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The graveyard sits quiet beneath a heavy, sea-born fog, thick as wool and brine-sour to the nose. The lamps that line the ancient wall flicker weakly, like candles guttering in a dying chapel, and the pale dragonborn kneels before a headstone that bears no name, smothered by ivy and lichen.
They had not meant to come here – not on this night, not again.
They had planned to walk the tangled lower streets until dawn took pity on them. Instead, their restless steps led them here – drawn as if by old chains – to this unmarked grave, half-swallowed by weeds, where the earth itself remembers a man the city wills itself to forget.
They kneel before the stone. Shaking hands fold together atop aching knees. The gesture is almost instinctive – a relic of lost faith, of old killings carried out in the name of the Lord of Murder. But as they open their mouth, no prayer to Bhaal passes their lips – only the memory of an old refrain they can no longer utter.
“Forgive me,” they whisper. “If forgiveness still means anything to you.”
The fog stirs. The silent night listens, breath held in shadow.
“I’ve begged and petitioned gods who thrived on blood. You were different – you only ever wanted loyalty.”
A tremor of laughter fractures the quiet – bitter, short, almost choking. “And I betrayed you all the same.”
It had been months since those world-shaking events. Months since their father’s hand had stopped their heart and carved away at their flesh, searching for the last dregs of gifted divinity. Months since they had stared into eyes that never flinched, never judged – eyes that only saw the truth within them. Months since they realised redemption was a path they would walk alone, knees scraping raw against the stone.
“None escapes Bhaal – or so they told me, once. Bhaal awaits us. Bhaal embraces us. I believed I could outrun his shadow, yet his memory clings tighter than this cursed fog. Maybe it wasn’t Bhaal who bound me in the end – maybe it was you.”
The wind stirs again, fog drifting like fingers over stone. For a heartbeat, a voice echoes – smooth, careful, edged with fond amusement, familiar as a blade’s shadow.
If you must kill me, my friend, then make it mean something.
They see the memory unwind: his final, trembling breath, the steel cooling in their palm, his gaze steady and unafraid – the righteous moment – the one that was supposed to be salvation.
“This once, I can’t uphold your command,” they murmur to the empty night. “I have tried to give it meaning. But a tool is only a tool without a true hand to wield it.”
Their fingers curl over the grave’s rough stone, lingering like supplicants at a forsaken altar. The gesture feels misplaced – both sinful and sacred. Their eyelids flutter shut, breath trembling with the cold.
“I used to jeer at your empire, all smoke and gears. Yet in your absence, what legacy have I forged? Is this redemption, or can these hands build nothing but sorrow?”
The fog curls around their shoulders, warm as breath, almost like an embrace.
“You made me better, showed me what I could be beyond my father’s leash,” they say softly, voice cracking. “And in the end, I destroyed you for it.”
They wait for an answer that cannot come, yet the air thickens nonetheless – the silence begins to take on shape, weight, near-voice.
“I was never yours to save.”
They flinch, eyes flying open.
The mist shifts, unveiling for an instant the shadow of him – standing just beyond the grave, coat dripping with unseen rain, expression unreadable through the haze.
“Then how,” the Dark Urge whispers, “do I stop praying to you?”
The figure does not move. The fog blurs him slowly – the shade returning into the world of the dead, or memory, or lingering madness.
They bow their head, a supplicant before a faith formed from guilt and longing. “I tried to stop killing for the gods. I did. But you – ” Their voice fractures. “You never asked me to stop. You only asked me to choose.”
They lower their hands, prayer abandoned. Blood smears the knuckles – a reopened wound, unhealed from some old struggle.
They press it to the stone. The colour seeps in, dark and spreading, like ink bleeding through battered scripture.
“If you cannot forgive me,” they whisper, “then let me, at least, remember you.”
The wind moves again, stirring and scattering the mist. The graveyard falls once more into silence – unchanged, indifferent, yet charged with a holy emptiness.
By dawn, the Dark Urge is gone – faded into myth. Only the faint imprint of their knees remains pressed in the wet earth, and a trace of blood drying on the unmarked stone: a relic, or perhaps a single benediction, to a god that never was.