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Though Shadowheart tries to use the Spear of Night for stability—as though it were the holiest of walking sticks—her hand keeps slipping. She descends through Lady Shar’s dreamlike dimension alongside a motley trio, all vaulting from meteor to jagged rock, heralded by echoes of Justiciars past that offer conflicting suggestions of encouragement, blasphemy…murder.
“I have emptied my heart of falsehoods,” she whispers, though her heart flutters with sacrilegious nerves. “I have vanquished your foes. Your will be done, sure as night will fall.”
A mutter comes from the hulking elf druid on her right. “Like a child repeating only what it was told, never questioning what it’s given.”
Heat floods her face—but she must not profane in this hallowed arena.
Hers had been holy words. Long-practiced tenets of faith, not some mindless recitation. He is not a holy man; he, who dallies in the bodies of beasts and claims to obey only the twist of leaves in the wind, could not possibly understand the Lady’s designs. After all, even her most devoted followers—those whose faith is far stronger than a bear-man’s sylvan meanderings—have forsaken any nonsense notion of understanding a goddess’s mind.
Nature is cruel. Those that nature abandons turn to dirt and dust. Lady Shar does not abandon; she protects, nurtures, embraces. She plucks the lost from the frightful woodlands and reconstitutes them, turns the dark from nightmare to everlasting womb. Only fallible humanoids would abandon a goddess. Only idiots would mock one in her own sanctuary.
But he stands so sure, the herald of a circle of living beings, his eyes leveled toward the task at hand. No doubt. No concern for piety or mercy. So should she be. As they pass yet another skeleton, the leavings of an unworthy aspirant, Shadowheart casts pity upon it. Whomever had once used these ribcages to house breath that produces prayers—they had not had enough grit. Enough faith. But she surely will.
The undertow in the pit of her stomach riles.
She licks her lips as they take turns leaping toward the final grand rock below. Faith is such a fickle thing: it must be blind; it requires sacrifice; it promises only itself as a reward.
Lady Shar promises that the darkness is all they need. It will be such a shame for her friends to never join her and her Lady in that eternal night. Shadowheart will have to leave them to their earthly struggles, their whims and dealings, their betrayals and prying…
…their merry fires, their twinkling eyes and horrible attempts at music, their shoulders brushing as they lean back in laughter…
Joy and hardship are fleeting, she imagines her Lady comforting her. They will not last. From darkness we come, and darkness we return. All else is distraction.
Shadowheart sometimes reneges on the dinners around the campfire, turning away from the sizzles of fish and jabs of wit or retellings of old tales, seeking solace in solitude and meditation. Each time, she considers the tug in her heart—the one that yearns for the food, the wit, the tales, the connection—to be a temptation to overcome, a too-human weakness to solder over.
After all, it is wrong to become accustomed to waking from cruel dreams and finding the wizard has sent over an illusion of dancing squirrels to cheer her. It is wrong to receive rightful retribution from her Lady in the form of a sizzling strike at her palm, and feel grateful that Tav or Karlach—both here with her now—glance at her in concern. They may tentatively support her, fight valiantly alongside her against the necromancer and its thralls—but they don’t understand.
After combat ebbs, she approaches the ultimate test of her faith: the sacrifice she must cull to crystallize her Lady’s fervent favor. It is a strange figure that struggles within its mystical bonds. Tall, sturdy, ragged and yet beautiful. Furrowed scars bonded with radiant gold. There is the oddest, most distant twinge of familiarity at the exact moment Shar’s champion should be distancing herself emotionally.
The nerves escape Shadowheart’s stomach, surge to her throat and take up space there. She swallows. It does nothing.
Once met and confronted, the sacrifice taunts her: “You, who have come to seek the praise of your goddess. You, who have come to drive a dagger through my heart.”
“Not a dagger.” Nothing so lowly. “A spear. My Lady’s spear.” After all, she, Shadowheart, is merely the instrument. The weapon, holding a weapon. She has killed so many already, this should be easy. Her palm tightens over the hewn wood; one thrust, and she will please her goddess and become an even sharper edge.
“The fate you seal is your own. To be a Dark Justiciar is to turn your heart from everything but loss.”
Lies. In the great dark, there will be no more loss. No more lies. No more loneliness or childlike cries out to a mother or father who had somehow left her behind. No more sting of abandonment, or hurt from humanity’s multitude of cruelties.
The sacrifice continues to sneer. “You will know no love, no joy—only servitude.”
Of course. In servitude, there is bliss. That is what she is taught. Joy is unnecessary. Love is…should be…paltry. That wretched bear-elf’s words return: Repeating only what you were told. A child. Never questioning.
Who is she, Shadowheart, to question? She has been given all she needs. Her Lady is even so kind as to offer her this experience, compatriots who have joined her on this quest, to show her what Shadowheart doesn’t need at all: companionship. Adventure. Malleability. She is no longer a child.
“Until, of course, your mistress inevitably abandons you. And there is much she does not tell you—a terrible blood price that may extend beyond my own death.”
Words of the viper. Poison. Inaccurate. Lady Shar would not rescue her from abandonment only to do the same.
Meanwhile, her companions by happenstance offer no words; they have no mantra to recite to her, learned by heart and by blood and by pain. They have the blind eyes of the faithless.
Or perhaps they are allowing her to choose her own path. No mantras. No darkness. Only choice.
The choice is easy. When every step, every prayer, every move has brought her along the Lady’s path to her just ascension, it’s easy. It should be.
There is a familiar eruption of excruciation in her hand; the Lady reminding her that thrusting one spear into one heart and receiving an endless embrace is easy. It’s so much easier than pain, or fear, or purposelessness.
Unbidden, her mind likens this aching reminder to a whip on an ox’s flank—a lash to keep it plodding forward.
She shames herself with her own thoughts. She deserves another palm-sized lash.
But…can not even her thoughts be her own?
She glances once more at Tav, at the she-devil, and even at the damnable druid, and recalls the others back at camp who read with ink-stained fingers tips or toss a ball to the scraggly white mutt, its breath rank and its energy ever-high, or make fun of her choice of wine, or hone their blades and their silly grudges, or welcome passers-by like the tiefling children, clever and sneaky and bright. All that, she thinks with a sudden pang, will become darkness. It is written; so it shall be. She cannot change this.
The spear is in her grasp, its icon reflecting the pastel purple light from a foot above. Such a lovely color. Such a shame it will someday be snuffed out.
She holds up her Lady’s instrument, her promises, and blocks out all those new memories of her adventuring band. Turns to the familiar darkness, the lack of remembrance.
And in that moment, she has the strangest yearning—that only if, at her ultimate triumph, only if her unknown parents could see her succeed.
But she can’t. They’d left her to the mercy of the night. And the night had brought her the Lady. And the Lady had given her the mercy of forgetting them. As she will give Shadowheart the mercy of forgetting these strange, chaotic friends.
It is mercy. It is faith. It is…“love.”
A revulsion ricochets through her, heart and body, and she must get the spear away, so she clings on to it, both hands, just long enough to fling it outwards. It arcs through this strange non-space and clatters to the edge of rock. Her Lady is kind enough to give her that one last vision, last awful blend of relief and regret, before it tips over the side and plunges into the unknown.
Immediately, the exertion of relinquishing the weapon is overtaken by all-encompassing panic. The cold of the air does not change, but Shadowheart feels Shar’s recoil all the same. Tav is the first face she finds. “Shar will disown me,” she whispers, the promise of this statement overwhelming her, like knives against her throat. Her lack of surety turns to shock, then despair. She has turned her back on her savior, and now will be abandoned in short order. “Now I’m truly lost.”
The sacrifice, now released, is calm. Compassionate, an unexpected echo of the voice that came to Shadowheart once when she was young. “You were already lost, little warrior. A lost child, frightened by wolves.”
Shadowheart’s eyes dart to her. To the shattered parts of her face, the one rebuilt time and time again. No one knows that story. No…she told Tav, once. That is the only one of so many in decades. It must be more mind-reading, her own mind insists, preparing for an onslaught of Shar’s pain at any moment.
The air—it is so cold. Lacking oxygen. She can hardly make words. “What did you say?”
The being’s lips offer a sad smile. “Much has been promised to you, hasn’t it? But what has been taken from you? What do you know of your own heart—your own life? Lay a hand on me in friendship, not-quite-Sharran, and I will fight the battle that has been waiting for me this last century. Then—oh, then, we will have much to discuss.”
On the sacrifice’s heels, the group hurries to a newly-awakened portal, Shadowheart casting one last glance behind at the site of her potential triumph, now her most unwelcome downfall. She mutters without meaning to: “She must be angry, yet I don’t feel it, or hear it… There’s only silence.”
She is the last to press one timid fingertip to the swirling pool. That is when Shar comes.
The Lady’s night-eyes open and glare with a viciousness that Shadowheart must absorb, body and soul. Her failure is compounded by cascading waves of agony. There is no fatigue and no unconsciousness—she is reduced to a spinal column spattered, a nervous system ablaze in perpetuity.
To keep her mind from splintering into the dark’s eager jaws, Shadowheart holds to one delicate mote of discovered truth: This is not love.
Some eon later, it is unreal to regain her senses, to smell grass and the iron of rock and recall there exists anything more than torment. There is an ache of loss at her core; a curse of a blessing.
Tav comes to check on her, haloed by the lurking moon. Shadowheart explains the delay as best she can. “But then Shar released me—banished me, more like. She said I was an outcast, that all of her children would know me and revile me.” Another loss; an echo of a childhood nightmare in the forest. Her voice wavers. “I’m alone.”
Not true, Tav reminds her, bolstered by their companions and shepherding her back toward the camp flock, its infuriating noise, its warm chaos. When they pass its borders, someone presses a freshly-poured cup of tea into her hands. Another shushes the excitable dog. A third passes her an encouraging smile she doesn’t quite process. This is what her weakness gained her, what betrayal of a goddess earned her: Grace. It should feel so paltry against the threat of divine retribution—but it doesn’t. It feels…right.
Shadowheart returns to her tent and kneels amidst the relics of a goddess she no longer worships. So, they will all succumb to the dark. Inevitable.
Her fingers tighten against the warm mug.
Is it trite to say that, at least, perhaps, they will succumb together?