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A shadow among shadows, the black panther pads through the twisted forest outside Moonrise.
The curse is already beginning to fade with Ketheric’s death. The land is hardly yet safe, but the silent creature can step without pain in the milder patches of darkness. And it seems joyous in that freedom; a low purr rumbles in its throat as it darts repeatedly from the path to climb a gnarled tree trunk or roll in a struggling patch of grass, scenting out the places where nature’s strength is starting to recover within the broken landscape.
It’s a short journey north to Last Light, but the panther’s meandering route takes it past the moonlight-bathed building. Instead, it makes for the small camp where Hector and his companions have been lodging since their arrival in the shadowlands. Unsurprisingly, given it is nearly two in the morning, the camp is still and silent; only a lone tiefling figure sits up keeping guard by the slowly dying fire.
So softly does the huge cat move that Karlach does not at first notice its approach. It is almost within the circle of firelight before she registers it - but when she does, she moves fast, leaping to her feet with a startled cry and bringing her sword to bear on the beast. “Holy shit--”
For a moment the two of them stare at each other, unmoving. Then the panther's body begins to shift, magical energy flowing off it like a surge of dark water. Jaheira's lithe form uncurls within the burst of power into a standing position from the hunch in which the wildshape left her. “Is there a problem, Karlach?” she says, looking calmly into the point of the sword drawn on her.
“Oh, thank fuck,” Karlach says. She slumps with relief and lets the weapon drop to her side; a nervous smile bursts onto her face at once as she recognizes the other woman. “You scared the piss out of me.”
The words come out faster than she can quite think about them, and she winces, hearing her own voice. “Er. I mean, hello, ma'am. High Harper. We weren't expecting you till morning.”
Jaheira smiles crookedly. “I assumed as much. But there is no one presently at Last Light. My Harpers will continue to scour Moonrise for some hours yet. And though I am no stranger to solitude, I did not have it in me to sleep in an empty house tonight. Besides, if you are all to be my new traveling companions, best I get settled at once, no?”
“Well, you'll hear no argument from me,” Karlach says agreeably, an eager grin rapidly replacing the startled expression of a few moments earlier. “We're excited you want to join us. Well, I mean, I am. Most of us are. I don't think Lae'zel really gives a shit but she's like that with everyone. But it's an honor. Really. You have no idea.”
She trails off, and then her eyes widen comically. I sound like a kid again, all slackjawed over Mum’s stories. “Holy hells, that's a lot of talking, huh?” she says sheepishly, rubbing the back of her neck. “Sorry. It's been… a day. My head feels like it's full of sludge.”
“As does mine,” Jaheira agrees, amused.
“Have you eaten?” Karlach asks. “We've got… well, mostly jerky right now, to be honest. Meat is slim pickings around here. It's made Astarion so grumpy; he-- wait. Do you know about Astarion?”
“What?”
“Uhh… never mind, I'll let Hector talk to you about that.” Karlach scampers over to the camp supply packs and digs around. “Jerky, then? That's about all we have other than several bottles of wine.”
Jaheira snorts. She hasn't moved from her position next to the fire but is watching all of Karlach's movements intently. “To be honest-- after the day we have had, I could do with the wine.”
Karlach smirks, pulling one of the bottles out and gripping the cork so it releases with an audible pop . “You and me both.” Returning to the fire, she hands it to the older woman and sits back down. “Make yourself comfortable, ma’am,” she says. “The others are all asleep. Hector pretty much collapsed as soon as we got back to camp but he’ll say a proper hello in the morning.”
“You may skip the honorifics - ‘Jaheira’ is sufficient,” the Harper says mildly. Accepting the bottle, she takes a direct swig from it and lets out a heavy breath. “We are comrades now, you know.”
“Oh-- yeah, right. Of course. Jaheira.” Karlach’s trying to keep her tone more steady now, but it’s hard not to fidget with excitement. She’s sitting at the fire with Jaheira! The Jaheira! They’re chatting! Ten-year-old Big K would never have believed this. “And I’m Karlach. I mean, you knew that, I think.”
Jaheira sits down heavily next to her at the fire and takes another swallow before offering the bottle back. A slight grin touches her lips again as she registers the eager way that Karlach is still watching her. “I did. But a proper introduction never comes amiss.”
Karlach takes the bottle, mimics the older woman’s direct gulp of the wine. “You really did scare the shit out of me, though,” she says with a quiet snicker. “Thought you were some weird leftover shadow creature. I forgot you could do the whole… animal thing." She grabs a nearby stick with her free hand and prods the campfire into greater life. "Have you always known how to do that? The…” She hesitates, clears her throat awkwardly. “The stories didn’t talk about it much.”
“It is a common bit of druidic magic, yes,” Jaheira answers. “I have not always known how to do it. But I have also not always been a druid.”
She holds out a hand and Karlach passes the bottle over promptly, her eyes narrowing curiously . “What were you before? Did the Harpers come first?”
Jaheira’s gaze turns to the fire for a long moment and she takes another long sip of the wine before she responds. “No, I was a druid before I was a Harper. But before that, I was a child. A child of nobility, in fact.”
Karlach blinks. “No way. You were a toff? In Baldur’s Gate? I never heard about that.”
Jaheira’s lips twitch. “A… toff, yes. In Baldur’s Gate, no. The place… it matters little. Far from here. I hardly remember it, besides in memories of its collapse.”
“Oh. Shit, I’m sorry.” Karlach shifts uncertainly. “What sort of collapse? You mean like a war? Or an earthquake?” She catches herself, frowns. “Sorry, I don’t mean to poke a sore spot. You can tell me if it’s none of my business.”
Jaheira gives her a sidelong look, appraising, searching, then shrugs. “It is alright. Perhaps such memories need to be aired out on occasion, lest they moulder.” She turns the wine bottle slowly in her fingers, examining the label with apparent interest, before handing it back to Karlach. “It was a war. Or a rebellion, I suppose. I knew little of it at the time, of course, being so young. The king was killed, and many of his loyalists as well - among them, my father and mother.”
“But not you?” Karlach has straightened up, listening in fascination. This is not one of the heroic stories she always heard about Jaheira; this is something deeper, more personal. Something darker. She really meant it, about us being comrades…
“I do not know. Perhaps they would have put me to the blade as well. One of the servants smuggled me from our estate.” Jaheira’s gaze has gone distant, her eyebrows knitted together in thought. “I remember… snatches only. Fire. Screaming. They burned the house to ash, I heard later. She wrapped me in a blanket to shut out the smoke…”
“She?”
“Lanya. She had been my mother’s maid. She told me the stories later, of our flight out of the city as the fighting raged in the streets. I did not know what was happening, only that we had to flee. That I must be silent, lest I draw the vengeful mob to the alleys we hid in… I remember the desire to scream, and the knowledge that I must not, and the tenuous balance between the two. My first taste of the line between want and need.”
She trails off, looks suddenly at the bottle in Karlach’s hand. “Are you going to take your turn or not?”
Karlach jumps, takes a hasty drink and passes the bottle over. “Sorry.”
Jaheira shrugs. “Anyway. We fled into the forest that surrounded the city. There was a druid’s grove there, not far from the city walls. The Circle of Dawn, they called themselves, and so they proved - the passage between the darkness and daylight. They took us in. Tended our wounds. Saw to it that I was raised and trained in their ways. And that - to answer your question - is how I learned the art of wildshape.”
She takes another sip of the wine, sets the bottle down carefully-- and then leaps upwards without warning, changing as she does so into a wide-winged grey falcon, screeching into the sky. She swoops in a long, gliding arc around the camp, and the white underside of her wings catches the firelight and bathes her in a halo of gold.
“Whoa…” Karlach mutters, watching with wide eyes.
The bird swoops down, lands on the opposite side of the fire and lets out a soft squawk. Karlach grins slightly. “That must be nice, flying up above the trees like that.”
Again the shape fades in a burst of dark energy, leaving Jaheira sitting cross-legged opposite her. “It is,” the Harper agrees, as if she had never left the conversation. “It can be… seductive, in truth, if indulged too often. There are reasons most druids will never shift more than so many times per day-- it is exhausting, certainly, but more than that, it is easy to find oneself more comfortable in another skin than one’s own.”
“Huh. Yeah, I can see how it would be.” Karlach considers this in silence for a moment. “That ever happen to you?”
Jaheira turns her head to look into the slowly dying flames of the campfire. “There have been many times in my life where I deeply longed to disappear into the woods as bird or beast and never come out again,” she says quietly. “But duty always called me further on…”
Karlach nods slowly. “When I was in Avernus, I used to imagine sometimes having wings like the devils did, being able to just leap up and take off, fly the fuck out of there.” She picks up the bottle and takes a heavy gulp. “Never quite figured out a way to make it happen, though. Not many druids in the Hells who could have taught me.”
“Avernus,” the Harper says thoughtfully. “You were another caught in the fall of Elturel?”
“What? Oh. No.” Karlach shakes her head. “Wish I had been, honestly. I was stuck there a lot longer. Practically a kid when I was packed off into Zariel’s army. Ten years ago, now.”
“Mm. We have this in common, then,” Jaheira says, tilting her head slowly to one side. “Torn from our homes as a child, to make our way elsewhere.”
Karlach’s head snaps around and she looks at the older woman in surprise. She feels a strange, sudden ache in her chest that has nothing to do with the infernal engine - a stab of sharp, unexpected emotion. The feeling of shared grief, for a life lost and left behind, never to be fully seen again. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “Yeah, I guess we do.” She smiles crookedly. “Not sure I’d wish it on anyone, but I guess we both turned out pretty badass, at least.”
Jaheira, unexpectedly, laughs softly. “We certainly did,” she agrees. “To have toppled the Chosen of a god is no easy matter. Perhaps I shall now retire from the legends at last, and it is Karlach they shall sing of, in the raunchy ballads in dingy taverns.”
Karlach snickers. “You think? Ah, Hec would hate that, because he’d be in them too. But I dunno that I’d mind. Figure maybe I’ve earned it.” She leans forward, resting her elbows on her knees. “So what else can you turn into?”
“Anything I have seen, and many things I have not. What would you like?” Jaheira answers, raising an eyebrow.
“ Anything? ” Karlach says, grinning excitedly. “Like a dinosaur? Kiddo Karlach wanted to be one of those so bad. I used to run around the Outer City alleys roaring at all the shopkeepers.”
Jaheira doesn’t respond, though her eyes glint with sudden amusement. This change seems to take her somewhat more effort; her shoulders hunch, and the energy moves over her body in a long wave from head to toe, stretching and shifting and twisting until an enormous Dilophosaurus sits at the campfire in her place, in the same cross-legged position.
“Wow,” Karlach says admiringly. “That’s so fucking cool.”
The dinosaur makes a strange snuffling noise that might be a laugh, and then the shape fades again. Karlach is struck, abruptly, by how small and tired the older woman looks in comparison to the beast - larger-than-life though she might be in song, Jaheira is no more than life-sized in truth. And just like the rest of them, she has had a brutal day.
“All right. Enough demands for party tricks -- you should get some rest,” Karlach says gently. “Can kip in my tent, if you like; I’ll be crawling in with Hector as soon as Wyll’s up for his guard shift.”
Jaheira draws a slow breath, lets it out. “That is very kind of you,” she answers. “I am no stranger to a bedroll under the stars-- but I would not turn down such generosity either.”
A grin flashes onto Karlach’s face. “Don’t even mention it. Remember? We’re comrades now.”