Chapter Text
"Shar teaches us that we are our own worst enemy much of the time," Shadowheart said. She was talking in that way where she was trying to sound calm but you could tell that she was really excited and really nervous.
"Alright," Karlach said, leaning back to examine the big, creepy, sealed archway in front of them. "So we're going to have a sort of tussle against ourselves?"
"That is what the pictography seems to imply," Gale said. He was standing close to the creepy archway, examining stuff that was carved along its edge. Mysterious runes and little engraved pictures that looked like lots of pairs of people fighting one-on-one.
"This is the Self Same Trial," Shadowheart said. "We will fight shadows of ourselves."
She was hovering by the creepy, bloodstained bowl in the center of the room like she wanted to call dibs. Like she was worried someone might cut in front of her in line to do the blood sacrifice.
"We must shed the aspects of ourselves that hold us back," she said. "We must accept the loss of self, unflinching. Only then will we know Shar's embrace."
"Goodness knows we all want that," Astarion drawled from where he was leaning back at the open and less-creepy archway they'd come in through. "Cuddles from the goddess of darkness. Sounds like a treat."
Astarion was still in a snit because the last trial had been sneaky and he usually did sneaky stuff but Shadowheart said she needed to be the one to do it. Astarion complained when people asked him to do sneaky stuff, but he also got pissy when people didn't ask him to do the sneaky stuff. Astarion was a complicated guy.
Shadowheart frowned at him. She was real prickly right now. Karlach decided to say something so that she and Astarion didn't start prickling at each other.
"All right, soldier," Karlach said, nodding to Shadowheart, because this was her thing. "What's the battle plan?"
"Blood willingly spilled will begin the trial," Shadowheart said, pointing the the stained bowl. "Just like the others. Then we may enter the next chamber and face shadows of ourselves. We each must confront our own shadow."
"Confront is a somewhat ambiguous verb," Gale said. He was walking over from the creepy archway to kneel by the creepy bowl and give it a once over for magic. "Could you be more specific? Will we be unable to harm each other's shadows? Will we be unable to assist each other?"
"We should be able to help each other," Shadowheart said. "I believe. Elsewise why would it be a challenge for a group?"
Her conviction trailed off into uncertainty at the end of the sentence. She got that kind of self-conscious and tense look she got when she was having trouble remembering stuff. Gale watched her curiously, waiting. Karlach waited too. Behind her, she heard Astarion sigh impatiently and then take a breath to say something. It was definitely going to be something mean. Astarion had really obvious tells for when he was about to be mean.
Karlach didn't know where Mister Don't-Know-My-Own-Eyecolor got off being mean about other people's memory problems, but he sure as heck was about to do that and Karlach didn't want to hear it while Shadowheart was going through a Thing and needed support. So Karlach took a big step back and trod with most of her weight on Astarion's boot.
Astarion gave out a little yelp that was more surprise than pain on account of he had good boots. He jumped to the side. He glared at Karlach.
"That was my foot," he hissed.
"Sorry, mate," Karlach said, a little quiet: "But maybe you want to keep it out of your mouth?"
They had a little glare-off which Karlach won. Astarion settled against the wall with a huff and an eye roll. A week ago that might have been a shouting match and a day of sulking. It was actually really nice that she and Fangs had a kind of relationship now where they could have a tiff without Shads or Gale even noticing. Shads and Gale were distracted, busy talking to each other.
"We are each our own worst enemy," Shadowheart was saying slowly, like she was thinking carefully about the words. "So I think we will each be most able to harm our own shadows."
"And likely they will be better able to harm us," Gale suggested, still kneeling and examining the creepy bowl.
"Yes," Shadowheart agreed. "And I am sure that we each must strike the killing blow against our shadow. That would be the symbol of us shedding weakness and accepting the loss of self."
"That follows," Gale said. "Are you quoting scripture? I believe I've found your words engraved along the edge of this vessel."
"They are?" Shadowheart said, crouching down to look. "Where?"
"Worked into the filigree, here we have 'you are your greatest enemy'," Gale said, wiping crusted blood from the edge of the bowl and pointing to marks that Karlach had thought were just pretty (creepy) curlicues. "And here: 'you will shed fragility'--you used the word weakness but I think those must be equivalent. And here: 'you will destroy your self'. A bit more aggressive than how you phrased it, but I think that just supports your theory that each of us will be required to execute our own double."
Shadowheart looked happy that she'd remembered all of the right quotes for the trial without even having to read the bowl. Then she frowned. She crouched down even lower.
"There's more writing on the bottom of the bowl," she said.
"Is there? What does it say?" Gale asked, shuffling on his knees to get closer to where she was looking.
"He's going to crawl around like this and then complain about his knees all the way back to camp," Astarion muttered, sounding half amused and half exasperated. Karlach chuckled just a little, because he was right. Talk about being your own worst enemy–Gale versus his knees and back.
"It says 'within each self a monster'," Shadowheart read off of the underside of the bowl.
"Oh, this is very interesting," Gale said. "The blood spilled in the bowl will touch the other phrases, but not this one. I think that marks it as optional. I've heard of something like this before. Azuth set out trials for young mages where one could mark certain incantations with chalk and leave others blank, indicating how difficult a challenge one was willing to face."
"This would make the trial harder?" Shadowheart asked, straightening. "A more difficult test?"
"I suspect so," Gale said, nodding. "Facing more powerful versions of ourselves, perhaps? This actually makes me wonder if the sacrificial bowls in the other trials also had hidden activation phrases."
Shadowheart's eyes brightened. She looked at the door, which led back to the rest of the Gauntlet. Astarion immediately swept forward, stepping into her view, putting his hands on his hips.
"We are not redoing those death traps just so that you can get extra credit with your god," he said witheringly.
Shadowheart scowled at Astarion for a moment, but then she sighed and seemed to center herself. She even nodded.
"I don't believe we could go back to the other trials, even if we wished," she said, sounding regretful. "They are complete. We already have the umbral gems."
"Quite," Astarion said. "Now have we spent enough time standing about and staring at things? Let's see if we can collect another dark bauble now, hmm?"
Shadowheart nodded and stood up. She turned to the bloodstained bowl and took out her knife. Gale stood and took a few steps back to give her space.
Karlach knew that this was, you know, religious. And she wanted to be, you know, respectful and open minded--
(That was kind of a lie. Way more than she wanted to be open minded, Karlach wanted Shadowheart to maybe rethink and change her mind about this entire Shar thing. Karlach was hoping that might happen if maybe Shadowheart got hugged often enough.)
--but even when she was trying to be respectful and open-minded, Karlach really didn't like watching Shads cut herself and bleed on things. It didn't feel good.
Shadowheart did it really well. (Which made it kind of worse--that meant she'd had practice.) She cut her palm and let her blood fall in a neat circle in the bowl. It touched the edge of all the words.
The dark, creepy archway creaked. The sealed double doors started to open, revealing an open area beyond.
Shadowheart turned her hand up and used a spark of her own magic to heal the wound on her palm. She paused for a moment, examining the blood still wet on her hand.
Then, in one quick motion, she leaned down and smeared the blood over the inscription she'd found on the side of the bowl, blotting the word 'monster' dark red.
"Oh, bloody hells," Astarion muttered.
"This does mean we will get to learn what that additional line signifies," Gale pointed out.
"All right, let's do this," Karlach said as she unslung her battle axe.
She was a little excited. She bet she'd make a pretty badass monster. She bet this was going to be a pretty hard fight.
The space they walked out into was an open air arena on a platform. Karlach could tell they were on a platform because of the hollow noise her boots made against the ground. She always ratcheted her caution up a notch when they were on platforms because platforms could break and the Gauntlet of Shar went very far down and a fall like that could kill you just as easy as a sword.
On the platform in front of them there was a kind of gazebo building--lots of stairs and floors with no walls. It looked important so they walked towards it, Karlach and Shadowheart in the lead, Gale a bit behind them, Astarion sneaking off somewhere to the side. Everyone had their weapons out, ready for the trouble they knew was coming.
As they got closer to the building, Karlach saw four shadowy shapes spring up--two standing on the stairs. One high on the uppermost floor. One on ground level right in front of them. Silhouettes. Maybe familiar? Hard to see details in the distance and darkness. For a moment, they were all humanoid.
Then they started to change. One of them twisted and fell down onto all fours. One of them vanished in a puff of smoke. High up atop the building one of them unfurled two huge bat wings.
But then Karlach lost sight of all the other figures because the one on the ground in front of them was growing.
It grew taller and broader, looming up. Big. Not dragon big, but bigger than any person. It had armor--bands of black iron on its chest, arms, legs. Its arms ended in weapons--axe on one side, spiked chain on the other. It didn't have a helmet. Didn't need one. Didn't have a head.
It began to glow from deep in its chest, cherry red like a furnace, and from that glow Karlach could see that it wasn't wearing armor--it was armor. It was all metal except for cracks where red light leaked through. There was a hiss of valves opening and steam spraying into the air. There was a scrape of metal as it stepped forward.
Then it swung its axe-arm and Karlach stopped looking at it and started moving.
People moved and yelled and weapons swung and sparked off stone and armor and Karlach got angry. Combat was a blur when she got into that groove of anger and violence. It was easy to get there, right now. This thing made her angry. And scared. She leaned into the angry.
She charged in close with it to keep it from using the chain. It was faster than she thought it would be. It was all metal and hard to hurt, but some of the joints looked weak. Someone distracted it and Karlach got a hit into a leg joint. Someone made her faster and she got another hit in. It hit her hard in the shoulder with its axe, but someone fixed that. Karlach broke its leg.
Karlach clinched in close with it to try and bring it to the ground, which was maybe a mistake because it was strong. Someone made her stronger. She took it to the ground and started carving into the chest where the cherry red light glowed. She hit metal and hit metal and hit metal and broke through and then she hit something soft inside and her axe sunk deep.
There was fluid on her blade and on her hands. She couldn't tell if it was blood or oil. There was rattling noise, like someone choking but wrong. She was probably gonna have a nightmare or two about all that--about the sudden softness under the metal and the oil-blood and the fact it didn't have a head. But that was later Karlach's problem. You had to live to get nightmares. Had to win. Nightmares were for winners.
She won. She killed it. The red light went out.
Everything was quiet for a second. Karlach looked up to scan for other enemies. See where the other shadows had gotten. If anyone else was fighting.
Astarion was across from Karlach in flanking position, rapier out. Shadowheart and Gale were a few feet further away, concentrating on spells. Shadowheart was looking at Karlach. Gale was looking at a wall of fire, drawn like a curtain between them and the building. It was blocking the other shadows from getting to them. Ah, that was smart. Good on Gale.
Then, the dead metal thing under Karlach started making a weird sound. It was a weird and kind of threatening sound, so Karlach jumped off and backed up a few paces. Astarion backed up too, which was good because then the metal thing exploded.
It shattered the ground it was lying on. It also damaged the big pillar underneath that ground. Karlach suddenly remembered they were all on a platform as that platform started to break and tilt.
Suddenly there wasn't enough ground and all the ground left was crumbling. Karlach heard Astarion yelling and Gale shouting more magic.
Then Karlach was falling. Falling sucked because you couldn't hit falling. All you could do was brace yourself and watch the ground rise up way too fast. And she couldn't even do that right now because they were all falling down into darkness.