#zevnation

Childhood/Upbringing: I don't think Zevlor had any biological family he knew of or could remember. Probably orphaned early/at birth and likely left to one of Elturel's holy orders to raise, as opposed to an orphanage, which might indicate at least one noble born parent - a headcanon I like, even if there's literally no evidence for it except his accent. Received pronunciation doesn't make much sense for an enlisted sort of soldier, that's well-bred officer material (although in reality, I think it has more to do with the fact his character was originally a schoolteacher in Beta). The orphan thing I had to surmise to make his having no family name make sense, because that's maybe my greatest complaint in all of BG3. Most DnD universe tieflings (all tieflings literally everywhere except BG3? Prove me wrong?) give themselves last names if they don't inherit a family one. And that seems like such a paladin thing to do! Name himself Zevlor Oathborn or something like that even if he didn't have any sort of known parentage. I can't fathom why Larian, in all their efforts to prove Tieflings are totally just like every other race, wouldn't give even one of them a last name! It seemed so unlikely to me that in all my original drafts of Nine Hells I said fuck it and gave him one, but I chickened out in the final version because I worried it was just too far from canon 😓

Relationship Experience: A 50 something year old (also my headcanon) military man is going to have sexual experience, that's pretty much given. But the Hellriders are a Spartan-esque organization. Members are expected to put their cause first and their personal lives way, way second. And Zevlor, a ride-or-die Hellrider and oath-bound paladin to boot, is going to take that super seriously. So, I personally don't see him as ever having had an actual relationship. Maybe he fucked the same dude in the barracks two or three times? Maybe he had a inn-girl he visited once or twice a year for a bit in his youth? I can see that. But I think on becoming a commander, he would decide such indulgences were for lower ranked soldiers and he would basically devote himself to his job fulltime. Meaning by the time he meets Tav, it's been... a while. And I do think Tav would be the first person he was ever in love with. He's an 'all in' kind of guy, and he spends most of his life 'all in' for Elturel. So with Tav, I think he's doing a proper relationship for the first time, and as an orphan/lifelong soldier I doubt he had much experience even watching real relationships, which means all he has to fall back on as far as method is probably what he's heard in tales or read in books. Which makes his idea of romance, well, romanticized, idealised, and probably more than a little old-fashioned. Which, in turn, explains why I don't think he would jump into bed with Tav right away, even if that's what he's used to doing. He's very much a 'good things have to be earned and deserved' sort, and the idea that he can just be given demonstrations of love without putting in the work first (gifts, outings, etc) just feels initially wrong to him. Tav really has to work to convince him it's ok to just have sex since they're facing down the end of the world, but once things have calmed down, she would definitely let him backtrack and 'earn his claim' to her to make him feel more comfortable in their relationship.

Sleeping Arrangements (in a relationship context): I think Zevlovers are all agreed that Zevlor wants, and in many ways needs, to be a little spoon. But what gets overlooked is the long journey it would take to get him there. Because no high-ranking career officer/soldier/male is going to be able to articulate “hold me, I need to feel safe right now.” They are the ones who make other people feel safe. It's a comfort zone that becomes a compulsion. Is it healthy? Nope. Does it leave Zevlor stressed and strained in the long run, even in peace time? Yep. Does it make it hard to relax and make sleep less enjoyable/often difficult to achieve if there's no one around he feels like he is guarding? 1000% The brain business is done, everyone's about their lives again, it's Zevlor's first time since he was a child not sleeping in barracks or tents surrounded by people he might need to defend from harm at a moment's notice, and he finds he's actually sleeping worse than he did when he was on the road! Fortunately, Tav is a bard very good at reading people. She figures this out about Zevlor quickly and begins a mission to subtly disrupt improve his sleeping routine. It starts with actions, not a conversation. They’ll be reading together in bed. Zevlor will always tire first and put his book away, and since he can sleep through anything, Tav can keep reading by candlelight while he sleeps at her side. Or curled into her side, his head on her chest, to make it easier for her to run her fingers through his hair which she does so love to do. Then it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to falling asleep in Tav’s arms on the regular. And then eventually, even when it’s Tav drifting off to sleep on his chest first, it somehow turns in the night to him on his side, her arms around him, her breathing just behind his ear. He'll wake in the night to discover this, and initially feel a bit of consternation or prick to his pride, but he'll tell himself he doesn't want to disturb her, and maybe be just sleepy enough to admit to himself it does feel good so he'll allow it just this once. And then "just this once" is years later and he can't remember how he ever slept any other way.

Does love an audience (NSFW): The sex headcanon I will die for. Zevlor has learned propriety and discretion as method in both private and professional life. He is disciplined and has good manners. But he also has a deep-seated need to be externally validated. He is a man who wants to be seen doing what he's good at it. And there's no way that doesn't bleed into his sex life. He will tell himself early in his relationship with Tav to be on his best behaviour: which to him means little to no PDA beyond hand-kissing/arm-holding. But Tav is 100% going to pick up on this (the little smug smile he can't suppress when he catches someone staring at them when they're out together; the hand on the small of her back, that subtle sign of possession, when they're in a group with others), and, being no stranger to the eyes of the world herself, she is going to have so much fun drawing this side out in him. They'll be drinking at the Elfsong and friends/acquaintances/fans will arrive who want to join them. Not enough chairs? Tav will graciously give up hers and deposit herself in Zevlor's lap. This blatant, public sign that they're together will have him instantly hard. He knows Tav can feel it. But it doesn't stop her shifting every so often during the conversation, playing with the ends of his hair or the tips of his horns apparently absently. None of it is overdone - most people won't give it a second glance in a crowded pub - but it drives Zevlor to distraction. The first few times she pulls this stunt, he'll make an excuse for them to leave early and head home. Or, if he can't wait, upstairs. Or, the time there's no rooms available and Tav's teasing was extra underhanded and Zevlor's had one too many pints, into the dark of an adjoining alley. Where he'll endure one second of inner turmoil that he's reducing Tav to this, and Tav, skirts already hiked up to her waist, will breathe in his ear how much she wants to be reduced to this. And who is he to deny Tav anything she wants? He will fuck her up against the dirty brick wall. And if he registers the doubletakes of the occasional passersby, he can't pretend he doesn't really fucking enjoy them. He will make the effort to cover Tav's mouth (Tav is incapable of being quiet), but he doesn't stop or stop whispering in her ear the whole time, look what she's made him do, look how needy she is for him (which is the absolute limit of Zevlor's ability to be anything like degrading). They walk home after, and Tav will have to stop to greet one or two people on the way, and the knowledge that she's dripping his fluids down her leg the whole time has Zevlor has hard and ready to go as before as soon as they make it through their door.

The Elfsong is never truly silent, even at night. The closest it can claim are those small hours before dawn when the staff have nearly finished setting the public rooms to rights and the kitchen help have not yet arrived to check the chef’s rising loaves. On a ten-day’s end at midnight, it’s a veritable riot—packed to the rafters with sailors ready to spend their freshly earned coin and the disproportionate number of locals who find themselves livelier by dark than by day.

So the fulsome hush that envelops its patrons as the last chime of the Lower City clock-bell dies away is highly unusual, and has nothing to do with reverence for the hour, but the high female voice which glides suddenly through the tavern in spectral, sourceless song.

A rare occurrence, but not unheard of. Several of those working the bar, and one or two regulars, have heard it before: this otherworldly phenomenon which gave the Elfsong its name. The melody is eerie, plaintive; the lyrics all old Elven. A lament for lost love, the eldest patrons say, though others believe the nameless, bodiless singer has recently added a second song to her repertoire. Whichever this one is, it ends too soon to be certain. In minutes, the elf's voice melts away with as little ceremony as it arrived, leaving the tavern to shake off the ill-fitting silence and, as if making up for lost time, rouse itself to twice its usual, raucous life. 

All except one private booth in a corner, whose disparate company, tense and contemplative even before the song began, seems to have taken its appearance as some divine portent. Those in the scrum of chairs around the booth scoot them hastily back. They drop tankards and coins to the tabletop, gather up greatcoats and hats, mutter minimal farewells to the booth behind, then scurry out into the ghost-less, godless dark.

One of the occupants of the booth’s bench also peels away as the party leaves. Sweeping their coins into a pocket and their tankards into her arms, she heads for the bar, tail held stiff behind her boots and expression turbulent enough to repel even the boldest of drunks.

Leaving the two remaining tieflings to stare awkwardly past each other for a moment…

…before Zevlor exhales through his nose and says, “I suppose that’s as good a place as any to call an end.”

Alfira blinks.

“Hang on — what?”

Her outburst halts Zevlor mid-motion, one hand already braced against the table, ready to rise. The ghostly Elven song has cleared some of the fog across his reason—enough, at least, to register the too-many pints he’s allowed himself to drink; and the time.

“I mean,” he tries again, “I’d say we’ve covered all the major events you would not have been able to track down otherwise. All that’s left is the final battle for the Gate, and surely others—”

“Like the hells it is!” Alfira explodes, and the force of it shocks Zevlor back into his seat. “I still don’t know what happened with you and Tav! Which was the whole damned point of buying you all these drinks in the first place!"

She scowls. It looks, to Zevlor, like hard work for such a naturally cheery face. He swallows a reflexive laugh. Two pints to the bad, her nerves worn thin by his protracted recitation of violence—not to mention the bout of moralising which followed—and, apparently, spurred to more brazen confidence by the spectral song, Alfira's mood is not to be tested. Not with her partner, to whom he's so tentatively reconciled, waiting in the wings, anyway.

With a wistful glance through the fluttering privacy curtain at the open double doors, Zevlor adjusts his tail more comfortably behind him and speaks as quickly as he can without incurring more bardic ire.

“Well, the journey back from Bhaal’s temple was uneventful. Tav had reinforcements waiting in the Undercity, so I only had to carry her a little way before I was relieved. And once we were above ground, we only had to go as far as here—the Elfsong. I had healed Tav’s wound,” he explains, cutting off Alfira’s burgeoning question, “but she’d still lost a great deal of blood. She needed rest. And so did I. Healing’s harder work than a fight.”

“But you still had your … your power?”

“Oh, yes.”

He had half-expected it to vanish on transferring the limp-limbed, faintly protesting Tav into Halsin’s steadier arms, but, though physically depleted, a weak, warm current still pulsed through Zevlor’s veins. It buoyed his aching legs through Baldur’s Gate’s labyrinth of greasy tunnels; up a ladder, out a sewer grate, and onto its marginally cleaner streets; then into the Elfsong, past the wrinkled noses of its few early morning patrons, and up a flight of stairs before, finally, bringing him to a halt. Some stubborn sense of propriety, or the realisation he was still dripping several varieties of noxious substance, held him back as the archdruid bustled Tav into a room so lavish it might have belonged to a minor noble, barring a few suspicious carpet stains.

And almost as pleasantly surprising to Zevlor as the sense of weary power that lingered even as Tav was lost to his sight was the fact that none of her other companions then chucked him out.

Instead, he’d been ushered through a different door into another well-appointed suite, where he was not only allowed, but encouraged—by Wyll, anyway—to help himself to food and drink; and, after a few minutes awkward dripping onto the polished floor, use of the room’s private bath. The folding screen shielding the deep tub from view was carved rosewood, the bathwater heated, the soap in the dish a haughty, fragrant cousin to his accustomed military-issue lye. To Zevlor, it felt more surreal to be here—fetched fluffy towels and fresh clothes, fitted for tieflings no less; then guided into a padded armchair beside a crackling fire and provided a tray of fresh fruit and a carafe of wine—than it had to wake chained to Bhaal’s altar.

Yet the luxury he relished most lay within himself.

Closing his eyes, he concentrated on it: that deep inner lake of purposeful, holy magic lapping gently at his insides. It was a second nature feeling, like coming home after a long and trying day, and yet… now he had the time and quiet to map its edges, plumb its depths, he thought it was not quite how he remembered. Power Zevlor had always inwardly pictured as unadulterated white-gold contained new tints of palest purple and vibrant blue. And beneath the mental image of coloured light rippled a suggestion of sound: a voice, barely audible, but effortlessly familiar… bracing as trumpets and soothing as strings…

A smile plucked the corners of Zevlor’s lips.

“Zevlor? Are you alright?”

He opened his eyes. The Blade of Frontiers was half-crouched on the hearthrug in front of him. He, too, had cleaned himself; his battle robes were free of refuse. Firelight flickered off the infernal crimson of one eye — and the ornate hilt of the rapier strapped to his side. Zevlor struggled to stand.

“What’s happened?” he asked, his words, like his legs, unsteady with approaching sleep. “Is Tav—”

But Wyll was shaking his head—a slow, calculated motion; he’d learned to compensate for the extra weight—and motioning Zevlor to resume his seat.

“Nothing’s happened. Tav’s alright. She’s still asleep, but Halsin says that’s to be expected.”

“He’s … he’s sure?” asked Zevlor, waiting for Wyll’s slow shake to become a nod of assurance before lowering himself cautiously back into the comfortable chair.

“Completely. It might not even have to do with her wound—he says you did a fine job,” he added in the same encouraging tone Zevlor remembers the young man using on the children back in the Emerald Grove. “She’s probably just exhausted. She’s been running herself ragged ever since you were... since we found you were gone.”

A wholly inappropriate swell of affection flooded Zevlor at this. He grimaced against it and reached for the carafe at his elbow, but the sight of his steady hands lifting and pouring a flawless measure of wine did nothing to quell his unseemly self-satisfaction.

More to distract himself than because he cared particularly, he asked Wyll, "And how long has that been?"

“It’s been three days since we received Orin's … uh … message that she had you. The gist of it was if Tav wanted to see you alive again, she was to kill Enver Gortash and bring his hand to the temple of Bhaal.”

Zevlor choked on a mouthful of crisp white wine.

“The new Archduke?” he asked when he could speak, and the alarm in his voice had nothing to do with loyalty to the office—he remembered Tav’s stories of the man. “Surely he would be highly defended? How was Tav supposed to reach him, let alone kill him, without being hunted down by the Watch? Or the Flaming Fist?”

“He is, and she didn't. Karlach had a plan to get at him but Tav said it would take too long and she didn’t trust Orin to keep her word, anyway. She was packed and headed for the Undercity to track down Bhaal’s temple before an hour had passed. As far as I know, this is the first time she’s slept since, and I really don’t want to wake her, but…” Wyll shifted uncomfortably on his heels. “I can’t keep Karlach off Gortash any longer. She’s going to march on Wyrm Rock by herself if no one else comes. I’ve got a group of us together. We’re as prepared as we’ll ever be. I’m sure Tav will understand if we leave her behind, just this once.”

But the crease in his brow and the fingers drumming the hilt of his rapier were far from certain. Zevlor, long-time commander that he had been, also suspected Tav would be less than pleased to learn her companions had taken on such a risky mission without consulting her first. However, on the point of prioritising Tav’s well-being, he was entirely of Wyll’s mind.

So he agreed, “Of course. I’m sure you’re right,” and hid any visible doubts behind another pull on his glass.

“Right. Well. I suppose that's settled, then.” Despite his words, the younger man’s posture remained distinctly discomfited as he straightened, avoiding Zevlor's eyes. “And since Halsin’s headed back to Rivington to watch the camp and Jaheira’s taking time off to check in with her family, that … that just leaves you here with — I mean, here to watch over Tav. I hope... that's alright with you?”

His scarred face worked furiously, as if to keep expression from it.

Bemused, Zevlor repeated, "Of course."

Only later, when the door had clicked closed behind Wyll and the others, and he was left with Tav in an unchaperoned suite full of firelight, and wine, and an exorbitant number of plush cushions and beds did it occur to Zevlor the situation might have been purposefully arranged.

With a flush no one could see, he set down his unfinished glass, the taste of wine suddenly sour on his tongue. Surely, they didn’t expect him to… not with Tav only recently revived… and everything between them still so fragile, so undefined… yet, what did he mean to do when she awoke? What would he say? That deserved real thought.

Glancing around the opulent space, Zevlor spotted a sideboard crowded with bottles and pushed himself off the chair in search of something less dangerous to drink. A pitcher of water, magically chilled, would do. He threw it back like Fireswill as he paced, the tread of his soft borrowed shoes on the floorboards and rugs the only sound in the room as he cast his mind back to the plans he had tentatively proffered Tav that last night outside the Emerald Grove. But everything from before the Shadow-Cursed Lands seemed to belong to a different time. As did the conflicted resolve he had set himself at Ilmater’s Temple, before finding Tav on the street and escorting her back to her camp…

Zevlor stopped, his tail bumping against one of the carved wooden columns near the door as it twitched to life behind him, reliving that brief, blissful moment. There had been no time to savour it then. And all the horror that had followed had almost erased the delirious pleasure of Tav’s lips on his. And her confession.

She had told him she loved him. She loved him.

If her word could ever be doubted, she had proved it any number of ways before and since. And he loved her of course, had loved her nearly all the time he'd known her, Zevlor admitted to himself without shame. But now he could let himself love her; with all the steadfast, unstoppable devotion he’d only ever bestowed his City of Light. True, he still had no property or prospects, but he was a paladin again—surely, that should count for something. He could stay with Tav, fight for her, help her rid the city of the Absolute, free her of the tadpole he often forgot lurked in her head; then, when the dust of the whole affair had settled, make a clean start of things, court her properly. That pleasant mix of peace and anticipation which always accompanied a viable plan seeped through Zevlor, warming him from toes to horns like a second scented bath.

Setting his empty cup aside, he leaned his full weight against the column. Powerlessness behind him, purpose in front of him, and no immediate threat demanding his attention, he wondered when was the last time he had felt so utterly relaxed. He let his eyes drift shut. Almost at once, his mind slipped into that realm just before true sleep, where it wandered idle fantasies of himself and Tav: not fighting side by side, but strolling arm in arm down sunlit streets, swords and armour gathering dust on a wall in a house, a home, they shared, battlefields and bloodshed far behind them, replaced by the building of something, a new life for them both, a community of their kind, perhaps, even a family of their own...

The click and creak of a door brought Zevlor back to consciousness. Although, on opening his eyes, he couldn’t immediately be sure the Tav standing in the doorway wasn’t merely a remnant of dream. Her dark hair fell loose about her shoulders in the rare, tamed waves that indicated a thorough wash and brush, and the generous stretches of cleaned wisteria skin revealed by the unfamiliar sleeveless dress seemed to glow in the flickering firelight. Shutting the door behind her, she caught his eye and smiled.

Dream, then.

Zevlor did not move or speak, unwilling to wake and watch her dissolve. He simply admired this vision of Tav padding towards him, slowly… but not a sensual slowness; more, a precise placing of weight as if compensating for soreness. And, on closer scrutiny, her smile, too, looked more tremulous than flirtatious; her skin a shade too pale, a painful contrast to the dark circles under her eyes.

With a start, Zevlor pushed off the column, mind racing for a way to explain his open gaping to this obviously real Tav. She, per her usual, saved him the trouble.

“You’re here,” she said, and he was glad to hear her voice, at any rate, had recovered its usual resonance. “I was worried it was all a dream, finding you and — but you’re alright, and you—” Her eyes, too, were bright and alert as she looked him up and down, heat pooling in Zevlor’s core at the familiar intent inspection. “You look so much better. I mean—not that you ever look bad, you always look good—I mean—”

With a noise that might have been pain or mortification, Tav pressed a hand to her temple, swaying slightly on the spot. And Zevlor, concerned as he was for her welfare, had to suppress a reflexive laugh. It was simply so good to see her like this again: smelling of clean, floral soap, and looking as well as could be expected after having nearly died only hours ago, and devolving into that nervous babble it occurred to him, at last, only ever really surfaced around him. In two steps, he’d placed a steadying hand on her elbow; the skin underneath his fingers was cool, but not sickly so.

The contact appeared to ground Tav. She lifted her face again, defiantly composed though still distinctly plum, as she concluded, “What I meant to say is, you look well.”

“I am,” Zevlor replied, and his own face felt stretched—the result, he realised, of a smile so uncommonly broad he wasn’t even sure what it looked like on him. “Thanks to you.”

He released her elbow, intending to take her hand, but Tav, struck by a sudden sourceless shiver, wrapped her arms tight around herself before he could reach it.

“Thanks to me…” Her echo sharpened the words to a sardonic edge. “I admit, I’m still a bit fuzzy on the details, but I’m fairly certain credit should go to Astarion and—”

 She broke off abruptly, head darting around the empty suite.

“They’re alright,” Zevlor soothed before she could form the question. “A few cuts and bruises. You were the only one seriously injured.”

“Then … where is everyone?”

“They’re—” Zevlor hesitated, but he could think of no lie or evasion that was not as troubling as the truth. So he admitted, “A few had other affairs to attend to, but most of them are off paying a visit to the Archduke.”

It wasn’t as bad as he expected. Unhappiness of a few flavours paraded across Tav’s face before she finally sighed: “I suppose it was unfair to expect Karlach to wait. Anyway, it's probably for the best.”

Her hands rubbed briskly along her arms—Zevlor glanced at the nearest benches and chairs for something warm he might drape around her exposed skin, but before he'd found anything, Tav was limping around him towards the fire, adding tonelessly:

“I’m afraid I'm more a liability now than any real help.”

She tugged Zevlor’s abandoned chair closer to the open grate, perched on the edge, and angled herself almost into the crackling flames. In spite of which dangerous proximity, the bit of her profile Zevlor could see around the chair’s high back remained hunched and stiff. But he had an idea what really ailed her was no physical chill.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, making his own slower way to the fireplace, giving her time. “You were able to hold that monster off long enough for us to deal with the cultists. Without that, we would have been overrun. Your magic’s come a long way from parlour tricks.”

Tav deflected the reassurance with a jerky shrug.

“Gale’s handiwork. He’s been teaching me. And it didn’t help much in the end. If it weren’t for you, I—” She paused; then lifted her head enough for Zevlor to make out her eyes, her voice a shade livelier as she reminisced: “Your sword was … glowing … wasn’t it? I remember light. Did you … did you get your powers back?”

“I did.”

“Then… you’re a paladin again?”

“I am.”

“That’s…” Tav shook her head, letting the thought trail away, apparently unable to find a word to describe such a miracle, and said instead, “I mean, I thought you might one day. It just seemed… I don’t know… right. For your story, I mean. You never struck me as a man the gods were done with. Or who was really done with them. I’m so glad for you, Zevlor.”

She glowed at him for a few seconds. Then her face wilted again, and she returned to the fire before asking with a nonchalance as brittle as the burning logs: “So, what will you do now?”

Zevlor said nothing for a moment, only studied this unhappy Tav. He was well-acquainted with the emotional crash that followed prolonged peril and dire, deadly battle. It made sense for her to be tired, self-conscious of her injuries, even ashamed of what she perceived as failure to contribute meaningfully in the final outcome of the fight. Yet he’d never known any state of weakness or self-reproach to leave her so insular, so withdrawn. From him, at least.

The best path forward, Zevlor’s intuition decided, was an honest and unadorned one.

“Whatever you would like me to,” he answered simply. “I’m your paladin, now.”

Tav’s head whipped round so fast a tendril of blue-black hair swung briefly through a wayward tongue of flame.

“I — what do you mean?”

“Tav.” Zevlor took a step closer to the chair, half expecting her to bolt up or shrink back into it, but Tav seemed stunned to stillness by his unwavering gaze. “I don’t know what god has trusted me with this power again,” he explained, slow and steady, waiting for her to absorb each honest fact, “but I do know why. It is for you. To help you. Perhaps, once you’ve completed your own missions, saved Baldur’s Gate, it will fade, but… as long as I have any power left, it is to be used in your service.”

And on bold whim, or divine inspiration, Zevlor knelt, knees barely creaking at all, and reached for Tav’s hand. She let him. He brought the back of her knuckles to his lips for a single, reverent second, resisting the urge to linger; then lifted his head, briefly admiring the string-hardened pads of her fingers, the sword-calloused palm, before returning to her face, where a storm-cloud-coloured war was being waged. The intensity of it took him slightly aback.

Tav’s mouth opened and closed twice before any sound emerged.

“Zevlor, you — you can’t. That’s not… this is… oh, gods.”

She slid her hand out of his and hid her face behind it. Nerves crept from under Zevlor’s refurbished confidence and crawled with distressing familiarity through his gut. Certainly, Tav had every reason not to need him—not to want him—but what could have happened between his capture and now to change her mind? He was abruptly aware of a cramp in his thigh, an ache where the infernal ridge of his knee grated against the wooden floor.

“Tav?”

He posed her name as a quiet question. This time, Tav did stand. She hovered over Zevlor unsteadily for a moment before sliding between him and the fire and taking a few stumbling steps away from both before speaking again.

“I appreciate your offer of help, truly. But, I’m sure you’re mistaken.” She was trying for calm and compelling, Zevlor could tell, and, for the first time since he had known her, utterly failing. “If the gods have given you back your powers, it’s because you deserve it, not me. I’ve been nothing but the most royally bad luck to you since the day we met. And every time we meet again, I think I can…I mean, I try to…but I just—just make it all worse!”

This was so incomprehensible even Zevlor’s nerves were nonplussed.

“What do you—” he began, using the empty chair to push himself to his feet, but Tav interrupted before he finished either; and it was as though a dam had cracked within her, drenching her words in turbulent anger and boiling grief.

“Everywhere I go, monsters spring up! Goblins, mind flayers, shapeshifters, cults — cults, plural! I mean, how many cults can one person realistically run afoul of? It’s ridiculous, it’s madness, it’s-” She clawed the air with frantic nails for some more heinous description, before deflating, arms dropping to her sides. “It’s hopeless,” she decided. “No matter what I do or where I go, I can’t escape it. It’s always something. Famine, illness, the end of the bloody world. But this… you.”

She chanced a glance at Zevlor where he stood, knees frozen mid-bend, one hand on the chair’s upholstery, then squeezed her eyes shut as if the fire behind him cast too bright a light.

“Whatever curse I’ve got on me, I… I can’t let it cause you any more trouble. If I'd just left you alone here, you'd never have got mixed up with Orin. Hells, if I'd just seen the signs at the grove and left first, your people would probably all be safe in Baldur’s Gate.”

“No. We wouldn't,” Zevlor, straightening, contradicted at last. While he empathised, painfully, with Tav's despairing spiral, this particular madness he could not let stand. “Without your intervention, we would all be picked over by carrion birds in the forest. Perhaps, without you to keep us together, a few might have defected and made it as far as the Shadow-Cursed Lands to fall there instead. Lands which would still be lost to a true curse, if not for you.” Approaching Tav with all the same slow deliberation he would have used around a shying mare, he continued, “You did not bring those enemies upon us. You saved us from them. Saved me. From more than you know.”

Zevlor was no bard. He had little experience with the power of sound to soothe and strengthen the soul. But he’d watched Tav level heads, comfort hearts, bolster resolve with no more than natural charisma and inarguable persuasion; and weren't there notes of her power in his own, now? He drew from it as he spoke. Softly. There was little distance left between them to fill.

“I lost faith, after Elturel. In the gods, in the goodness of this world. In myself. It was you who helped me find it again. Tav—” Zevlor stopped, then corrected himself, using her full name and watching her eyes widen up at him. “My oath is to you. I believe in you. I love you.”

And what a release, an almost physical shedding of weight, to say it out loud at long last. Something half gasp, half tearless sob escaped Tav. One hand flew to her face—to muffle the sound? To hide from him? Zevlor caught hold of it regardless and held it tight in his own.

“And I am devoted to your protection,” he went on, determined to have it all out. “To the success of your mission: saving the Gate, the world, your companions—whatever it is or may be. I have precious little to offer, but what I do have, what I am, is yours. I am yours.”

Zevlor stops. The words which had seemed so poignant declared to Tav in the fire-lit room just above where he sits, sound far more contrived repeated here; with rowdy cackles and whoops for ambience and his tongue coated in a residue of cheap ale. Nor has he meant to say them at all.

Reddening indistinguishably, he avoids Alfira's eyes, automatically scanning the table for anything left to drink. One tankard remains, half empty. He pulls it towards himself, dubiously considering its contents. He really ought to cut himself off, he knows. And, anyway, he isn’t sure who’s drunk the first half.

“And…?” comes the inevitable prompt.

“And…” Gaze still safely oblique, Zevlor searches for an appropriately reserved summary of all that came next. “She… agreed.”

“Agreed?!”

The outraged yelp creates a vacuum in the nearest tavern noises. But if Alfira notices the curious hush, or her companion’s placatory shushing, she does not care.

“What does that mean? You shook hands on it or something? Please— please!—tell me you kissed her, at least!”

And Zevlor, keenly aware of how little privacy the booth’s curtain really affords—and how long the volatile and loud bard has waited—supposes it can’t hurt to tell her that.

Zevlor wasn’t sure which of them started it. Whether Tav tilted her head up before he had angled his down; if his fingers had already framed her face when hers wound themselves through his hair, coaxing him closer. Once her lips were pressed to his, he could no longer think at all. Nor did he need to. Everything else in the world outside this, their first real, uninterrupted kiss, was entirely inconsequential.

Nor was he sure how long it lasted. He couldn’t remember moving his hands but could suddenly feel the ridged outline of Tav's hipbone beneath one, the satiny skin of her back where the dress cut away under the other. And hers had left his hair to trace the outline of his shoulders and upper arms through his shirt's starched linen. Which flood of sensations set Zevlor's mind adrift, the gentle pressure of Tav’s tail curled round his calf his only anchor to any sort of solid ground. His own tangled with hers before he could stop it.

Tav gasped. The sound sparked some small return to reason. Zevlor pulled away the minimum required to check her face, ensuring he had not hurt her. But she was smiling, glassy-eyed as if drunk.

“Did you know I’ve wanted to do that since the day I met you?” she said, voice slightly slurred; and Zevlor’s own was far from steady as he admitted, “So have I.”

More words were unnecessary. Tav’s mouth found his again, and, in seconds that bloomed like whole seasons, this next kiss left innocent exploration behind and became a thing of heat and weighty intention. Suddenly, Zevlor could not get Tav’s body close enough to his. Again, thought deserted him, and, again, it did not matter. His hands did not need instruction. They knew exactly where they were needed, what they were needed for: enjoying, delighting, praising every pliant curve and perfect plane of the woman who had fought for him, saved him, who responded to his greedy, graceless clinch with all the ardent affection of a benevolent god. Every new grip on her flesh was awarded a muffled moan or a radiant shiver, and a sweet responsive stroke of her own nails wherever they could find his skin.

Until, stretching on her toes, Tav managed to line their bodies up exactly where they should be for everything else Zevlor desperately wanted to give her. And from the very back of his brain, a warning sounded: this wasn’t right; this was too much too soon; he was going to ruin everything before it even began.

Zevlor grimaced, nails digging briefly into Tav's willing waist, his insides a roiling sea of vital contradictions. He wanted to take her arm, guide her back to the chair by the fire and resume his place at her feet, pour out his admiration for her, confess all his half-formed hopes and dreams for their future; but he never wanted to tear his mouth from hers. He wanted to hold her at arms length and simply look at her, memorise her swollen lips and iris-flushed skin, and revel in the fact that he had caused it, that she wanted him to; but at the same time, he wanted her pressed so close to him their bodies were indistinguishable. He wanted her here, now, under him, on top of him, wrapped around him; and he wanted to whisk her away somewhere safe and civilised where he could grace her with all the proper ceremony she deserved.

With an effort greater than he’d ever exerted in any physical fight, Zevlor untangled his lips from Tav’s, heart aching at her groan, and rolled his forehead against hers until the base of their horns bumped. The sensation was grating enough to give his brain the jolt it needed to form coherent words.

“We should … wait … until all this is over. Until we can … do things properly.”

“I have a proper bed just next door,” was Tav’s throaty reply—kindling on Zevlor’s already conflagrant core.

“That’s not what I—”

He broke off in a moan that would have made him cringe to hear were his ears not full of his own racing pulse as Tav dipped her face into the hollow of his throat, teeth and tongue blithely exploring the infernal ridges just above his shirt’s open collar — and when had that happened?

Zevlor grappled for thought.

“Nevertheless, there are … this isn’t … Tav,” he half laughed, giddy with bliss and consternation. Tangling his hands in her waterfall of hair, he pulled her lips from his throat and met her eyes as he murmured, voice still hoarse with lust, “These things deserve time. You deserve time.”

“But… who knows how much time we have left,” Tav pointed out breathlessly, face contorted with desire and desperation. “The world might literally end soon. And every day I’m not a mindflayer is a miracle. We could both of us die tomorrow and never have more time and never had this time either!”

That gave Zevlor’s already shaky sense of propriety a destabilising shudder. It was a difficult argument to counter, particularly when his body was wont to agree vehemently with whatever Tav said on principle. Yet, that infuriating voice at the back of his head reminded him of all the ways he could still disappoint her if he did not do this right. He could not afford to fail; not now. He did not know which to trust: his instinct or his reason.

But, above both, he trusted Tav.

“Tav,” he said; then, again, called her by her full name, which made her blink, a ray of cobalt breaking through lust-dark fog. “What do you want?”

“I …”

His use of her name, or the question itself, or the earnestness with which he asked it, appeared to sober Tav. Inhaling sharply through her nose, she brushed the hair back from her face before tucking her hands safely into the folds of her dress. Part of Zevlor felt impressed and achingly fond of how quickly she could pull herself together; while another part of him swelled with ignoble misery at the realisation Tav was about to change her mind. Which was hardly fair — it was he who had stopped her, after all. He simply hadn’t realised how much he hoped she would persuade him to stay until it looked as if she would not.

He shut his eyes briefly, wrestling any visible tells of disappointment from his face. Until Tav said quietly—

“I want you to have what you want, Zevlor. Everything—anything you want. Whatever it is. Whatever I can give you.”

—and his eyes opened to find hers, to be sure the words were truly coming from her and not a fantasy of her playing out in his head.

“So… if you have a vision of how you want this—how you want us to happen, and you want to wait for that, then we will. And if you want—”

Whatever else she might have offered him, Zevlor never found out. In one thudding heartbeat, he had reached for Tav again, cutting her off with another kiss, a fierce working of his lips against hers, as much hunger as praise.

“I want you,” he said when he stopped to grant her breath. “Now. And every day we have after.”

“So…” Alfira, quill-pen poised above parchment, ventures into the lingering pause with all the delicate tact of a hungry owlbear, “you definitely… you know… consummated your relationship then?”

Zevlor inspects the tankard still clutched in his hands, wondering if the nail-shaped dents in the pewter had been there before.

“I thought,” he replies with what he considers the mildest possible reproach, “you didn’t need any graphic details.”

“Well, no not graphic ones, but some would be nice. I mean—” at Zevlor’s swift, severe look, Alfira’s face blooms rutabaga. But she retains enough vim to hold his gaze. “Look, I don’t need a play-by-play—don’t want one, trust me—just… just the right words to describe it. Because… you know… it’s you and Tav! The two of you, finally together, after you’d both wanted each other for so long! It has to be a big deal, right?”

To hells with it. Zevlor picks up the tankard and downs the rest of the half-drunk ale, letting it sweep him momentarily away from the crowded tavern and the nosy bard and her voluminous notes of all the things he already ought not to have said.

“It was—”

“Gorgeous.”

—was the first thing Tav whispered into the candle-lit confines of her lavish private room once the door had been fastened behind them, and Zevlor’s shirt tossed thoughtlessly aside.

“I mean… I knew you would be. I just… never pictured… I don’t know what I pictured.”

Her fingertips wandered as she babbled, charting the path of infernal ridges that jutted from his chest. A tiefling feature less prominent in Tav, Zevlor confirmed, as he slipped the straps of her silken dress from her shoulders.

“You are… miraculous,” he croaked when he could find his voice. “Every part of you.”

Tav gave a little wince, as if the compliment pinched. But her tail sashayed behind her in clear appreciation, and Zevlor did not wait for her to demure or devise a clever reply. His mouth found the column of her throat and blazed a reverent path down her sweet-smelling skin, mapping each subtly infernal angle and soft human curve, unwrapping her dress as he descended, until he was kneeling in a pool of silk at Tav’s feet. With a noise of satisfaction somewhere between purr and growl, he ran his nails up the bare legs that had taunted him at the Emerald Grove, at Ilmater’s temple. The memory, and the little stifled whimpers from above him, spurred a devilish impulse. One hand bracing her hip, Zevlor slid the other around her to tease the base of her tail.

Only his arms around her saved Tav from collapse. She shuddered: a full body motion that arched her back, buckled her knees, sent her up on her toes. He traced the underside of her twitching tail with his thumb and—“Zevlor!”—his name on her tongue like that was a heady, god-like thrill. As was the sudden desperate grip on his horns as Tav fought to keep her balance.

But an open-mouthed kiss just above the lacy lip of her small clothes and—“Zevlor…”—her tone had changed. She sounded uncharacteristically nervous as she stuttered, “You don’t—you don’t have to—”

“You’ll let me take my time, won’t you?” he interrupted, pressing the request into her skin. “Let me worship you?”

Tav’s reply was a protracted moan—at his words, or another deliberate stroke of her writhing tail, Zevlor wasn’t certain. But the grip on his horns that relaxed into mindless caress over and over the jagged serrations communicated consent. And though some rebelliously reasonable part of Zevlor’s brain reminded him just how long it had been since he’d done this, he was sure as he had been in yesterday’s battle the ability would not fail him. He slid her small clothes down her legs, fingers greeting a new wondrous array of skin, tongue parting—

“—tasteful,” he decides after a moment’s reminiscence; blinks, clears his throat roughly, then corrects, “that is, respectful. Considerate.”

Alfira snorts.

“You know, when women say that, it’s usually code for bad.”

Which criticism Zevlor—only a man and a soused one at that—cannot help but take as personal attack.

“That was my summation now, not what Tav said then.”

“What did Tav say then?”

But speech had long abandoned Tav. All her bardic eloquence had devolved into wordless cries, climbing and collapsing along a musical scale, when at last Zevlor lifted his head. And the sight of her sprawled along the edge of the bed, nails clenched in the counterpane, chest heaving and head thrown back, inspired a fleeting ambition in him to take up painting, or sculpting, or learn some spell that would forever etch her image in its every gratifying, gorgeous detail on his memory…

…until an especially violent twitch threw Tav off-balance, and she slid from the bed with a thud and a far less sensual cry. Zevlor's arms were around her in an instant, when an equally vivid image assaulted him: of Tav's body on the floor of Bhaal's temple, limp and lifeless and soaked in her own blood.

Guilt stung in Zevlor's chest. Inwardly, he cursed himself for three kinds of infernal fool as he took Tav's weight and helped her stand. How could he have let himself run her so ragged so soon? He cleared his throat, withdrawing with difficulty—his body did not approve this plan—as Tav regained her footing.

“Tav,” said Zevlor, each word sticky with reluctance, “perhaps…you ought to…rest. Or—”

“What?”

The sheer horror in the exclamation stopped him short; the dismay marring her pretty plum flush a physical enemy he longed to swipe away. His hand reached for her face before he could stop it.

“Zevlor, please…” And Tav’s own hands were tugging him to her. By the band of the trousers he still wore. “I’m fine. I’ve never been so fine in my life.”

And before Zevlor could argue, or remember why he’d ever wanted to argue, Tav was fumbling his fastenings open, brushing against him in a spike of arousal that obliterated all but need. She pushed trousers and pants alike down his hips before he had caught his breath, and her own airless noise of appreciation as she took in the sight of him was a hymn that went straight to Zevlor’s head.

“I don't recall that she had any complaints. Requests, perhaps...”

“Please, can I?”

The low plea reverberated pleasantly through him; though Zevlor, rendered mindless by her delicate exploration of him, had no idea what Tav was asking until her careful fingers were replaced by the wet warmth of her mouth.

Sparks, white-hot as holy fire, popped behind his eyes. Heat like fever subsumed him. Each languid swirl of Tav’s tongue licked flames higher and higher up his spine. Until, in a flash of surprising clarity, a rogue thought struck him—that he had gravely overestimated himself. Whatever stamina he might once have boasted was nowhere near valiant enough to withstand this. It had been too long, and it had never been Tav.

With a strength of will attributable only to whatever divinity watched over Tav, Zevlor wound a hand gently round her mane of tamed curls and guided her head back. The wet noise her mouth made as it left him curled his tail.

“Did I hurt you?” she panted up at him.

But, “Tav… Tav,” was all Zevlor could say. After a minute's studiously measured breaths, he chanced a downward glance. Tav's blown-black gaze was noticeably concerned. He caressed her cheek, both hands mindlessly petting, soothing, apologising for him as he did his best to explain, “Tav… if you do that, I… I won’t last. And I want all of you.”

“Oh…” Nervous apprehension gave way to a stormy blush, then a teasing smile.

“Next time?” she asked, getting to her feet; and, “Next time,” Zevlor deliriously agreed.

He would give her anything for there to be a next time; for Tav to want him for good. 

“Not, of course,” that infuriatingly deathless part of Zevlor grafted to honesty and fairness, and freed by inebriation, is compelled to add, “that any lovers’ first time is seamless…”

“Oh, gods!”

He processed the pain before the oath itself, registered the recoil in Tav’s arch—no longer up against his body but back into the bed—and reacted instinctively. And there was no internal struggle this time. Greater than any other base urge Zevlor possessed was the need to keep Tav from pain. He had drawn himself from his tentative sheath within her and rolled to his to side before his brain could fully process what had happened—the very thing he'd been worried about it, though it was hardly the gods who were to blame.

“I'm sorry, it's... I should have… it—can be different with tieflings. Infernal anatomy is... more demanding—”

Zevlor bit down on his tongue till he tasted bitter blood. What the hells was he saying? What could he say? Arousal still throbbed through him; the cold of the room prickled mournfully at his flesh where it had parted from Tav's. He grappled about for sheets, tugging them up even as, beside him, Tav fought to extricate herself from them. Zevlor found he could not look at her directly. Would he forever be disappointing her? Making every wrong call there was to make?

“I’m sorry,” he repeated, the only thing worthwhile he had to say. “This… should wait. I don’t want to cause you any more pain.”

From the corner of his eye, Zevlor watched Tav sit up. He braced himself for more pleading, tantalising entreaties; or, every bit as likely, her embarrassed agreement and tactful retreat. He was not prepared for her fond, if exasperated little laugh.

“Oh, for heavens’ sake, I’m not that delicate. Roll over,” she commanded, pushing at his shoulder until Zevlor was flat on his back in a sea of tangled damask, feeling, if possible, more in love with Tav than ever and helpless to disobey. In one lithe and apparently pain-free movement, she straddled his legs. The visual struck him dumb. “Don’t forget,” she added amid a series of quick, disarming kisses as she angled herself over him, “I’m a tiefling, too.” 

And in this position, the fit was easier, smoother, if tighter than Zevlor had ever dreamed. The whole joining felt effortless, intended: their bodies; Tav’s sharp cry, and his own low moan. A perfect harmony.

“See,” she babbled, voice pitched several notes higher than it had been seconds before, “that’s — that’s perfect. You're perfect. Watching gods Zevlor you feel so, so good!”

Zevlor wasn’t sure if Tav knew she was speaking aloud, but he drank in each thoughtless praise like the finest wine. Her knees dug into his sides, her hands pressed to his chest as she leveraged herself off him, then sank again by painstaking degrees; each ridged inch of him heralded by a new litany of half-coherent compliments in Tav’s increasingly wrecked voice.

Until she collapsed across him. Her lips found his, moving aimlessly, too drowned in sensation to remember how to kiss.

“Zevlor… Zevlor…”

His name became a request Tav couldn’t articulate, but Zevlor understood.

“Yes, my sweet heart. My precious Tav.”

He had little more control of his own tongue as he drew her against him and settled his weight to one side to flip their positions without separating their bodies, but Zevlor couldn’t bring himself to feel self-conscious about it. Doubt and worry had no place here. This was desire wedded to devotion, base instinct to reverence. He settled Tav more comfortably underneath him and shifted experimentally, eyes never leaving her face. Fragments of consternation appeared under the plum-flushed bliss. But—

“Your knees?” was all she gasped.

“Aren’t so delicate either,” Zevlor assured her.

Tav laughed again—the sound devolving into a lilting cry as he drew himself briefly from her only to slide securely back. And no one physical sensation had ever felt so fulfilling; so like completion, belonging. Perfection, as Tav generously reminded him again and again. 

Zevlor dearly wanted to pace himself, to draw the moment out to as close to forever as he possibly could, to display the discipline and restraint a man of his age ought to have as reflex. But he’d wanted this—wanted her—for so long; and whatever experiences he had under his belt, he had never had this: a love he had fought for, and who had fought just as fervently for him, wrapped around him, singing his praises in his ear. He felt impossibly light, decades younger, stronger, confident he could do anything in the world except hold himself back one second more.

All he could say was, “Tav, I—”

And the only reply of which she was capable was, “Please, yes Zevlor, please.”

Which begging would have spent him even if were not already perched on the brink. But the words that echoed in Zevlor’s head as he surrendered control of his hips and buried his face in Tav’s shoulder were, “Next time.” Because there would be a next time. Minutes from now, of course, if he had any say in things, but also for days and years to come, he believed wholeheartedly at last.

Tav was his. They would have time for everything. 

“But her only disappointment,” Zevlor, wincing slightly, admits into his empty tankard, “is how little time we had.”

“Why was that?”

Iron rattled against wood. Zevlor, roused from his sated doze, recognised the sound of the heavy bedstead knocking against the panelled wall. Only, the vibration of the bed was more violent and ominous than when he and Tav were the cause. He tried to push himself up and found his chest weighed down by a tangle of limp limbs and wild raven hair.

“That'll be the brain,” came Tav’s drowsy mutter. “Causing the quakes.”

Another of which shook the room before she'd finished speaking. Bottles crashed off a nearby sideboard; on the other of the bed, the lid of a overlarge trunk clattered open and closed like gnashing teeth. And Zevlor's head was suddenly full of screams and that earsplitting cracking of stone as the earth under Elturel was ripped away. His grip on Tav tightened on instinct, and—ignoring her squeak of protest—he rolled her underneath him where his own body might bear the brunt of any falling masonry should the ceiling collapse.

But the tremor subsided without further damage—beyond Tav's short, blunted horns scraping skin from Zevlor’s chest as she adjusted herself within his protective embrace. In spite of which, it was another minute of deep breathing before his reflexive panic subsided enough to uncurl himself from her body. If any of this abrupt awakening confused or offended Tav, she gave no indication: merely groaned a little, massaging the corners of her eyes.

“I guess this means the others managed to take Gortash’s netherstone. They’ll be back soon.”

She sighed, as though this were a setback rather than the accomplishment of a long-sought objective, and twisted into Zevlor's body again, fingers absently stroking the light abrasions left by her horns. And perhaps it was the rush of adrenaline on which he’d woke, or the heat that bloomed under his skin at Tav’s soothing touch, but Zevlor was surprised how little disappointment he himself felt at the night’s imminent end. Yes, he could happily have stayed forever naked in a bed with Tav. But if he could not, then rejoining the world with purpose and power, an established place at her side, was the next best thing.

He smiled—it, too, easily managed—and reached out to brush dark curls from Tav’s face.

“What can do I for you?” he asked; and when Tav’s eyes wandered meaningfully down his body, chucked her chin gently back up to his face and clarified wryly, “Or, rather, what can I do to aid you in the coming fight?”

With another long-suffering sigh, Tav squeezed her eyes shut and rubbed her temple. Zevlor wondered if her head ached; then, when was the last time she'd eaten or drunk. Then a dozen belated concerns over Tav's well-being paraded through his brain. Before he could settle on which to promote first, however, Tav had exhaled through her nose and opened her eyes again, and Zevlor did not think the newly hardened sheen to the swirling cobalt was a trick of the pre-dawn light.

“Could you find me an army?”

At Zevlor’s furrowed brow, she elaborated, “Or just round up everyone you can? Anyone we know, anyone we can trust in a fight. These quakes are going to get worse fast now. And I’m afraid once the brain senses we’re on the way, it'll start turning people.” She propped herself up on an arm and glanced through the bedposts to the room’s long windows, squinting through the thin gaps in the rich brocade curtains onto the street below. “The city could be overrun by mindflayers before we even get a chance to bring it down. We’ll need as many people as possible armed and prepared.”

“Of course,” agreed Zevlor automatically, though in truth he understood very little of what she'd said. But the details did not matter. Tav was in command here. All he need worry about was his assigned task. “Actually…” He sat up, letting the bedclothes slide off him as he considered. “There are a number of Hellriders in the Gate—those who were outside the city limits when Elturel fell. I met a few while serving at the temple. They came here looking for help. Met only scorn, of course, but I’m sure I can rally them to our cause. Being a Hellrider is for life, after all.”

“Good,” said Tav absently. “Not just them, though. We’ll need everyone.”

She uncoiled herself from the warm expanse of damask, and Zevlor’s thoughts paused to watch her cross the room naked, kneel by the unclasped trunk, rummage around, then begin pulling items out of it, talking all the while.

“Find Rolan at Sorcerous Sundries, he owes us. And the deep gnomes—they’ve a workshop on the outskirts of Rivington. And Counsellor Florrick and the City Watch. Nine Fingers and her Guild. I’ve got a list of them all somewhere on the desk—everyone who’s promised us support and where to find them. We’ll need all our chips cashed in.”

Zevlor wasn’t sure if his sudden dip in mood was the prospect of interacting with people who detested him, or the loss of Tav’s skin as she pulled small clothes up her legs and fitted a loose tunic over her tail. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, knees complaining feebly, and began the search for his own discarded clothes.

“Why can’t you ask them yourself?”

There was more open suspicion in the query then he’d meant to cop to, but Tav did not challenge it. Or look at him.

“I,” she answered, gaze fixed on the leather she laced up her chest, “will be on my way to the brain. I’m pretty sure I know where it’s hidden, but I might be wrong. And even if I’m not, I only have a rough location—I don’t know exactly how long it will take to get there. So, I’ll need to leave as soon as the others are back with the last stone.”

Of all this cryptic explanation, it was the solitary personal pronoun that made Zevlor most uneasy. He tugged up his trousers one-handed, the other hurrying his shirt over his head.

“Let me go with you,” he said. But, “No,” Tav replied, so fast and firm Zevlor knew she’d been expecting it. Hands abruptly unsteady, he abandoned his attempt to do up his trousers and did not bother about his collar or cuffs. Shoes not appearing on the rug directly in front of him, he gave those up for lost, too, and strode bare-footed to Tav’s side of the bed.

“Tav, my oath is your protection—”

“—your oath can't protect me from a netherbrain,” Tav rebutted evenly. “And even a paladin’s power can’t bring it down. No one’s can.”

Whatever argument Zevlor intended to wield when he reached her Tav disarmed by pulling him to her by his trousers’ dangling laces and fastening them for him—an intimacy almost as erotic to Zevlor as her undoing of them hours before.

“Those stones are the only thing that can control it, and only one person can wield them at one time,” she explained, fixing fabric more securely across his hips and tail, then moving on to his dishevelled shirt. “I’ll take a couple of the others for protection on the way, but we need our best people here. Because if I—” Tav’s voice caught, her fingers faltering briefly at his collar; then resumed their brisk adjustments, “—if it doesn’t work, we’ll need as many capable people as possible defending the city from whatever hell comes next. People who know how to do that. Who’ve done it before.” She flicked a smile on and off at Zevlor. “The only reason I feel safe leaving is because I know you’re here, taking care of things. I trust you. Please. Trust me.”

“I do.” And he did. It was in Zevlor’s very bones to trust her; his spirit vibrated with it—a pulse of sure, steady power. “But that doesn’t mean I like this plan.”

“I don't like it much either, but…” Tav’s lips curled joylessly again. “Leaders have to make tough decisions. We do what we must.”

The words recalled heat, the coppery scent of sweaty armour, the unrelenting gravity of despair—and Zevlor remembered his plea to Tav the first day he met her at the Emerald Grove. Now, it was her shoulders sagging under the weight of impossible decisions, her pretty, still-too-pale face creased into lines as she contemplated the 24 hours ahead. Tav’s hands stilled against his chest, checking her handiwork, searching for anything else she might fasten or fix—any innocent excuse to touch him, Zevlor understood, and need boiled in his core: to sweep her back to the tousled bed, to drown her every stress and worry in endless waves of pleasure, to keep her pinned beneath him where nothing could ever harm her again. He endured it with restraint he knew could only be divine.

"You're right," he conceded with equal effort. "This is your fight. And your plan is a good one. Probably the best such circumstances allow. I'd say it's a long shot, but... those are your specialty, aren't they?"

At her wince, Zevlor placed his hands on Tav's leather-clad shoulders—not as a lover, but as one commander to another. And there was a different sort of long-sought satisfaction in taking his turn to imbue her with his own renewed hope and strength, and to reassure them both:

“You're ready for this. We both are.”

Alfira heaves a sigh.

"It is a little disappointing." At Zevlor’s stiff silence, she rolls her eyes and clarifies, “I know it's not your fault, it’s just… we're already back to plans and battles and catastrophe. The good part was just… over so fast.”

She rests her quill-pen on her parchment and regards her sparse notes sadly. Zevlor, head tilted slightly to read her cramped writing upside down, is surprised at how little she’s written; how little he’s given her to write. He wets his lips.

“Well…”

“Well?”

Alfira’s tail perks up in anticipation.

“There was Tav’s parting gift…”

It was the leather under his hands—a far more light-weight armour for the fight ahead of her than Zevlor would have preferred, but he held his tongue—that urged his mind to more practical problems.

“Do you keep extra weapons and armour here? Or is your cache at your main camp?”

The question had an unexpected effect on Tav. Her expression, tremulously wooden as an ill-held shield during all his encouragement, now lit up in an echo of the previous night’s bright joy. Sliding from under his hands, she turned back to the open trunk. 

“No! I mean, yes, most of it's in Rivington, but… I can't believe I nearly forgot!” Her voice hummed like a lute’s plucked strings with suppressed excitement as she rifled through rattling contents. “I do have some things you can use.”

Zevlor, nonplussed at this change of aspect, watched Tav’s bent back. Until a grunt of effort finally prompted him to rush forward and relieve her of the bulky, fleece-wrapped burden—wider and heavier than she, and clearly the trunk’s dominant contents—she’d attempted to single-handedly heft. He carried the bundle to the unmade bed, laid it out with a series of muffled rattles, then stood back to let Tav do the honours. Face working furiously to restrain her enthusiasm, she unwound the layers of cloth to reveal what Zevlor, by its feel, had already guessed— a full set of armour: expertly crafted, complete with crimson mantling, gold fluting flashing even in the weak light; and far too large for Tav even if she did frequent plate.

“Where did you get this?” he asked, unable to disguise his professional admiration.

“Dammon made it,” was Tav's answer. “It's mostly infernal iron. We gathered all we could get our hands on for Karlach’s heart, but it ended up being more than she needed. So Dammon made this with the rest. Only Karlach doesn't wear armour, and it didn’t fit Lae’zel. But it seemed too rare a gift to sell, so I saved it. Just in case.” She glanced sideways at Zevlor, and he could tell from the way she pursed her lips to keep her smile from spreading, there must be more. “As well as these.”

Beside the pristine chestplate, Tav placed a second smaller but equally sparkling bundle of white-gold and steel. And, with a frisson as fierce as though she’d once more run her fingers down his spine, Zevlor recognised his own gauntlets: blessed in Elturel's High Hall, and presented to Tav on besotted impulse what felt like a lifetime ago.

He opened his mouth—to thank her, he supposed; though if there were words that encompassed the upswell of love, gratitude, and thrilled astonishment that Tav, through all her trials and misfortunes, had seen fit to keep his impractical gift, Zevlor did not know them.

“Tav—” he began. But Tav had returned to the trunk. And when had she finished fumbling a longer, thinner package from the bottom, and peeled off its wrappings, Zevlor lost the thread of his inadequate gratitude completely, and, “Where did you get that?” he said instead.

Because it was unbelievable what he was looking at. Yet there could be no mistaking the battle-worn greatsword Tav pressed into his automatically outstretched hands for any but his own.

“But, I left it—”

“In the grove, yes,” Tav finished for him. “After your people left, a few of us went back to look for any leftover supplies.”

Zevlor’s thumb traced the surface of the hilt where, in a fit of piqued despair, he’d filed away the details of his paladin’s oath. Someone had since sanded it smooth, along with the spots of rust he’d savagely allowed to gather on the pummel. It was his sword, but restored to nearly new.

“I thought I’d check your old room,” Tav was still explaining, “for any leftover wine. Or… really, I just missed you already. Anyway, I saw you’d left it behind and I... well, it was too precious to be left to rust. And I thought, maybe, if we did meet again in Baldur's Gate you might..."

She broke off, wrongfooted, as Zevlor dropped the sword unceremoniously to a spare patch of mussed bed, tugged her to him and wrapped her in his arms, leather and all. He knew he shouldn't. He knew it was a breach of the physical impasse on which they'd unspokenly agreed. But the tide of emotion breaking over him demanded some sort of expression. With his last modicum of self-control, Zevlor settled for pressing his lips to the top of Tav’s head. He would have forever to thank her—to love her—properly, after all.

Still, he could not bear to release her. Until the floorboards rumbled again underneath his bare feet, and another tremour broke them apart.

“And I thought, you said—” The hitch in Alfira's voice makes Zevlor look up in alarm. Her ochre eyes are overbright, her lip quivering visibly. "—thought you said... there was no romance.”

“It probably wasn’t as bad as you’re picturing,” Zevlor feels compelled to say on returning from the Elfsong’s facilities and finding an ashen Alfira resolutely gulping down the rest of her ale. “I was unconscious for most of it. And, as far as memory serves, underwent very little physical torture. Which is more than most can say who’ve played guest to the Cult of Bhaal.”

“Ooo, the Cult of Bhaal… on to a real story then, are we?”

Lakrissa slips through the velvet privacy curtain Zevlor still holds open: eyes bright, voice eager, and arms full of more sloshing tankards. She settles them safely on the table, then slides onto the bench beside her partner with a “Budge up, Alfie,” and pulls one towards her, though she remains too busy chattering to drink.

“I remember Tav looking into them. First day she and her friends turned up here, she was asking after Roveer, said his name was on some list of cult targets. Said to watch our backs, mine and Alfie’s. I told her: we’re two tiefling queens!”—she jostles Alfira’s shoulder at this—“Been to the hells and back, we have. We can handle a few brain-washed idiots with knives.”

She ends on an overloud ‘ha’ of laughter. From somewhere behind Zevlor, there's the groan and slide of wooden chair legs, and a strident male voice slurs Lakrissa's name.

“Rest break,” she barks back without looking. “Get your own pint for a change, Fane,” and takes a pointed pull on hers, complete with appreciative sigh, before returning her attention to Zevlor. “So — you got your act together in time to help Tav and the others take those cult buggers down?”

Zevlor considers the ‘two tiefling queens’ critically for a moment. But Lakrissa’s lively presence appears to have a fortifying effect on her partner. Though the bard remains uncommonly quiet, the azure has returned to Alfira’s cheeks, and she meets Zevlor's eyes readily as she straightens her stack of parchments and swirls her quill pen through the waning bottle of ink.

“Well…” He eases back into his chair and rallies himself for an audience of two. “If by ‘getting my act together’ you mean being captured by the cult’s leader and used to lure Tav to their temple hidden under the city, then… yes.”

Not that Zevlor was aware of any of this when first he woke: needled from uneasy, half-formed dreams by a voice as disconcerting as the drag of cold steel across bare skin—

“And what did it say, the Banite spy? Do the little lordling’s entrails yet decorate the stones of his stolen keep?”

—which was no mere morbid fancy. As sleep beat its sluggish retreat, he recognised the unmistakable edge of a blade dancing deftly up and down the length of his right cheek—

“Not yet, my Lady. Gortash lives. Those were his spy’s last words before we relieved him of his tongue.”

—until the razor-sharp tip increased its pressure just under the infernal ridge of his cheekbone. Zevlor stiffened—

“This corpse-killer tries my patience! And with such fresh meat waiting for me on my altar…”

—but it was not the sting of the knife, nor the bead of hot blood he could feel welling under it, that set his newly conscious nerves on edge. It was that voice. He had heard evil before: the awful war cries of the narzugon, the howls of ghouls and growls of ghasts, the eerie keening of vrocks. But Avernus itself had not contained a voice like that—

“Look at its skin... such crimson. Oh, to peel it from its bones... what a picture I could paint…”

—with its fervid, quivering cadence, its lewd delight at the tortures it described—

“Perhaps, a foretaste. A quick slit through the lesser veins... one small, pretty slice…”

—and Zevlor’s flesh recoiled as much from the sound of it as the serrated metal now tracing a path down the unprotected skin of his throat. Base fear welled up in it like bile; he fought the urge to swallow it down. The slightest movement might disrupt the fragile truce between his neck and the hideous voice's hungry blade. Which, without warning, vanished—

“But no… no, not yet. It must be a flawless sacrifice.”

—and the voice, too, was more distant when next it hissed—

“You! You must distract me!”

“Of-of course, my Lady … perhaps the tale of my first kill?”

—then fell silent at last; and even the story of savage murder its companion told could not match it for terror—Zevlor’s chest unclenched by degrees. He inhaled, and nearly gagged at the taste that filled his mouth and soured his lungs. The air of wherever he was was foul, rotted, like the inside of a bloated corpse. It made the sulphurous stink of Avernus seem bearable by comparison, and fear matured into dread as he wondered what fresh layer of the hells he had been dragged to now.

Keeping his breaths short and shallow, Zevlor prodded his brain for answers. Instead, a deluge of unprocessed sensations released themselves in painful spurts.

His cheek burned. His head throbbed. His spine ached, stretched as it was across a slab of what felt through the fabric of his clothes like un-sanded stone. His tail, squashed between it and his back, protested the chafing surface. He tried to shift it to a more comfortable angle underneath him and felt the bite of heavy iron crisscrossing his waist. His wrists and ankles registered a similar weight.

“Bland!” spat the other voice unexpectedly; Zevlor flinched at the sound. “Forgettable! The Murder Lord receives such paltry prayers each hour.” A soft scraping, as of leather on stone, and the voice was closer when next it moaned, “Oh, how I crave to bleed him a worthy offering.”

Then the blade, too, returned. Fetid air caught in Zevlor’s chest as he felt it trace an almost longing pattern along the unchained portion of his right arm, splitting his sleeve to reach skin, while the more human of the speakers inserted in sickly soothing tones:

“My Lady Orin, the faceless continue to spread carnage like a pox. Priests poisoning congregations. Mothers serving their own babes for supper. Surely, Lord Bhaal must savour such destruction?”

Whatever wretched sentiment the vile voice spewed in reply was lost on Zevlor, the wheels of his brain creaking into motion at last. My Lady Orin. The Murder Lord. Bhaal. He knew those names. The latter, of course, recalled the history lessons of his youth: the cautionary tale of Baldur's Gate's infamous Bhaal cult a favourite of Elturel's priests. But the other… Orin… he’d heard that too, and recently, he thought. For some reason, his brain associated the name with the scent of crushed tomato, and a would-be casual warning of shape-changers and assassins in a voice that even in memory carried a tangible clarity…

Zevlor’s eyes snapped open. The blade tip tickling the crook of his elbow froze. And the face that loomed over his, so pale it appeared to glow in the dark all around it, blinked even paler eyes in brief surprise. Then its blood-blacked lips stretched in a blasphemy of a smile.

“It wakes… good. It shouldn't miss all the fun. Its little devil-kin will be here soon.”

These words, once Zevlor's brain could think past the voice itself to grasp them, hit him like a shield blow—flat, hard, and all at once—and fear of a different sort, though no less primal, abruptly animated his limbs. His feet curled in his boots, his fingers tightened into fists, long nails gouging against his own palms as his body fought to free itself, to reach the threat that leered above, to neutralise it, now, before it found its true target, whom that wickedly curved blade glinting red in the gloom could under no circumstances be allowed to touch. But his bonds held fast. Iron clunked pathetically against stone with each weak movement.

The woman—if woman she was; she exuded an air more creature than human—giggled.

“Watch it struggle. Does it think it can escape me? Escape the very seat of murder?” She laughed again—a wild, joyless crow—and Zevlor’s gut prolapsed as she contorted her scarlet-clad limbs until they were laid out along the stone beside him, one arm snaking over his chest to trace the clenched jut of his jaw with her blade; a mockery of a lover. “Ohhh…” she moaned in his ear, “both little devils bled together on my altar. A beautiful offering for my father.”

She shivered against him in perverse ecstasy. Zevlor's body echoed the shudder. But the dread vibrating his bones was no longer for himself. It was for what—for whom—was coming; the rescue that would find him as surely, impossibly as it had since that sweltering day at the Emerald Grove. Only the hooded figures waiting in the darkness all around him were no goblins, the thing panting hot and wet in his ear a far more deadly enemy than any drow. This was the cult of Bhaal, and she, Orin, must be a Bhaalspawn: an heir of death in its most unholy form.

Despair knotted Zevlor’s thoughts. He squeezed his eyes shut again, and under his short, shaky breaths, pushed out frantic fragments of prayers, pleas, promises of service and his own soul to every god whose name he knew if only they would keep her from coming, keep her from finding this place, keep her from sharing in his damned fate, please, just keep her safe—

“Hush,” hissed the horror in his ear. The tip of the dagger pricked the skin under Zevlor’s chin. “I hear the trip-trapping of feet on the Murder Lord’s stones.”

And, over the blood clanging like an alarm bell in his ears, Zevlor heard it, too: the padding of leather on stone, the precise steps of a champion duellist ready at any moment to spring into stance. Then a voice, bold and inevitable as a sunrise.

“Take that knife from his throat or you’ll be fetching this stone out of the depths of one of Bhaal’s bloody bottomless pits,” said—

“Tav?” echoes a male voice — the same that had slurred for Lakrissa to fetch him more ale. “What, the Tav?”

Zevlor swivels his head, peering through the gap in the privacy curtain to the next table over and the man turned almost full round in his chair to stare shamelessly back. The weather-worn skin of his wholly hairless face and scalp speak to long days spent out of doors, though Zevlor thinks the man’s current ruddy flush owes less to the sun than the empty cups strewn across his table.

Not that he’s one to judge.

Zevlor lowers this, his third pint, and searches for a suitable rejoinder: insistent without sounding instigatory; forceful enough to establish theirs as a private conversation but not so much as to invite a fight. Before he can dredge up such words through his brain’s ale-tinted brume, however, Lakrissa takes the conversation's reins—down a decidedly different track. 

“Oi, Fane! Keep your nose to yourself, ‘less you’d like it go the same way as your eyebrows.”

There are a few guffaws from the man’s companions. Fane himself clutches comically at his chest. A good-natured drunk, Zevlor notes in relief.

Lakrissa is not charmed. Wrinkling her nose at the display, she stretches out an arm to jerk the privacy curtain more firmly closed, then sweeps the spare tankards to the edge of the table so she can lean over it to demand, low and urgent, “Go on. I don't have long - tenday's end's always our busiest time - and I want to hear about the fight.”

But it takes Zevlor a few seconds of throat-clearing, and another sip of ale for good measure, before he can direct his thoughts past the curtain's swaying hem and the wooden chair legs edging slowly along the scuffed floorboards just visible beneath. He closes his eyes…

...and hears the soft scratch of leather on stone as Orin uncoiled herself from his body, the spine-chilling whine of “No no no” that grew in vim and volume as she moved, the uneasy shuffling of the surrounding cultists. But though Zevlor funnelled all his focus into hearing, straining his ears past the extraneous sounds, he could not locate the one he sought: the echo of other boots following Tav’s. Where were reinforcements? Her companions? Surely, surely, she had not come alone? 

Which thought was worse for his lightening-struck nerves than the rabid eruption from overhead.

“It lies to me! It lets the tyrant live and comes crawling into Bhaal’s sanctum on its own instead!”

Training and experience alerted Zevlor’s body of imminent danger. His eyes opened of their own accord and found Orin crouched beside him on the altar, like an animal guarding its prey, dagger-arm shaking, colourless face stricken with a manic mélange of disappointment, incredulity, and rage.

“Did it think it could protect? Did it think it could save? Only the blades offer salvation!”

Then his vision was drenched in ruby, the red-jewelled knife descending towards his face all he could see. His heart had time for one last pump of self-preservatory panic before—

“Stop!”

The command quavered audibly, but there was enough authority in it to stay Orin’s hand. For a moment, at least. The blade tip remained poised a breath from Zevlor’s throat as Tav continued, “Gortash is dead. I butchered him without breaking a sweat. Here. You can check for yourself.”

Some slight, padded weight thudded to the ground to Zevlor’s left, but he dared not turn his head to see what it was; dared not flinch or blink or breathe lest he break the brittle spell of Tav’s bravado. The whole dank chamber seemed to throb with anticipatory silence, awaiting Orin’s verdict.

“You do not smell of his corpse rot…” she mused; then, slowly, retracted her blade. Her pale face swam back into focus over Zevlor, mouth warped grotesquely. “But yes… I feel it. He is grave meat now. And you… you will be next.” Before he could breathe again, Orin was standing, skipping nimbly over his bound body and off the other side of the altar, her voice gaining fervour with each step. “Your blood will clot the gutters of this place. Your flesh will rot on the slab. A worthy offering to the Murder Lord at last.”

“And why is that, exactly?” Tav, in contrast, had assumed a more relaxed, almost conversational tone as the other woman approached her, leaving Zevlor, forgotten, behind. “Why would Bhaal want me? I’m nobody. A foulblood. Why is my death worth more than anyone else’s?”

“Why?” Orin mocked. “You are the corpse killer. Slayer of the chosen of the Lord of Bones and the Black Hand, both. And the spiller of my grandfather’s crimson. Blood that was meant to be mine.”

A ghost of her former crazed anger haunted this accusation. Zevlor twisted his head, trying to keep the mercurial creature in his sights, but all he could see through the awkward angle and the sanguine dark was the long, pale plait swishing like a tail behind Orin as she paced.

“He, who showed me how to slice and slit. He, who guides my daggers still.”

Crimson blurred through the gloom with each of her wild gesticulations. Zevlor’s own hands convulsed at his sides. Every instinct he possessed was screaming at him to move, to act, to fight off his chains whatever the cost to his own flesh and fly to Tav’s aid as Orin’s rant crescendoed.

“He was mine to take! As his plans are mine to finish. Sarevok brought this city to its knees, but I will be the one to slit its throat! Starting with its precious, would-be saviour’s…”

In desperation, Zevlor wriggled his wrists against the unyielding chains, ignoring the grate of iron on bone—

—until a voice he recognised hissed into his right ear, “Stay still! This is hard enough already!” and his head whipped round so fast he cracked his cheekbone on the altar. Behind him, Tav’s voice rang out—

“Really? That’s it, then? Petty revenge for a grandfather that didn’t give a damn about you?”

—while beside him something moved: a shadow within shadows, with red pinpricks for eyes—

“Then carrying on the family business? Toeing his old line?”

—and behind it more shadows: the silhouette of massive curling horns, twin glimmers of curved steel. Two indistinct figures slunk through the dark between the cultists, whose faceless hoods were all turned in the direction of Tav’s diatribe.

“Being whatever awful thing he expected you to be?”

Zevlor blinked. The vague impressions remained. Which did not mean they weren’t figments of the headache pounding a second pulse in his temple. But the carefully quiet unravelling of the chain around his right arm was not—he rotated his wrist to be sure—nor was the voice which sniped again in his ear, “Stop moving!” under cover of Tav’s conclusion:

“That’s depressing, Orin. And unoriginal. I really thought you were capable of more.”

Had stakes been any less dire, Zevlor would have been impressed, roused even, by Tav’s daring stratagem, and cool head in the face of danger. As it was, the return of Orin’s shrill indignation chilled any buds of warm feeling in his chest.

“He worships me, now! I am Bhaal’s chosen. His perfection. One fit to control the crown! Sarevok built the foundations on which I will carve Bhaal’s succession. And when I set my blades to your neck, the Murder Lord will taste my domination!”

A warning note of hysteria warbled through her words—Zevlor’s muscles tensed even as the chains securing his legs went slack. The Bhaalspawn’s patience for parley was disintegrating fast. Tav must have heard it, too.

“Fine.” Her simple pronouncement was punctuated by the shnk of a drawn blade. “You keep your word and let him go, then we fight each other for the stones, you and I.”

Orin’s answer was all the worst of a scream and scornful laughter. And surely it was frantic fancy, but Zevlor thought he could hear the physical snap of her restraint, like the breaking of bone.

“It does not demand! It obeys!”

Only the hideous cracking and shredding that followed, the almost orgasmic groan of pain, were sounds too heinous to be conjured by any imagination. Zevlor's stomach lurched. A low thrum of irreverent chanting struck up by the cultists all around added to the nauseating cacophony, tangled through which was Orin's eerily distorted wail:

“Come to me, Father! Set my flesh to your unholy purpose!”

Then, a ripping. A retching. A spray of hot, vile something hit Zevlor's face—so his first act of freedom as the last chains clunked carelessly off his waist was to struggle to a seat and drive heave over the altar’s side. An utterly inhuman roar of agony and ecstasy, and the murmured, “oh, shit,” from the pale-haired elf now visible beside him, threatened a second capsizing of his empty insides. But, at Tav’s distant yelp of panic, Zevlor succeeded in swallowing it down.

Swiping bile and burning liquid he did not want to name from his face, he lifted his eyes—a commander’s ingrained training. Every mortal instinct he had was screaming at him to squeeze them shut, to gouge them out, rather than cast them on the thing unfurling itself to full, unthinkable height ... shaking the last shreds of red leather and mortal flesh off its chitinous frame ... flexing its new set of talon-tipped limbs ... clicking the monstrous appendages protruding from its many-fanged mouth…

“What’s that supposed to be, then, eh? One of them mind flayer things? I killed one, meself - they weren’t so tough.”

For all he’s been expecting it, the sudden pop of Fane’s head through the privacy curtain makes Zevlor jump. He covers the undignified lapse with a hasty pull on his pint and leaves the floor to the furious Lakrissa.

“Oh, sod off! Does that sound like a mindflayer to you?”

“Wha’s it, then?”

“It’s Bhaal’s bloody chosen monster, that’s what!”

“Bollocks.”

If Fane means to follow this up with any more structured argument, he's interrupted by the appearance of a second head through the tatty velvet, the green eyes of a height with his own though the woman is standing.

“Do you mean the Slayer?” she asks shrewdly. “The slayer of Bhaal? ‘Cause that’s a real thing, Fane.” The halfling knocks her shoulder into his and declares, “Volo tells of it,” as though this is proof beyond reproach.

Her companion in intrusion only snorts and reaches absently for one of the tankards lining the tiefling table’s edge.

“If anything Volothamp Geddarm says is true, then I’m Mystra’s bloody chosen.”

“Excuse you!” Lakrissa slaps Fane’s hand away and snaps over his offended yelp: “You’re talking to the man who actually saw it! And fought it — I assume. Not that I’ll ever find out, at this rate.”

She gives the two interlopers her best infernal glower. Neither notices. Both new heads have turned to Zevlor.

“So, we’re supposed to believe you ,”—Fane makes rather a spectacle of looking the older man up and down—“fought some monster of Volo’s, then the whole of Bhaal’s murder cult, and lived to tell the tale?”

“Reverse order, actually,” returns Zevlor coolly. “And believe anything you like. It’s of no concern to me, and it’s true, regardless.”

What ale has taken of polite tact, it's recompensed him in pettish wit; and a confidence, Zevlor decides with as much objectivity as he's currently capable, not undeserved. He meets the other man’s eyes readily over the rim of his tankard and is pleased to watch the little patronising smile playing round the hairless lips falter. Rather than being cowed into retreat, however, Fane drags his chair closer.

“Alright,” he says with a shade more deference. “Go on, then. How’d you slay this Slayer?”

There’s a pause in which all three tieflings glance at each other in wordless conference. Lakrissa’s eyebrows pose a question to Alfira; then, at her small half-shrug, to Zevlor. He considers.

Had this invasion come at any prior part of the interview, he would never have allowed it. But alcohol transmutes irritation into amusement, the additional faces fixed on him pump a pleasant adrenaline through his veins, and, for once, he's recalling a memory which inspires not the slightest twinge of shame.

On the contrary.

“Look out, Ast-ah!”

Whether Tav’s initial command contained some hidden, invigorating magic, or the thick thwack and the cry of pain which cut it off galvanised his unsteady limbs, Zevlor responded with a speed that impressed even him. He caught the pale elf by his drow-leather collar and flung them both backward. The next instant, two sets of sabre-like claws carved furrows into the altar where their bodies had been. Massive, talon-ed hind legs followed. Chunks of granite cracked free and tumbled to the temple floor, which trembled as the nightmare creature that had torn itself from Orin's willing body shrieked in rage.

Zevlor, already on his feet, braced himself for the impact. On the other side of the altar, however, heavy thuds and the clatter of steel on stone drew his eye. Tav’s two other would-be rescuers had been shaken from their shadows: the Blade of Frontiers, and a second tow-headed elf, this one a woman, whose hard, lined face Zevlor did not know. Nor was there time for introductions. With another furious howl, the hulking abomination twisted towards the new arrivals, leaving Zevlor and the pale elf to stumble hastily backwards, avoiding the thick, thrashing tail.

“You alright, Tav?”

“Tell me there's a new plan, cub!”

The shouts just carried over the creature-Orin’s spitting, clicking wrath, the scrape of claws on steel as the elven woman caught them in her dual scimitars and drove them back—Tav’s reply, if she attempted one, was lost.

Zevlor squinted. But between the dark chaos of violent limbs and the orbs of smoky, sulphurous energy Wyll hurled one after another, he could spy no hint of pale dancing tail or darting rapier. Panic prickled under his skin. Unsoothed by Tav's cool, clear voice when it finally rose above the din—

“And I thought you were ugly before, Orin!”

—or the flash of weak purple-tinted light that accompanied it. It hit the creature-Orin's chitinous flank, and, like Wyll’s infernal magic before it and the elf’s continued barrage of silver blows, glanced off without any apparent harm. But where swords and spells failed to faze her, Tav’s taunt seemed to have struck Orin's remaining pride. Another screech, this one threaded with an echo of human indignation, and the monstrous form sidled around again, claws clicking, tail lashing, the muscled hind legs launching into a second deadly spring.

Registering, and just as quickly rejecting, his brain’s reminder of his armourless, weaponless state, Zevlor hurtled after her, skirting loose chunks of rubble, scouring the dark for anything he could wield or throw—and caught the glimmer of metal as it sliced through the shadows for his face.

He did not think, simply ducked. The razor-edged dagger grazed the tip of one horn.

A bare-handed swipe at the wielder’s unprotected wrist as Zevlor straightened sent the dagger flying from its hand, but the short-sword clutched in its other was already hissing towards him through the dark. He dodged again: a feat of dexterity that shocked himself as much as his attacker. The cultist snarled, and Zevlor wondered distantly if he was dreaming; or dead — perhaps he had, in fact, been murdered on that altar. Then the short-sword was swinging his way again, and underneath him the ground was quaking, and as he fought to keep his head and his balance something bulky and unyielding—Orin's tail, he remembered too late—hit the back of his calves, knocking his feet from under him and his brain free of abstract thought.

He hit the cold stone on hands and knees. Skin smarting, ears ringing with his own pulse and another of Orin's shrieks and an upswell of that irreverent chanting from the congregation of cultists he could not see, Zevlor did not hear the sword’s descent; instinct alone told him it was on its way. He rolled, aware he was likely too late. But the flat of the blade only smacked his thigh before clattering away. Raising his head, he watched the cultist’s shrouded silhouette crumple atop its fallen sword.

“You're welcome. Again.”

Above him, the pale elf flicked blood from his own wicked-looking dagger. Zevlor, eyes darting from this study of determined nonchalance to the shadows moving behind it, forwent both thanks and retorts. Scrabbling blindly for the cultist’s dropped knife, he took quick, careful aim, and, before the elf could do more than arch an incredulous brow, threw it over his white-blonde head—where it lodged with a sickening squelch and a scream into the hood of a second hidden attacker.

In one fluid, almost blurred movement, the elf ducked and whirled, dagger whistling. Zevlor did not stop to watch his work. The slippery splash of things wet and weighty hitting stone and the noxious odour of human insides barely affected his jaded senses. He shifted forward on his knees, feeling for the fallen Bhaalist's body.

Another screech, shrill enough to shatter glass. Tav’s voice, shouting something unintelligible.

Zevlor ground his teeth, fear and frustration vibrating his hands, nails snagging on coarse leather. The sword was there, somewhere; but limp hair swung across his face, and flecks of blood clouded one eye, and everything in front of him was wet and tacky and painted the same damned shades of indistinguishable grey and black…

Until another flash of purple magic lit the chamber—one which did not evaporate back into the darkness, but solidified somewhere behind Zevlor, illuminating the scene before him in otherworldly hues, like a dream of the astral plane: the limp body in a pool of blood, tinted bright vermillion; the same warm liquid seeping over long-nailed magenta hands it took him a moment to realise were his own; and, inches from them, gleaming under studded leather like a buried star-ruby, a crude bone hilt.

Zevlor wrapped his sticky, stinging palm around it, pulled it free, pushed to his feet, and spun to face the source of the light.

With the shadows swept to the temple’s primitive edges, its dank stone walls, and the enormous leering skull hacked into the closest one, were thrown into violet-tinged relief. As was the rough-hewn block of stone—Bhaal's altar, where Zevlor's body had been so recently bound—and the runes that had appeared in front of it. Uninterpretable to Zevlor, but clearly arcane, they winked in a circle on the dingy stone floor. Beams of light arced from each, like luminous purple bars; within which, her screeches magically muffled, insectoid limbs stuck at strange angles as though the spell had ensnared her mid-lunge, was trapped the creature-Orin.

And planted between her frozen forelegs, less than a swords-length from that murderous maw—his heart stuttered in warring anxiety and relief—Zevlor could, at last, see Tav.

“I’ve got her!” she cried, and her voice was as bright and bracing as his every memory of it. Her tail flexed and curled at her feet, her face screwed up in focus, skin iris in the glow of the spell she steadied in place with outstretched hands. With grim authority, she commanded, “Wyll, Jaheiera—hit her with everything you’ve got!” then threw a desperate gaze out across the chamber.

For one, too-brief moment, their eyes met. Tav’s, lit by her own enchantment, sparkled like cobalt stars. Zevlor felt a muscle twitch in his jaw at the sight of her, inflaming the cut under his cheekbone. He grimaced, but Tav had already glanced away—not back at her prisoner, but over Zevlor’s shoulder. Consternation creased her brow. Her mouth moved, the words drowned in the renewed sounds of steel pitting itself against chitin, but Zevlor did not need them. Instinct, and the belatedly-processed absence of the cultists’ low chanting, told him what she saw, what he was going to see when he turned.

He turned anyway.

Out of the shadows still gathered at the top of a crumbling staircase, figures in light armour and leather, brandishing daggers, hefting maces and swords, stumbled into the domain of the arcane light. Zevlor’s heart thudded against his ripped temple robes, but with adrenaline, not fear. More faceless hoods than could be quickly counted were fixed on him—the only thing between them and the trapped emissary of their evil god. And if he was the line keeping Bhaal’s army from Tav, he would hold it; alone, if he had to.

“Oh, weeping hells. More of them? It’ll take hours to kill them all,” moaned the pale elf, silently re-materialised at Zevlor’s side. He shifted his weight petulantly, but his continued tirade was equal parts terse and tense. “And of course Tav gets the High Harper and the Dragonslayer on her team, and leaves me her ex-hellrider-soldier-paladin-or whatever it is you’re supposed to be.”

Zevlor’s only response was to settle into a defensive stance, tail balanced behind him, short-sword at the ready. The elf—Astarion, Zevlor’s brain, currently processing and providing information in the orderly rank-and-file of a trained commander, helpfully supplied—sighed dramatically. He drew his own daggers and raised them, his grip far steadier than his voice as he threw a final jab over his shoulder.

“Tav had better be right about you.”

“You’re a Hellrider, then?” interrupts the halfing woman.

“I was.”

Zevlor watches her green eyes perform that familiar dance—horns to fiery sclera and away again—to which he is almost as accustomed as the surprise at the unconventional juxtaposition of his former profession and race.

“ And a paladin?” Fane’s skepticism is echoed in pewter; he’s managed, under cover of Zevlor’s story, to snag one of the table’s unattended pints. “Didn’t think there were many of those among the hellions…”

“There aren’t, historically. But…” and even the faint sting of old prejudices and open doubts—and Lakrissa’s undisguised scowl—cannot sour the relish Zevlor feels at the words he has not tired, even after many months, of saying in the present tense: “ I am.”

He was not. His oath was broken, his power rescinded, his faith lost. It was not possible. And yet…

Zevlor knew mere determination to see Tav safe, however dauntless, could not accomplish such a swift sideways twist past a close-range dagger thrust. Or the blink-of-an-eye riposte and retreat he executed, boots navigating bloody stone and fallen bodies like familiar ground. In younger years, he might have credited his own reflexes with the way he scythed nigh-untouchably through the rankless, reckless mob, but he was too old now, too well acquainted with his own inadequacies to mistake miracle for personal merit.

A snarled oath on his left, a manic cackle on his right. Zevlor’s knees sank, then rose a second later with enough force to catch the first cultist under the chin with the ridged crest of one horn while his adopted short-sword slid up and through the ribs of the other. One sure kick removed the slackening body from the bloody blade. He straightened, rotating his head experimentally. His horn, like his knees and his back and every other part of him that ought by rights to be screaming in protest, registered no complaints.

In fact, Zevlor realised, taking stock of his body as he disarmed, then decapitated another attacker with unfeasible ease, he felt better than he had in months, maybe years. His muscles vibrated with a warm, revitalising energy. His bruises did not ache. The cut on his cheek had ceased to burn. Even the needle-sharp spikes of the mace that sank into his shoulder from behind, Zevlor could only clinically feel. And it did not stop him.

Spinning on his heel, his free hand grabbed the offending wrist, snapped it, snatched at the handle of the mace before it hit the ground, and, with a wordless war-cry, swung it, off-handed, at his attacker’s chest. White-gold sparks erupted in a dazzling corona, like a halo around the weapon’s spiked head. The cultist sank, screaming, to its knees, clutching not the sunken cavity in its chest, but its face. The burned, blistering skin around the human’s blinded-white eyes shone starkly in the mace’s brilliant glow, then took on a tinge of dream-like purple as the magic flickered and faded—then, abruptly, dissolved into muted shades of grey and black, the significance of which Zevlor was too preoccupied to immediately grasp.

He stared at the mace in his steady, blood-stained hand. The holy aura had vanished from the crude weapon, but he could still feel it singing under his skin, pulsing expectantly through his veins—a sensation as familiar to Zevlor as his old armour or discarded great sword. A paladin’s divinely-deigned power. The same power that had bolstered him, strengthened him—and allowed him to bolster and strengthen the city to which he’d devoted himself—nearly all his life. But how had it returned to him, and why? And why now? What god had seen fit to finally hear his prayers?

He could not fathom the answers, and was given no further time to try.

Ahead, the pale elf, Astarion, was screaming at him as he slit the throat of a cultist Zevlor had to squint to see, his words lost in the sudden vicious screech that rattled the bodies and blades strewn over the ground. And, with a nauseous resurgence of panic, Zevlor’s brain caught up—in time to hear a harsh grate of torn metal, an agonised groan in a voice he would know anywhere but had never heard like that.

He turned. He had to—though he found his eyes more reluctant to view this scene than any horror to which he had been exposed since he first woke chained to Bhaal’s wretched altar.

It bore a different body now.

Tav half-sat atop the stone slab, half-slumped along its side. Her gloved hands pressed into her stomach, as if to stem the dark tide pouring through the ragged gash rent in her armour—by the creature-Orin, free and unfurled to full height over her, forelimbs raining blood as they stretched towards the looming visage of Bhaal. She roared—victorious, ecstatic, inhuman. And underneath the earsplitting noise wandered other cries of anger and anguish, shouted imprecations and incantations.

All of which tumult slid impressionlessly in and out of Zevlor’s ears. Like the fear, the despair, the sense of hopeless loss he could sense stalking the newly refortified borders of his confidence and power. But he would not surrender to them. This time, he would give them no ground. Faith—of an earnest unassailability he had not felt since before Elturel’s fall—suffused him, sustained him. Tav would not leave him. She would not die. Whatever deity had renewed his oath would not let her bleed out on that profane altar. And, in the meantime, Zevlor knew what his mission, the reason he'd been vouchsafed divine might again, must surely be...

He stepped over the body at his feet and started forward, unhurried, adjusting his right grip on the short-sword to better heft the mace still clutched in his left. Neither were his preferred weapon—ill-made and ill-intentioned, designed to extract as much pain and suffering as possible from victims, not offer an opponent a swift, deserved end. But, grafted to divine purpose, even unworthy weapons would serve—Zevlor, lips twiching grimly, knew that only too well.

He lifted the mace like a standard. Radiant sparks engulfed the head again, illuminating the ground. And whether the light caught her attention, or such holy power was innately offensive to the blood of Bhaal, the creature-Orin lumbered around, and met Zevlor’s eyes for the first time she had shed her human form.

Time slowed.

Or rather, it didn’t—the creature-Orin lunged with a speed that belied size; Zevlor’s own rolling dodge equally and impossibly blurred—but the rate at which his brain processed what was happening, what his own limbs were doing, had slowed to a crawl. His mind felt detached from his body, outside it, as he side-stepped one deadly swipe, parried another and pushed the slick talons back; but there was a trustworthy surety in each unconscious movement, as though his arms and legs were taking their orders from someone higher than himself in the chain of command.

Drops of blood flecked his face, his hair as another claw descended. This one Zevlor caught. Trapping the forelimb between mace and short-sword, he twisted with all his newly-allotted might. The crack which followed might have belonged to a felled tree trunk, and Orin’s subsequent scream contained as much pain as rage.

Then, a searing in his own thigh, a burning, twisting sensation radiating to his ankle told Zevlor one of those sabre-like talons had pierced his leg. He observed the pain like a spectator and filed it away, shifted his weight to his other leg to compensate, and, before the talon could tear itself free of him, hacked off the insectoid limb.

With an anguished howl, the creature-Orin staggered back, dragging her mangled forelimb with her. Dark ichor smeared stone in its wake. Zevlor used the brief respite to wrap his sword-hand around the talon and, gritting his teeth, tug it from his leg. It hurt, but the blood leaking from the hole in his filthy trousers was minimal: injured muscle, then, not severed artery. On divinely-guided whim, he relinquished his short-sword and laid the palm of his hand against the wound, letting that ready, righteous glow swimming under his skin meet his gouged thigh. He had never been much of a healer, but any paladin worth his name could at least seal a wound this small.

Retrieving his sword, he felt the stone rumbling under the blade—the creature-Orin creeping back his way. Zevlor cocked his head, wary, but did not rise, not yet; and instead of cutting off the flow of holy power pooling in his palm, he let it flare and spread. The magic ignited the short-sword from hilt to tip with flickering tongues of white-gold flame. He waited … waited until he heard hot breath, the tell-tale whistle of claws through air ... then caught the oncoming limb with the length of his mace, ducked under her guard, and swung the blessed blade in an arc at the many-fanged maw.

Blood—glutinous and foul-smelling—sprayed from Orin’s monstrous face. She doubled over, keening in agony and outrage, and Zevlor, stopping neither for breath or for stance, launched himself through her tangle of spasming limbs to reach her chitinous side. He brought the flaming short-sword to bear again. And again, at the small of the creature-Orin's back. Massive hind legs collapsed in a ground-shaking crack. Zevlor hardly noticed, hardly heard her almost pitiful keening. Bells rang like victory, like divine purpose fulfilled, inside his head. 

Throwing the mace aside, he crowded the short-sword’s hilt with both hands, spun for momentum, and, with a cry of righteous fury, brought the fiery steel down on the creature-Orin’s narrow midsection. It bisected in one clean slice. The hideous wails became a death rattle. The remaining forelimbs scrabbled at the unforgiving stone, as if to crawl away. But its chitinous carapace was dissolving, viscera vomiting itself across the floor of the temple. 

Zevlor stepped back, abruptly aware of his tight lungs and heaving chest. He inhaled foul air, lowered his sword by a fraction, but did not drop his guard until the last of the abomination had disintegrated, until there was nothing left of Orin but a heap of empty, red flesh, her crimson dagger, and, inexplicably to Zevlor, one gleaming, purple gem.

For several rapid heartbeats, Bhaal's temple was utterly silent. Then, Zevlor heard a near-hysteric laugh, a breathless whoop of victory...

…not dissimilar to the cheers that ripple through the congregants in and around the private booth—the rest of Fane’s messmates have joined the impromptu party, perched on their scrum of wooden chairs. Lakrissa clinks tankards with Fane himself; hostilities temporarily tabled in the wake of a well-told story’s suitably violent climax…

Zevlor ignored all of it. The voices in the distance, the detritus at his feet; the ache in his leg, the stitch in his side. Instead, he scanned the dark for Tav's outline, expecting to find her propped up by one of her companions, or, perhaps, already limping towards him; his body, keyed with adrenaline, experienced a thrill entirely incongruous with his state and surroundings at the delirious vision of Tav's outburst of relief, of gratitude, of- 

He froze. Then, dropping the short-sword with a clatter, tripped forward as fast as he could over the slick stone towards the altar, bullying his eyes into showing him something else beside Tav's body—no, just Tav, she was more than a body—crumpled at its base.

She did not stir at Zevlor's approach, did not so much as twitch as he sank beside her, his knees brushing hers, warm blood seeping through his torn trousers legs and squelching over his bare arm as he scooped her limp torso onto his lap. Wiping his other hand pointlessly on the driest bit of robe he could feel, Zevlor smoothed the mass of tangled, tacky curls from Tav's face. Where it wasn't freckled with drying drops of crimson, her skin had turned an orchid white. And still, she did not move.

Without thought for witnesses or propriety or anything else at all—all thought seemed too dangerous to indulge—Zevlor let his thumb trace the base of one of Tav's short horns, then the subtle ridge of her cheekbone, the curve of her jaw, leaving a smear of dark red along her too-pale skin. His thumb found her lips, cracked and colourless as parchment, and slightly open ...

...then they pressed themselves together and parted, slick with blood spurted up from the sudden wracking cough. Zevlor hefted Tav higher, arm tightening underneath her as if holding her body together through its spasms. Her mouth moved again, weak and soundless. He was sure it was delirium to imagine her lips formed the shape of his name. Until her eyes fluttered open—unfocused and foggy, like a weak, winter sky—and she said it again.

“Zevlor.” It came out hoarse and thready; and somehow the wreckage of her vibrant voice struck Zevlor harder her broken body; which blurred as his eyes grew uncontrollably wet. “Zevlor,” she said again, more a hiccough this time. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. You … here … it's all my fault.”

Still struggling to reclaim his foothold on faith and that warm, golden surety that Tav would be alright, that she had to, Zevlor’s brain stuttered. He could not process what she was telling him or think of any words of his own to say. Blinking his eyes clear and ignoring the new wet stain sliding down his cheek, he stroked her hair back where it had fallen defiantly forward again, trying wordlessly to comfort her, and himself. But Tav was still pushing apologies and incoherent explanations out between weak coughs and gruelling gasps.

“Orin … watching me … saw us together, she … she knew … taking you would … that I couldn’t … I’m—”

Another excruciating shudder, and a rattling gasp. The force of it lifted Tav briefly off Zevlor's anchoring arm, before she slumped back, head rolling onto her chest. The hand still framing her face fumbled clumsily, angling it upwards to meet his eyes again. But hers had fallen closed. The only movement was the blood still trickling down her chin. 

In the weighted quiet that followed, Zevlor wasn't sure his own heart was still beating. Then came footsteps. A hand on his shoulder. Someone else saying his name.

“Zevlor... Tav... is she…”

“Of course not!” interrupted someone else, with shaky insouciance. “She’ll be fine, it’s Tav. Surely, we've got a potion or a scroll or - or something? Jaheira?”

A third, unfamiliar voice chimed in sombrely.

“I am no trained healer. And this … this, I’m afraid, would be beyond the skill of most.”

“Well… well, that’s just great, isn’t it? I knew we should have brought the other druid. Or Shadowheart. But no, no one ever listens to…”

“Astarion, now is not the time—”

Two voices overlapped, the third descanting in and out at intervals, until the argument reverberated through the hollow temple, and Zevlor’s own voice was barely a ripple in their rising tide.

“Tav.”

He said her name aloud. And it was not a prayer or a plea or a pointless exclamation. It was a declaration. A vow. An oath of devotion as binding as his signature in a holy book. He was alive, here, a paladin again because of Tav, for Tav. His power was inextricably linked to her, of that he was sure. And he could still feel it, the pulse of molten gold in his veins, waiting to be called forth, waiting for...

Fingers slipping from Tav’s face to her ruined midriff in a sticky rush, Zevlor pressed his palm to her cooling wound. He had never healed anything like it before ... but devotion was an instinct—he'd told Tav that, once—and he let it guide his hand. Power, perfect and purposeful, pooled under his skin and swam past his fingers, swallowing the congealed blood and torn flesh in brilliant white-gold light. It was a strain, like a muscle rarely used—Zevlor's temples began to throb after a few seconds, his arms trembling in a way they hadn't once when wielding a blade, but he never doubted he could do it. That he was meant to do it. Every horror he had survived, every twisting, turning path he had endured, had led him here, to this moment, when nothing short of divine aid, and a vessel to wield it, would do. The gods, or fate, or whatever watched over her, had always meant him to save Tav.

Zevlor closed his eyes. The elation of utter peace, of understanding one’s place in the world and that it was good after all, overwhelmed his senses. How long he knelt there with her, what her companions saw or thought, he never knew or cared. When at last the holy magic ebbed and he was aware of the world again, the only thing in it that mattered was the sealed, seamless skin under his hand and the bright cobalt eyes blinking up at him in disorientated surprise.

“I don’t know how I feel about this…”

Zevlor starts, then shifts his gaze from his audience to Alfira, a light ripple of guilt disrupting his placid lake of pride. He has almost forgotten she’s there, that this is supposed to be a private interview to establish Tav’s story, not a self-aggrandising tavern yarn.

“What do you mean?” he asks cautiously.

“When you say that everything was meant … that it was all the gods’ plans … you mean that every awful thing that happened to us, every tragedy, every death, that was all just supposed to happen? My teacher died on the road here, I lost friends in the Shadow-Cursed lands, not to speak of Avernus, and you’re saying the gods planned it all, all so you could get to Baldur’s Gate at just the right time to save Tav?”

Her voice is shaking by the end, like the quill pen still clutched in her hand. Its crumpled plume flutters against forgotten parchment, loud in the hush that falls on the booth in the bard’s outburst. Zevlor wets his lips.

“That’s not exactly what I mean,” he very carefully replies. “I was speaking specifically of my own journey, my own story. But… I suppose all our stories are intertwined. And the same horrors that may have served one purpose for me will have served another for others—even for you; ones, perhaps, you cannot see. It’s not an easy thing for us mortals to wrap our heads around,” he adds with a small sell-conscious chuff. “I would say that’s why the gods rarely reveal their plans.”

“But why do it at all?” It’s not quite an explosion, more an uncontrollable spill, like the head of hastily poured ale bubbling over the rim of a tankard. And Alfira continues: “Why can’t they just … just get us all where we needed to be another way? They’re gods! Why couldn’t they have just told you in a dream or a vision or something to go to Baldur’s Gate and save someone? If they’re so powerful and good, then why do we need all this horror and conflict and mess? Why does anyone have to die ?”

Zevlor does not speak right away. Nor does he drink. He knows this question is the most important Alfira has yet, or might ever, ask of him. And many answers existed. To a more religious person, he might explain that death is not the worst thing that can happen to a good soul, that there is peace in the realms that wait beyond. And to others more pragmatic, he might have pointed out that evil, too, plays its hands, that not all deaths are the divine impetus of the heavens, though they find ways to turn even the most heinous acts to the advantage of the good.

But the tiefling woman across the table from him, whose pained and pleading eyes looked in that moment painfully young, is not a cleric or a scholar. So, ignoring the audience waiting with bated breath, Zevlor says to her:

“My friend … you’re a bard . A composer, a storyteller. Didn’t you say about this very story: ‘It has it all … every angle’? And what is this world, this existence, but one great epic? Countless stories touching, connected into one." He lets a smile touch his lips briefly, and remarks in a jest not unkind, "What a most uninteresting story if would to tell be if everyone’s lives were easy all the time.”

Lakrissa is not wrong. The more of her peace offering Zevlor puts away, the lighter he finds his mood, and the swifter and easier his answers come. Alfira, too, is a world more cheerful, though she’s consumed little of her own pudding, too busy hastening in her new subject like a long-awaited guest.

“So, how did you get to the city? When did you get to the city? Before or after Tav? I mean, we left as soon as there was sunlight, same as she and the others did, but we made it to the Gate before them somehow. I never understood that.”

“Well, they were slower,” Zevlor explains between forkfuls of pudding. “There were more of them at that point. They had a great deal of equipment to carry. And they stopped to take out any regiments of cultists they met along the way.”

“But you weren’t with them?”

“No. I learned all that later. I left sometime after they did — joined a group of those unfortunates displaced by the cult’s attacks also heading for Baldur’s Gate. By the time I arrived, Tav and her party had already made quite a name for themselves.”

“Did you stay in the refugee camp in Rivington?”

But Alfira’s dubious tone convinces Zevlor she knows the answer.

“No,” he says with only the slightest wince. “I did not imagine a warm welcome waited for me there.”

He swallows the last mouthful of syrupy slice and reaches for his tankard. His hand is steadier now; the ale’s taste similarly improved. The complaints of his body quieted, Zevlor finds it possible to reflect on, rather than relive, that first day in Baldur's Gate: dragging himself, half-starved and wholly exhausted, through its southernmost district's overcrowded and inhospitable streets.

“In spite of everything,” he muses, “I couldn’t stand to sit idle. My only thought at the time was to make myself useful, somehow. But there was little I was fit to do. I had no trade experience, and I was in no state to join the border militia. There was the circus, of course, but” — he nods at Alfira’s notes - “I wasn’t sure who I might run into there. Still, I hadn't ruled it out. Then I spotted Ilmater’s temple.”

It was a poor replacement for the holy houses of Zevlor’s memory. The entire building, complete with single, modest bell tower, would have fit easily within one wing of Elturel’s High Hall. Tall, weedy purple flowers and presumptuous vines had overtaken its stone facade, toppled bricks huddled in piles just past its open entrance, and, once inside, odd pockets of sunlight cut through the reverent dim, courtesy of the roof’s missing slats. Zevlor, who had not felt properly warm since the heat he’d blithely cursed at the Emerald Grove, limped to one of these. The sound of his footsteps caught the attention of two temple attendants, seated at a table crowded with alchemical apparatus. They frowned at the sight of him.

“You’re too early for supper and too late for healing,” snapped one, some variety of elf. “Potions are doled out in the morning and soup’s distributed an hour before dusk until we run dry. First come, first served.”

All in all, an inauspicious introduction to the Crying God’s flock.

“Bill, please.” Wood scraped stone as the other robed attendant, a harassed-sounding dwarf, pushed back his chair and got to his feet, addressing Zevlor more politely: "Welcome to Ilmater's house, my friend. We are limited in our resources, but we’ll help however we can."

He cast a wary gaze up Zevlor, who supposed his own first impression left as much to be desired: hair unkempt, skin unwashed, his neglected armor filthy and rusting and hanging off him where hunger had eaten away any excess flesh. All that could be said for him was, in spite of his obvious infernal traits, he hardly looked a threat; except for the short sword tucked through his belt — Tav's, which Zevlor had refused to part with on the road for any sum of money no matter how hungry he'd become. He dropped his arms to his sides to obscure it, but it was not the weapon the dwarf wrinkled his brow at: it was Zevlor’s hands.

“Why, you're shaking fit to shatter, my friend. What ails you?”

A voice from behind him, high and quavery with age, spared Zevlor the trial of cobbling together an answer he did not have.

“Combat fatigue,” it sighed, and the halfling woman who matched it shuffled around Zevlor’s exhausted legs. She lifted her chin to look up at him and shook her head sadly, new lines erupting over her face’s well-established wrinkles. “All this bloody fighting, if you will excuse my language, spreads it like the plague, it does. Brother Clements, fetch some clean clothes from the spare box. Brother Bill, put the kettle on — a hot drink’s the thing. Do come through, sir, and we’ll see what the Broken God’s grace can do for you.”

“Little, as it turned out,” Zevlor sums up succinctly. “A health potion repaired the minor scrapes, and the drink did at least help me find my tongue enough to explain who I was, or had been. Whatever ailed my hands, however, was beyond the aid of magic or medicine. Sister Yannis could not heal the tremors. But she was kind enough to permit me a bunk in the temple infirmary in exchange for what labour I could provide.”

“You were lucky,” comments Alfira. “When we got here, the temple was refusing anyone any help at all. There had been a—”

“A murder, yes. The Sister explained. Apparently, it had done a number on the temple’s reputation. Even after it had been solved and services re-instated, Ilmater's regular followers were much slower to return than the refugees. The temple was overrun with demands for assistance. I believe that’s the main reason I was allowed to stay.”

Alfira cocks her head, a smile creeping up the side of her face like one of the temple's intrepid vines.

“And did the Sister tell you who solved the murder?”

“Of course.”

“That lovely horned lass,” explained the rector in her tremulous soprano, sliding a second bowl along the kitchen's scrubbed wood table after Zevlor’s hands had toppled the first. “You see her about regular in town, now, only I can’t remember the name. Tail like they’ve all got, though the horns were a bit smaller than most. Eyes were different too; very blue. Load of dark hair looked like it could eat the teeth off a comb. What was her name…”

Zevlor, navigating his spoon with a weak and wobbling fist, asked, “Might it have been Tav?” before gulping down what soup survived the shaky journey to his mouth. It tasted of potato, seasoned only by the name his tongue had not had an excuse to say for days.

A few of the wrinkles adorning Sister Yannis’ world-weary forehead unwound as she smiled.

“Oh, that’s the job! I expect you’ll know her, then?”

“Not all the tieflings in the Gate know each other, Sister, anymore than all the halflings or all the dwarves.” Brother Clements’ gentle admonishment drifted towards them as he sidled through a side door into the temple’s warm, sunlit kitchen. “That name’s appeared in every issue of the Mouth since she got here, and half the mouths in town, too. They say she and her camp are all that stand between us and that cult. They’ve set themselves up just beyond the hill. You’ll have seen her on your way in, I reckon?” the dwarf adds to Zevlor, tipping a bundle of clean, if well worn, robes the same dusty blue as his and the Sister’s onto the bench beside him, and avoiding Zevlor’s tail, which shivered in imitation of his hands as he replied ruefully:

“Something like that.”

“He wasn’t wrong, either. Tav’s local adventures made up most of the table-talk among the refugees who came for the temple’s daily meal. By the end of that first night, I’d heard at least a half-dozen fantastic rumours about what she and her companions had got up to in the tenday since they arrived: foiled a plot to blow up refugee children, discovered a ring of shape shifters, stopped a serial killer, killed a clown at the circus, who might also have been a shapeshifter or a cultist or both — accounts disagreed.”

Zevlor chuckles softly into his tankard, still held aloft — memories of struggling to transport similar pewter mugs and laden bowls to tables and benches inspiring a renewed appreciation for the reliable use of his hands.

“I wouldn’t have believed a word of it of anyone else,” he continued, “but it was Tav.”

But such paltry exploits of Tav’s are old news to Alfira. Her quillpen has ceased its frantic scratching and hovers, impatient, over her parchment.

“Right. So, when did you finally go see her?”

Zevlor raises his brows at the overeager bard.

“I didn’t.”

Not that the idea didn’t tempt him as, at long last, Zevlor eased himself onto his allotted infirmary bunk, horns tucked carefully around a stack of pillows and back giving glory to Ilmater for the blessing that was the lumpy goose-feather mattress beneath it. With such long-absent luxuries, sleep ought to have claimed him at once. But the knowledge Tav’s camp was less than a mile away, that he could reach it in minutes if he chose, fluttered in his chest like some trapped, winged insect he lacked the energy to squash flat.

Was she there now? What was she doing? Bedding down for the night herself, or refusing to rest, using the quiet hours to plan the downfall of cults and killers and false gods, instead? Zevlor closed his eyes, picturing Tav in the cast-off dress he’d seen so often at the grove, dark coils of hair loose and wild around her face as she bent her head to pore over notes by the light of a dying fire. And there, on the cusp of sleep, all the longing and regret the march to the Gate had held at bay welled up through the cracks in Zevlor’s resolve to keep himself, and the burden he'd become, from Tav. He envisioned scenarios, every bit as fantastic as the stories the refugees told: of wandering into her camp on some pretext — an apology for the way he had left? returning her sword, perhaps? — and her leaner face — or was she eating better now? — glancing up at him, the fire’s red embers illuminating her surprise and delight — or would it be disappointment and fury, at last? Had his unceremonious departure sealed the fate of their friendship, and whatever else it might have been, or could she still possibly want—

Only it did not matter what either of them wanted, Zevlor was cogent enough to remember the next day. The facts had not changed. He was no use to Tav, or her quest against the Absolute; nor was he worthy of her friendship, let alone anything else, anymore — truths driven repeatedly home with each successive dish and precious potion bottle his treacherous hands refused to hold.

Sister Yannis bore these almost hourly crashes with saintly understanding, but, by the end of his second day in Ilmater’s service, Zevlor had been relegated to less breakable, more menial tasks: he spent hours in the temple’s pitiful courtyards pulling up weeds and pulling down vines, washed an endless river of laundry, scrubbed tables and benches and swept and mopped floors twice daily soiled by an army of uncleaned hands and feet. And if any of it felt beneath him, Zevlor reminded himself of the bodies buried at Last Light. The humilities of domestic labour seemed a fitting penance, and the proper prison for his pride, and prevented him indulging further fantasies of Tav — at any rate, during the day.

Which meant he was entirely unprepared to enter the kitchen one late afternoon, a burlap sack of vegetables carefully hoisted in his arms, and hear her voice echoing up through the temple’s floor.

“… just hate to leave them there like that.”

“They’re dead! They don’t care!”

“Well, I care!”

Zevlor froze. The sack sagged in his arms. Unless he had gone abruptly mad — a possibility which could not be ruled out — he knew that voice, and the voice she argued with. And the third that interjected:

“We can always come back for them another day when we’ve got more time. Astarion’s right, it takes longer to prepare for an event like this than you might think, especially when you’ve been living rough for so long.”

“Thank you, gentlemen, I know exactly how long it takes to complete one’s toilette.”

The trap door set into the kitchen's floor banged open and Zevlor jumped, the sack tumbling from his slack arms with a series of squashy thuds. Potatoes and onions spilled from its burlap mouth and rolled across flagged stone. He barely noticed. He had eyes only for Tav: her wild, dark hair defying its plaits, pale tail swishing behind her as she hoisted herself from the ground, armor shining in the waning sunlight wafting through the kitchen windows as she clambered slowly to her feet, her face upturned to his, blue eyes impossibly wide…

“A day’s wage plus tips says she threw herself at you the second she saw you,” interrupts Lakrissa in a saccharine sing-song as she rips the privacy curtain aside and begins scooping up the pudding bowls.

Zevlor clicks his tongue in mock reproof.

“I’d take it easy on the wagers, Lakrissa. You’re on an unlucky streak, I’m afraid.”

Hands full of dishes, and calls for ale coming from the table behind her, Lakrissa can do no more than roll her eyes extravagantly and groan in disgust, “Ugh — you and Tav, honestly. Call me back you’ve got over yourselves, and we’re on to some proper action again,” before turning on her heel and flouncing away.

Alfira’s stretches out a colourful boot to kick the privacy curtain more fully closed — her only acknowledgement her partner was ever there — and asks, “You mean she wasn’t glad to see you?” in tones of such rapt attention, Zevlor isn’t sure whether or not to laugh. He sips his ale and waits for Lakrissa’s footsteps to fade back into the Elfsong’s ambient noise before admitting, “Well, not right away.”

“Odd, running into each other like this,” were Tav’s first words: cool and cutting in a way Zevlor had never heard directed at him, “considering how we parted last. You’ll remember that, of course.”

“Yes. Of-of course.”

Zevlor’s tongue tripped thickly over the words, his stomach plummeting as he made the shift from impossible dream to dreaded nightmare: Tav was here, before him, as he’d pictured more times than he liked to admit over the last few days, but her face was flat, her eyes dark and guarded as though curtains had been drawn behind cobalt stained glass. At her side, the pale elf, Astarion, let one hand drift to the hilt of a cruel-looking dagger, while behind them the Blade of Frontiers, arms occupied by a wrapped, bulky something wafting a fetid scent into the room, regarded Zevlor with undisguised consternation.

It hurt to look at them. Zevlor addressed his clumsy apology to the burlap sack at his feet instead.

“I … I am sorry for how we — how I left things. It was unconscionable of me to leave like that. I thought it for the best at the time, but…” He shook his head at the ground. “That’s no excuse. You deserved an explanation and a proper goodbye. You always gave one — but the once.” He chanced a glance at Tav. Her face might have been carved from wisteria marble. Cursing himself for the mess he was making of what should have been a simple admission of guilt, Zevlor fell back on the one feeble restitution he had: “I have your sword. I’ve kept it in … well, relatively good condition. I’ve meant to return it. I - I’ll get it for you.”

But he had not taken more than two cautious steps around the vegetable minefield when a wall of cool, unyielding mail hit his chest with enough force to knock him back against the kitchen table.

“Oh gods, it’s you. It is you. It’s really you,” Tav repeated in a voice as unsteady as Zevlor’s hands — currently trapped at his sides by her arms wrapped around him so tight he could feel every dip and groove of her armor. “I’m sorry, but I had to check. Gods, I was terrified … I thought she’d found you first,” and if her words meant nothing to Zevlor, the way she breathed them against his robe's high collar seemed to indicate she was not unhappy with him, which was all that mattered right now.

He had only seconds, however, to savour the relief of this realisation, and the warmth of Tav’s lips tantalisingly close to the skin of his throat, before she was pulling away, pelting him with rapid-fire questions as she anxiously inspected his face.

“But where did you go? I looked for you on the road and in the camps and couldn’t find anyone who’d seen you, I’ve been so worried. When did you get here?”

“Just a few days ago,” Zevlor managed to insert into her quick inhale before Tav was plunging on.

“And you've already joined the temple of Ilmater?”

“Not joined exactly, no. But the acting rector, Sister Yannis, has been kind enough to allow me to stay and help their order. They’re short-handed at present.”

“I suppose they would be after what happened. Oh, thank every god you weren’t here for all that!” Tav’s eyes darted towards the trapdoor, and a violent shudder rattled her armor. She touched Zevlor’s arm again as if reassuring herself he was still there, then drew a deep breath and continued, “But I’m glad the temple’s helping people again. I didn’t realise they’d been allowed.”

“Yes, well,” — the feel of her nails absently grazing his skin through the thin sleeve of his robe turned Zevlor’s head giddy and light — “I hear you’re to thank for that. Or, as the Sister put it, that lovely horned lass — I assumed you were who she meant.”

Tav laughed: an eruption of mirth far beyond what his weak, delirious flirtation deserved, and with a stale note threaded through it, that made Zevlor think it might have been some time since she'd last attempted the sound. He understood. He felt almost capable of smiling himself. For one sunlit moment, the past and every awful thing in it was a distant fever dream, dissipating in the light of Tav’s merry face beaming up at him and the bright, unbelievable joy of being together in Baldur’s Gate.

Then a door on the other side of the kitchen opened, and reality fell across them like a shadow.

“Ilmater’s patience, what’s happened? What’s all this?”

Alfira groans in abject disappointment and slumps back in her seat.

“It might have been worse,” Zevlor says, purposefully misinterpreting this display. “Nearly all the food was salvageable, and it was Brother Donnick who entered — he was the younger and more kindly of the temple’s two half-elves and, coincidentally, the one most fond of discussing Rivington’s resident heroes. So, he was thrilled to see Tav, and willing to forgive her any small sins such as distracting the temple’s kitchen hands before the supper rush. And, of course, when Tav discovered this , and the queue already lined up outside, and offered to stay and help,” — the over-invested bard makes a noise of approval and wriggles back up in her chair; Zevlor ignores this as well — “he was elated. Perhaps, the only one who was.”

Alfira’s excitement freezes on her face.

“Wait. You mean you weren’t?”

“Absolutely not. Saving peoples’ lives is one thing, but I draw the line at charitable good works.”

“Tav, you know I’d rather stay and help, but we really are pressed for time.”

“Then go,” was Tav’s answer to her companions’ protests, removing her fingerless gloves at them deliberately. “Drop Dribbles off at the circus on your way back to camp, then you can get started on whatever lengthy ablutions gentlemen need to prepare for posh events, and I’ll take my turn when I’m finished here.”

“Yes, that’s all very well for us, but what about you, Miss Nobody-Goes-Anywhere-Alone?”

“I’ll be fine,” Tav assured the petulant elf, throwing a glowing look at Zevlor. “I’m not alone.”

And Zevlor’s stomach roiled in delight and disquiet…

…which unlikely cocktail continued to ferment within him over the next few hours; prompting Brother Donnick to comment more than once on how ill he looked and wouldn’t he rather go have a quiet lie-down. Zevlor ought to have agreed; removed himself entirely from temptation. He did not think his will strong enough at present to resist further persuasions on Tav’s part to join her camp — the reason he assumed she had stayed — but nor could he bear to leave. His heart felt lighter, his hands steadier than they'd been since he arrived, at the familiar sight of her making the rounds through the refugees crowding the refectory, extending smiles and encouragements along with bowls of soup and mugs of mead. Better sense could not rip his eyes from her. Its only hope was time. By the stories told of her, and her companions’ complaints, it was obvious Tav had a world of more important things awaiting her attention. She surely could not put them off for long.

But the sunset peeking through the high, small windows and the gaps in the ceiling faded slowly to black, the soup ran out, and the sated refugees migrated from the temple in clumps and swathes, until only a handful of bodies lingered at tables nursing dregs of mead. And still Tav wandered among them, collecting dishes and carting them to the kitchen in careful stacks. It was on her way back from one of these trips she finally paused to catch Zevlor’s eyes. He dropped his at once to the rag he was running over an empty table, but he could already hear the telltale padding of her boots across the temple’s smooth stone. The table shifted under his hand as she leaned against it.

“You know, I must admit: this is not what I pictured you doing in Baldur’s Gate.”

Tav’s low murmur near his ear — and the thought of her picturing him doing anything at all — sent a frisson of pleasure singing down Zevlor’s spine. His tail strained against his robe, not made for tieflings, and the question was out of his mouth before he could think twice:

“What had you pictured?”

“Oh, I don’t know exactly.” Her nails tapped a thoughtful rhythm into the wood. “Combat training for the Watch, maybe? Knocking some order into the Flaming Fist? Or maybe I’m just not used to seeing you out of your armor.”

Her fingers stilled abruptly on the table, as if this last remark surprised even her. As Zevlor lifted his gaze, Tav swung hers over her shoulder, towards the pool at the temple’s centre. She spent a few seconds in presumed appreciation of its holy aesthetic before turning back, a flush the colour of thunderstorms still on her cheeks.

“Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s worthwhile work. I wish I had more time for things like this — actually helping people, not just killing things. I just wouldn’t have thought you” — she met Zevlor’s eyes — “would enjoy a … quiet, temple life.”

Zevlor let the rag he was passing mindlessly across the tabletop rest. He glanced around. Brother Donnick was still in the kitchen and Brother Bill hovering near the temple’s entrance, clearing his throat pointedly at the last refugee to remain seated. Zevlor lowered his voice, nevertheless.

“To be honest, of the Triad, the Crying God was never the one I gave the most obeisance. There are no paladins of Ilmater. His followers abide by a strictly passive creed: forgiveness and mercy to all, even the worst of criminals, the cruellest of enemies. Never tenents that sat well with me.”

“So, this isn’t what you originally intended to do when you got to the city, then?”

“None of this is what I intended,” Zevlor admitted. Tav’s tail perked up behind her. He grimaced — the pain of disappointing her a twisted knife in his gut — and finished, “But I believe it is the best place for me now.”

Tav opened her mouth to speak, paused, then closed it again. With the room lit only by scattered tallow candles and the moonlight spilling from the holes overhead, Zevlor could not interpret her expression, but her tail drooped sadly. Her eyes wandered to the next table over. A mug, several bowls and a few spoons lay scattered across it. A jerk of her head towards them and a perfunctory twitch of her lips at Zevlor evidenced Tav’s intention; then, she was walking away. As she approached the other table, she passed through a pool of moonlight, and Zevlor was viscerally reminded of their last night in the forest together: the tentative plans he had dreamed up when he had been a more worthy person; when the possibility of a new life, perhaps even better than the one he had lost, had seemed within his grasp.

Melancholy filled Zevlor's veins. He felt like a battered cask of soured wine as he returned to the table and the rag, abruptly aware of the renewed trembling of his fingers, the sting at the base of his tail where stiff cloth rubbed sensitive skin. He bent his aching back to wipe down the chairs, suppressing his grimace when he heard Tav's footsteps padding back.

“You know,” she said, her voice higher-pitched than usual in her effort to sound light and off-hand, “my offer’s still good. You’re always welcome to join our camp. If you prefer to remain a pacifist now, we’ve got plenty of this sort of work that needs doing, too. We’ve collected so many new people, we’re overrun with chores — I don’t know how you always kept your camp so organised. I could certainly use an expert.”

Zevlor did his best to imitate Tav’s teasing tone —“You wouldn't want the help of an old, unreliable traitor,” — but even he could hear the bitterness that leaked through.

“Not especially, no,” she replied, her own sangfroid cracking. “I was thinking more the help of an experienced leader and a paladin.”

“I am neither of those things anymore.”

“Fine, then. A friend.”

The rag slipped between Zevlor’s suddenly quaking fingers. He snatched for it, hit a leg of the table instead, and the stack of dishes Tav had perched there while she talked toppled to the floor. The resultant clatter resonated through the temple like sparring swords on shields. Wincing at the noise, the humiliation, the strain on his aching bones as he got to his knees, Zevlor reached for the mug, and nearly knocked horns with Tav who had also stooped to help clean up. By the time they were both upright and the dishes — blessedly unbroken — spirited safely off to the kitchen by an indignantly muttering Brother Bill, Zevlor’s face was a bonfire of shame and frustration, but his voice was stronger, his resolve more firm than either had been since Tav arrived.

“Even if my will could be trusted, my body could not,” he told her. “I can barely hold a pen anymore, let alone a bow or a sword. You need allies you can rely on, with skills that will further your cause. You deserve—”

But what Tav deserved died on Zevlor's lips as she grabbed one of his trembling hands in hers. She brought it close to her face, examining it like a piece of faulty weaponry; apparently, unable to feel his racing pulse.

“Doesn’t this place have a healer?” she asked.

“Yes,” Zevlor managed after a few false starts, “but it isn’t Ilmater’s will to heal this affliction. Or so says Sister Yannis.” Tav raised an eyebrow at him; it matched the ironic twist of Zevlor’s lips. “She recommends reducing stress and maintaining a restful state of mind.”

Tav snorted biting laughter from her nose like dragonfire.

“Well, good thing the world’s not ending all around us, then.”

She dropped his hand but held his gaze; hers melting from sarcastic to thoughtful as she inspected Zevlor's face. He averted his eyes from her familiar intent, almost reverent stare; he would not let it derail him. At last, he heard her exhale — a slow, resigned sigh — and say more softly, “Zevlor, I’m not a healer, but … this last year … everything you’ve been through … I really do think it would be more concerning if you weren’t showing some signs of strain. You’ve endured enough to drive a lesser person mad. Maybe staying out of the fray for a bit isn’t such a bad idea. Maybe this is the right place for you. For now.”

Zevlor blinked, unseated. He had steeled himself for a verbal spar — more of Tav’s infuriatingly reasonable persuasions or inarguable rhetoric, not a meek concession. And certainly not for what she threw at him next:

"But, you wouldn't happen to know anything useful about fighting vampires?”

“Vampires,” Zevlor repeated, positive he had misheard, but—

“Vampires,” Tav confirmed. “I’m planning a … well, a siege, I suppose, or an invasion, of a vampire lord’s lair. You mentioned Elturel’s history with them in passing once. I know it was before your time, but I thought you might have some ideas for me. Something that could help me plan.”

Zevlor’s brain was slow to adjust to this new, entirely unforeseen track.

“What do vampires have to do with the Cult of the Absolute?” he asked.

Tav’s smile was small, but no less triumphant for it.

“That's a story best told over a drink.”

“Before you ask,” Zevlor interjects into his own reminiscence, “the drink was tea and the talk was purely business, with Brother Donnick as audience and chaperone. So, that’s all it was.”

“Oh for…” Alfira’s exclamation trails into an indignant huff. She grabs her tankard, swigs down ale, and stops just short of slamming it back to the table; then decides: “Lakrissa’s not far wrong about you two. I never imagined it took this long! And, for the record,” she adds with uncharacteristic venom, “I think you were being incredibly stupid. There was absolutely no good reason for you not to go with Tav. It was pure stubbornness.”

Zevlor regards his own dwindling ale supply with a sort of sheepish gloom.

“I won’t argue,” he says. “But I will warn you: that’s going to get worse before it gets any better.”

Alfira’s ochre eyes narrow.

“What is ‘worse’?”

The very question that kept Zevlor from sleep after Tav had finally left, with the ominous promise to him and a delighted Brother Donnick to return and help with the temple’s supper again the next chance she had. And what was worse: to see her, or not to see her? To tease his resolve with more encounters like this, or cut himself off from Tav completely?

Zevlor lifted his neck, snaked a hand behind his horns to unfasten his hair, then let his head fall back against the stacked pillows, and ran his calloused fingers across the fraying edges of the small, embroidered band. Tav’s — which, like her sword, she had given him without hesitation and had never asked him to return. It was her signature, her greatest gift and her fatal flaw, and what he loved most about her, he decided there in the honest dark: the way she gave of herself unreservedly to every lost and pointless cause. He clenched an impotent fist around her band. What wouldn’t he give to have anything to give her... But he was less than useless to Tav now. And which was crueller: to let himself drain even more of her time and resources and affection knowing he had absolutely nothing worthwhile to offer her in return, or end the companionship Tav clearly hoped to rekindle in one quick, if painful, stroke…

The night passed fitful and fruitless, and Zevlor still had no answer by the time he dragged himself from his bunk. But with a bit of luck, he decided as he slogged sleepily through the day’s chores, he would not have to choose anytime soon. Yesterday had surely been a once-off. Tav had the demands of a whole city on her shoulders. Whatever she promised, she couldn’t possibly carve out hours of her time to volunteer at Ilmater’s temple every day.

Had he been less exhausted, Zevlor might have remembered the goddess of luck had rarely been on his side.

The kitchen door swung open. The clatter and chatter of a supper in full swing drifted in from the refectory, then faded as the door was closed, replaced by the clicking of unfamiliar shoes. Zevlor took a moment to finish his painstaking ladling of soup into bowls before looking up — and was very glad he’d done so in that order. The spasm of white-hot shock, excitement, consternation, and pure, primal arousal that rattled from the base of his horns to the tip of his trapped tail would have capsized the entire laden tray.

Tav was almost unrecognisable. Almost. Beneath the upswept knot of sleek, raven hair and the colourful paints shading her lips and cheeks were cobalt eyes Zevlor would know anywhere; and parting the heavy length of embroidered purple velvet clinging to her frame were the bare, wisteria legs he had seen once before and would never forget. She swept past him on silver sandals whose ties crawled up her calves, unfastened a small reticule of matching embroidery from her skirt and deposited it on the kitchen’s scrubbed wood table, then turned and met Zevlor’s eyes. For one second of extraordinary hubris, he wondered if he was the reason for this glamorous transformation. But—

“Bloody Gortash’s coronation,” Tav grumbled as she slid the tray of bowls from under Zevlor’s shaking hands and marched for the door again in a cloud of heady perfume.

The full tale, however, had to wait until supper was finished and Tav settled in the kitchen helping Zevlor take his turn at the washing up. He did his very best to listen as she spoke. But even with the washbasin, then the table piled with dishes to be dried, kept safely between them, the sight of Tav’s bare legs — close enough he could make out the delicate pattern of infernal ridges decorating her knees and the exposed jut of her hips — had unlinked some important chain in Zevlor’s brain. His dilemma of the day was a distant, foreign land; Tav’s words, too, reached his ears as if from far away. By the end of her story, the only bits he had retained were that she and a few of her companions had attended the coronation of Baldur’s Gate’s first Archduke, and that among the man’s many, many hidden crimes was landing Karlach — Tav’s other tiefling friend — in Avernus.

“It took Wyll and I both to hold her back,” Tav concluded. “Literally. We took an arm each and dragged her out. And you’ve seen her — even in sensible shoes, that’s no easy task. I felt bad, but, honestly, there was no chance of us winning a fight. We’d no weapons, there were at least two of those Steel Watch monsters in the room, plus more at the exits. Not to mention the regular guard and a whole crowd of civilians.”

She added another bowl to her clean, dried stack and paused for Zevlor’s verdict.

“That’s good,” he murmured vaguely, eyes still on Tav’s lips — he did not know the name of the deep shade of red they were painted, but had grown to appreciate it over the last hour, nonetheless. Then her silence, and the words proceeding it, caught up to him. He cleared his throat roughly and corrected, “Good of you to keep her from causing an incident.”

“Well, I suppose that’s one upside to all this.” Tav gestured down her dress with the drying rag, drops of water marring the deep, plum velvet. “I don’t know that we could have kept her punching his smug face in if she weren’t ‘trussed up in a posh straitjacket’ as she put it.”

Her chirp of laughter did intriguing things to the bodice of her gown as she scooped up the stack of bowls and carried them across the kitchen to the open cupboard. Zevlor paused in drying a tin spoon to watch her walk away. His eyes wandered instinctively south of her swaying tail before darting back up, a rogue thought occurring.

“You must have had this commissioned,” he said out loud. “The dress.”

“What?” Tav stopped, bowls balanced in her arms, and glanced down, as if to check what she was wearing. “No, it’s ready-to-wear. Astarion picked it all out from a shop in town and did everyone’s alterations. Except the fitting for my tail. I did that myself. I’m getting rather good.” She gave a little proud half-twirl, demonstrating her tail’s range of motion — and introducing Zevlor to the backs of her thighs — then returned to the cupboard. “Mind you,” she said over her shoulder, “it cost nearly as much as bespoke, all told. Cleaned us out of almost half of everything I’ve saved.”

The silver laces of her sandals clung to her calves as Tav stretched to push bowls onto the topmost shelf. Zevlor’s fingers itched with envy. Something gave beneath them, and he looked down to find the tin spoon in his hand slightly bent. He set it aside in bemusement, picked up another and kept his eyes fixed firmly upon it as he remarked wryly, “I had no idea being a hero paid so well.”

“Better than you might think.” There was a hint of a smile in Tav’s voice. “But most of our current good fortune comes courtesy of one Arfur of Rivington. He graciously donated his entire estate, including his not insignificant coffers, to our cause soon after we arrived. I’m actually thinking of setting his house up as a sort of inn for refugees with families, get some of the children out of the tents before the cold comes. If I ever have a few days to work up a proper plan. In the meantime” — Zevlor heard more of the swish of her skirts and the click of her sandals heralding her return than he did of Tav’s words —“I like to think we’ve put his gold to better use, new clothes notwithstanding. Although…”

Her sudden hush ought to have been his first warning, but there was a fog around Zevlor’s mind. The only thing it felt currently worthy of note was that Tav’s body waited somewhere close behind him. It urged his eyes to find her. He fought them. Then the sound of her shoes resumed.

“I don’t know that you can really put a price on clothes that fit properly,” Tav continued, and the strange undercurrent to her casual prattle was Zevlor’s second unheeded sign. “It’s more a necessity than a luxury, especially for tieflings. Wouldn’t you say?”

“Of course,” he agreed absently, unwittingly sealing his fate.

“Good. Glad that’s settled then.”

Reason told Zevlor there was something strange about this response. But reason had been demoted to his brain’s reserve ranks; its frontline focused solely on following Tav's movements without looking up. She stood beside him now. He could smell the clean scent of her hair underneath the perfume, feel the soft velvet of her dress brush his arm as she reached for something on the table’s far side. Unidentifiable rattles and clinks won his eyes. He glanced at her hands. She was rifling through her embroidered reticule, producing a series of random objects: a miniature pair of scissors, a minute spool of purple thread, a folded patch of leather with what looked like two silver needles stuck through. And even were his mental faculties at full strength, it might still have taken Zevlor, untrained in any tailoring arts, a minute to interpret their purpose. As things stood, he was lost.

“Turn around,” Tav instructed.

Zevlor’s bewildered gaze climbed to her face. Cobalt excitement twinkled in her eyes, and triumph twitched playfully across her deep-red and enticing lips.

“Go on. Turn.” She illustrated the motion with a finger in case he’d forgotten how. “It won’t take long.”

“What won’t take long?” Zevlor croaked even as he shuffled obediently in place — his throat was strangely dry, his heart pounding; his body aware of what was about to happen before his brain could put it into words.

“Just a necessity.”

A split second of breathless anticipation passed. Then Tav’s shoes clicked forward once, her skirts swished as she sank to her knees, and Zevlor understood her intention at the same time he felt her warm hand just above the base of his tail…

“She didn’t!”

“She did.”

“But … she had to know what she was doing? She has a tail! She knows what that feels like!”

“Well, you must remember, Tav hadn’t known many tieflings. Knowledge you and I think of as implicit was still largely foreign to her then. She didn’t realise that can feel so...”

Stimulating. Agonising. An impossible marriage of bliss and torture. Tav’s fingers were quick, purposeful, careful not to linger as she measured out the hole she planned to cut. But Zevlor could not remember the last time such sensitive parts of him had been so gently touched. It was going to break him.

“Tav…” His voice was just shy of an open groan, his eyes on the verge of rolling back. “This is … this isn’t—”

“Zevlor, please.” And his name in Tav’s pleading voice made his already pressing problem impossibly harder. “You can’t keep this up. I could see it yesterday. It’s agony having your tail trapped like this, I know, and certainly not conducive to a restful mental state. And, really, it won’t take long at all, I swear. Like I said, I’m quite good at it now.”

No doubt Tav meant her dulcet babble to distract him from what she read as discomfort. She kept up a steady stream of it over minutes that dragged on like years, but her words might have been a different language for all Zevlor understood of them.

Fire blazed in his blood and pooled in his core; and when she parted the split fabric to let his tail spring through and her bare hand brushed his exposed skin, he was positive it would burn him both alive. How Tav did not feel it was beyond him. She was already stitching fabric back together beneath his tail, neglecting the placement of her hands in her haste, and even through a layer of starched cloth, ripples of molten pleasure coursed through him at every accidental touch. Zevlor gritted his sharp teeth against it. He tasted blood on his tongue. He let the pain ground him. He squeezed his eyes shut and sent up a slew of silent prayers to every god he’d ever known: Torm for strength, Tyr for courage, Ilmater for forbearance…

The rest of the ordeal passed in a blur. Afterwards, Zevlor wasn’t sure how he survived it; or how it had ended exactly, except that it definitely wasn’t how his imagination wanted: on his knees at Tav’s silver-lined feet, lips worshipping the flawless skin of her legs between entreaties for her to touch every other unworthy part of him, to fix everything else in his body that ached. Instead, he had a hazy impression of Tav’s satisfied smile, fading as she peered into his face, asking him if he felt ill. He thought he might have agreed. He hoped he’d said something in the way of thanks or at least farewell before fleeing, but couldn’t be sure. His next clear memory came as he lay, panting and spent, above blankets, his newly altered robes sticky and stained and his horns caught in the posts of his bunk, mortified at his lack of control and hoping against all hope Tav had left the temple before he’d cried her name.

It was another long night of wretched introspection. By the end of it, Zevlor’s body and soul felt as wrecked as if he’d done pitched battle. And looked it, too, if Sister Yannis’ reaction when he reported to the refectory for morning chores was an accurate mirror. Her wrinkled face erupted into worried lines. She had him crouch where she could feel his forehead, declared him fevered, and sent him straight back to the infirmary to rest — which suited Zevlor fine.

Because he knew his mission, now; and knew he was too weak to execute it without resorting to low tactics. But any soldier who thought warfare always honourable had never truly fought for their lives or the lives of those they loved. And Zevlor refused to let Tav waste any more of hers on him, whatever it cost him, whatever it took...

...be it a fever, or a pretense of one, that lasted that day into the next, and a request of Sister Yannis to inform any guests who might ask after him he was not to be disturbed; then, when he could not lie still a day longer, a strategic retreat outdoors, where he spent all waking hours — including the supper ones — at groundskeeping and where he had could watch Rivington's main road, and hide himself away again whenever he spied any dark-haired, blue-eyed tieflings headed the temple's way.

It pained him — a slow, sharp, nauseating throb, like a stab to the gut, and one that did not heal even as the days passed and Zevlor’s sightings of Tav became infrequent, then stopped altogether. Anxiety only built in the absence of these fleeting glimpses, like infection over an untreated wound. It was Brother Dannis, who followed accounts of Tav and her companions almost as religiously as the god he served, who eventually explained: Rivington’s resident heroes had moved house. Though they’d left some behind to maintain their camp, Tav and most of her companions had secured rooms in the lower city where the work was largely based place. And while this knowledge eased some of Zevlor’s worry after Tav’s wellbeing, it brought him no real peace. He wondered bleakly if anything ever would; if time would teach him to accept this tense, joyless, but necessary existence with better grace.

It did not. But it did bring, a tenday later, the 101st issue of the Baldur’s Mouth Gazette.

“I remember that!” gasps Alfira, clapping a hand to her face — the first time her quill has stilled in full minutes. “I couldn’t believe it when I read it! I mean quite literally, I didn’t believe one word, but it was awful all the same. I thought she must have pissed off Estra Stir, or—”

“Enver Gortash,” Zevlor growls. “Retaliation for destroying his Steel Watch.”

“Ohh…” Comprehension blooms in Alfira’s voice. “I never put those two together … but that makes sense! Everyone just - just turned on her. Alan couldn’t even let her in the Elfsong that day, afraid of what it would do for business. She had to leave her friends and go back to their camp in Rivington. All of it sort of died away on its own after that final fight, but it was scary there for a while. I remember I was so upset people would think those things about her after all she'd done!”

Zevlor considers the beginning of that most pivotal day in his head: Brother Donnick, who’d hero-worshipped Tav for so long, quoting the article incessantly at him until he’d lost the run of himself and punched the half-elf in the jaw.

“So was I.”

He was exiled to groundswork again after that. Hardly a punishment — Zevlor was glad for an excuse to vent some of his righteous anger at something, even if it was only the temple’s tenacious vines.

The baseless accusations, the outright lies, the unfair and unexpected turning of an entire populace on those who had saved them… the parallels with Elturel disturbed him. And the thought of Tav out there, somewhere in the city, enduring the same injustices he had suffered shook Zevlor to his core. He tore bare-handed at the brambles climbing the idol of Ilmater guarding the temple’s front, hardly aware of their prickling thorns; hardly aware of anything — the dip of the sun into shadow, the evening breeze rippling the back of his hair, the slurry of footsteps and shouting from the street below him — until he heard a familiar whistle of air.

Zevlor ducked without thinking. Tall weeds and torn brambles hit his face. He disregarded them, his senses strained for signs of further projectiles. But all that came was a sickening splat, followed by a swell of hateful laughter. He pushed to his feet, hackles raised, and searched the buildings opposite, then the street below for evidence of attack…

…and found a nightmare come to life: Tav — slumped in the dirt at the centre of a jeering mob, one hand pressed to the side of her head, a river of bright red running through her fingers.

Panic wiped all thought from Zevlor’s mind. He was a creature of action and instinct. He leapt the temple railing, landed on his feet, and was running flat out down the road in the space of seconds, knocking gawkers and catcallers from his path. A strain in his throat, and the turn of startled heads, told him he was yelling, but whether it was words or a simple roar of rage he did not stop to discover. His unrestrained tail whipped shrieking faces and evaded grabbing hands as he pushed and shoved his way to the centre of the crowd.

Tav was still on the ground. She had struggled to her knees, but froze at the sight of Zevlor. A sign her wound would likely keep until they reached safety, he recognised, even if the red oozing down her cheek and into her gaping mouth made his stomach cramp. He forced it down. There would be time to assess the damage later. The next step was getting Tav away from danger.

He crouched at her side.

“Can you walk?” he asked, and, at her nod, threaded an arm under hers and slid her weight onto his shoulder to hoist her to her feet.

“And there’s another one!” called a harsh voice over the rabble's raucous din. “All these bleedin’ foulbloods, that’s where it all comes from! The Archduke should have ‘em—”

“Enough!” Zevlor’s bark was the sort to call down silence on a trained brigade. It stopped the grey-haired human mid-word, and cast an uneasy hush over his audience’s cheers. Faces flicked from curling horns to fiery pupils engulfed in infernal black sclera, and, for once, Zevlor was glad to watch their eyes all shift nervously away. “You should be ashamed of yourselves!" he snarled at them, letting his tail lash threateningly behind him for good measure. “Every person in this damned city owes this woman their lives. Now, get out of the way!”

He took one, unassailable step forward, and the mob all around broke ranks. His slower trek back up the road towards the temple, half-dragging, half-supporting Tav, went uncontested — by any of the hastily retreating bystanders. Tav herself maintained a litany of murmured protests all the time Zevlor limped her up the stone steps and into the refectory’s sheltered shade. He ignored her: easy enough to do while they walked. On reaching the infirmary and transferring Tav into the nearest wooden chair, however, she twisted in his arms and gripped his face in both hands, demanding his eyes.

“Zevlor.” She said his name like a reveille: loud and distinct. “Zevlor, I’m not hurt. I’m fine. Look,” and released one hand to run a finger through the red stain clotting on her cheek, then popped it into her mouth before announcing: “Tomato.”

In the quiet that echoed after the word, Zevlor realised he was panting. Hard. He inhaled, trying to force his lungs to accept air and his brain this new, important fact. Blood still pumping in his ears, he scanned Tav for other injuries they might both have missed and found only dirty scuffs on the knees of her armor and what was clearly, now he was looking properly, seedy pulp dripping down her neck.

She brushed a blob of this to the threadbare rug and prompted, “You could still fetch me a towel?”

A concrete task. Zevlor’s brain re-engaged, and he set off for a familiar cupboard, returning with two of the infirmary’s least ragged many-purpose cloths. Rather than placing them in Tav’s outstretched hand, however, he dragged another of the fireside chairs closer to her, sat, and, adrenaline still animating his limbs, mopped the mess from her shoulder himself. He caught the subtle widening of her eyes, but kept his own on her sticky armour; then the stained skin of her throat as his cloth climbed.

After a few laden seconds in which he could hear only his heartbeat, Tav ventured cautiously, “Are… are you alright?”

This question had far too many layers for Zevlor to consider them all right now. He opened his mouth, unsure what he was going to say. What came out was a gruff accusation.

“I thought you weren’t supposed to be going anywhere alone?”

Tav’s face crinkled, tomato juice diverting into laugh lines, as she chuffed mirthlessly.

“I appreciate your concern, but that danger has mostly passed. Orin’s gone underground since we ended the murder tribunal — there’s been no signs of assassins or shapeshifters for days. And now Gortash’s toy soldiers are broken, the streets are relatively safe.”

“And the angry mobs?”

“Have tomatoes.” When this failed to ease any of Zevlor's pinched grimace, she sighed. “And they're nothing I can't deal with. Actually, I’m an old hand at this part — the name-calling and fruit-flinging and the torches-and-pitchfork brigade. It happens everywhere I go. I’m used to it by now. It really doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters!” Zevlor snapped, throwing down the sodden, red-stained rag. It took a supreme effort of will to rein in his simmering anger — but he could hardly take out on Tav fury he felt on her behalf. His nostrils flared as he drew in a deep breath, then repeated, “It matters,” with more restraint, “because it's wrong. You've done nothing to deserve this.” He began pulling slimes of tomato peel from Tav’s tangle of gathered hair, flinging them to the floor with disgust. “Not one of those people would be alive if it weren’t for you. For them to treat you like that is beyond shameful. And none of that mindless rabble would have dared face you on their own. Cowards, every one!

“What?” he interrupted himself, his hand stilling against Tav’s ear, as a smile — a genuine smile — glowed across her face.

“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head — very slightly so as not to dislodge his hand. “It’s just…” She raised one of her own and laid it tentatively on his. “Your hands. They’re quite steady now,” she explained.

It took a moment for Zevlor to understand, then to understand Tav was right. His eyes flicked from her smile to his hand. There was the knot of veins he knew well, the callouses and thorn-pricks to be expected, the long nails that needed cutting, dirt ground underneath. But it was so still and secure in itself, it might have belonged to someone else. And with Tav’s pale, stained fingers resting lightly atop it, Zevlor thought of the man’s it might have been: the one who had not failed his people, had not let them die, but led them here; who had crafted a life in Baldur’s Gate he could have been proud of; who had something to share with the woman holding her breath before him, waiting on him to speak.

Zevlor wet his lips, but no words came. Whatever temporary reprieve adrenaline may have allowed his better sense — and, apparently, his tremors — nothing of substance had changed. He still had nothing to offer Tav. And it would be an injustice worse than one tomato to let either of them forget it.

He slid his hand from under hers, all his righteous rage deflating. And with it, any idea of what to say next. Yet even from this, Tav rescued him. Her chair whispered across the rug as she stood and pushed it back.

“I should … get going,” she said, sounding suddenly terribly weary. “Thank you for your help. It was … I…”

She trailed away, abandoning the thought in favour of a last look at Zevlor, eyes full of some deep cobalt emotion he could not translate. Then, she turned for the infirmary door. But the thought of her traversing Rivington’s hostile streets, alone and distracted by exhaustion, was too much for Zevlor to bear. And it occurred to him in a last, purposeful surge, he did, in fact, have one thing to offer her the rest of Baldur’s Gate currently would not.

“Wait,” he called, rising from his chair and ignoring the chiding of his better sense. “Let me walk you to your camp. You’ll need someone watching your back.”

It was a short, uneventful, uncommunicative journey. Zevlor led Tav out one of the temple’s side-doors, through the iron gates into the adjacent grounds co-opted by the Circus of the Last Days, then along Rivington's fringes and into its low foothills where Tav and her companions had re-appropriated a ruined farm for their base camp. Lights flickered between the boarded windows of the few derelict buildings, and the fence showed signs of recent repair, but Zevlor still recognised the tops of colourful scrap-fabric tents spread across the low-cut grass. He thought of the last time he’d seen them with a wistful pang.

“I’d ask you to stay a bit,” said Tav, speaking for the first time since they’d left the temple. “Eat with us or something, but ... I assume you have things to attend to. You’ve been so busy lately. You never have time to see me when I stop by.”

It was a statement of fact, but she put it to him like a question, a plea to understand. And Zevlor found he, too, was desperate for a cleaner air between them. He turned to face her fully.

“Why do you come to the temple?” he asked.

“To see you,” she admitted, unabashed.

“What are you hoping to see?”

This question seemed to stymy Tav. She cocked her head, regarding Zevlor in confusion for a moment. Then said simply, “You. Just … you. I like seeing you.” And, when this answer furrowed Zevlor's brow, burst with unexpected passion: “Zevlor, I like you! How is that not obvious?! I like talking with you, being with you! Getting to see you is what I look forward to the most about every day!”

Tav’s face contorted, her tail twisting in knots behind her, in earnest entreaty for Zevlor to understand.

“You make me think and make me laugh and - and hope and make me feel better about everything that’s happening, all of this… mess.” She waved her hands frantically at the world around them. “Every single day is harder than the last one right now, and I’m trying very hard to put a brave face on it for everyone else and not complain, but, honestly, sometimes I feel I might drown in all the things, all the people, I’m responsible for. And at the end of the day, just seeing you, even just for a minute … it makes me feel like I can take whatever fate throws at me next.”

Her storm of vehemence abated as abruptly as it had begun. Tav’s arms collapsed, her tail fell limply to her ankles. She took a shaky breath, teeth worrying at the corner of her lip, before saying, more softly, “But the last thing I want to do is make you uncomfortable or … or bother you. If you don’t want me to come by the temple anymore, I’ll stop. Only… wasn’t I supposed to look you up when I got here?” she added with self-conscious humour, wrapping her arms around herself, presumably to stave off the cool evening breeze. "Didn't ... didn’t you say I had family at the Gate?”

“That was … before.” Zevlor shook his head, less in any disagreement than in sheer wonder at the confession his brain was still struggling to absorb. “I had planned … mrag, I don’t know what I planned,” he groaned explosively, running both hands over his face. It burned, like his wounded pride. But Tav's raw honesty had unlocked his. He spoke, fast and thoughtless, into his hands. "Before meeting you, I don’t think my plans ever made it as far as Baldur’s Gate. I had hopes for the others, but none for myself. All that mattered was getting them here. And then… you….” He looked up as he said it: even sticky and red-stained and smelling strongly of tomato, Tav was still every bit the picture of divine aid she had been when he’d first seen her, perhaps even more so now. “You appeared. You saved us all. You saved me. And for the first time, I truly believed I might make it here and accomplish something worthwhile. Perhaps even have something to offer you when you arrived. But nothing has gone the way I wanted. I have less than before. I am less now. I’m not just oathbroken and exiled, I’m a traitor” — he spat the word from his mouth like a curse, voice rising — “who led my own people to their deaths! They would revile you for associating with me. I have nothing for you! I—”

“But I don’t need anything from you!" And Tav’s in contrast was little more than a fragile whisper, poured directly from her lips onto Zevlor's as she closed the space between them, her fingers inching delicately up his clenched jaw. “I don't need you to give me anything! The only thing I ever wanted from you was you. I didn’t love you on potential or because of what I thought you might accomplish or become, I fell in love with you exactly as you were when I met you. As you are right now.”

From somewhere around them, distantly familiar voices called, but Zevlor could not guess at directions or names.

“Why?”

The word left him in a weightless murmur. Tav would not have heard it, nor Zevlor her response — “So many reasons,” — were her mouth not already pressed to his. He felt her thumbs stroking the ridges of his cheeks, but nothing else. Which did not concern him unduly. This was surely a dream. Tav’s words, her love, -  gentle, un-demanding kiss, did not belong to the hell that was this world, but some heaven Zevlor no longer deserved. And if it was a dream, there was no harm in enjoying it. He could let his own lips reply. He could revel in the taste of her: clean and refreshing as cool water, with a hint of tomato that did not matter; like it did not matter that it had been so long since he had done this, he’d almost forgotten how; or that there were footsteps perilously close by and a voice he knew calling Tav’s name—

“Tav, is that — oh!”

Then her lips were gone, replaced by cold, empty air. Zevlor blinked, his eyes adjusting to a dark that felt blinding to his bleary eyes.

“Just-just a minute, Wyll. I’ll be there in-in just a minute,” came Tav’s breathless voice, and a succession of noises — murmured voices, a stifled laugh, a thwack of a hand hitting leather, a yelp, footsteps tromping swiftly away through grass — punctured the dream-like bubble cushioning Zevlor’s mind…

…and he was panting, inches from Tav as they stood huddled together at the entrance to her camp, three figures retreating back inside its fence; one, the Blade of Frontiers, threw Zevlor what looked like an apologetic grin before shutting the gate behind him with a click. A quick assessment of the last minutes informed Zevlor he had, in fact, kissed Tav, or let her kiss him, and it had been interrupted by what looked like half her camp. Before fear or reason or better sense or mortification or anything else could take hold of him, however, Tav was there to save him from them all.

“Look,” she murmured, speaking into Zevlor's face again, if not quite as intimately close as before, “this isn’t exactly how I hoped things would be in Baldur’s Gate either, but… they won’t be this way forever, will they? I mean, the world can’t be ending forever. Things will get better. We'll get better. And we don’t have to make any important decisions now. We can take things slow. We have plenty of time.”

Her words vibrated with the same nerve-soothing, spirit-bolstering note Zevlor remembered from so many occasions. As always, it ignited hope. And, abandoning his reason, he clung to it. Reason might lead him astray, he decided, but Tav would not.

“Meanwhile..." Tav's eyes, the only light in the darkness, fluttered to his lips again as she asked, “May I keep coming by the temple? To see you?” and Zevlor's own low voice rang with surprising conviction as he promised her, “Anything you want.”

The return journey — or what little of it Zevlor accomplished — went by in a daze. His body felt buoyant, unburdened. His back and knees barely existed at all, let alone offered any complaint. The pinprick lights of the city in the distance guided his feet to Rivington’s main road, and he had just stepped onto it, amused at the spring in his own step, when a voice drifted towards him from behind; very like Tav’s, only —

“Oh, and Zevlor? One last thing…”

— only there was something indefinably off about it. And about the cobalt eyes that glittered at Zevlor as he swivelled round. And the wisteria face that possessed all of Tav’s exact features, except he had never seen Tav wear that sort of sharp, smug, self-possessed smile…

“So, you knew who it was right away?”

“Well, obviously I didn't. I only knew it wasn't Tav. Who — or what, I suppose — she really was I didn't know until it was too late.”