Work Text:
(i. iron)
In his memoir notes, decades later, he drafts the following sentence: The rise of Enver Gortash, born miserable and low, with nowhere to go but up.
A pretty bit of bait for the Lower City rabble. For the patriars, naturally, he keeps a cleaner script: Enver Gortash: a brilliant mind who rose above unfortunate birth to take his proper place at the helm of this fair city.
Both stories are lies. For the record: Gortash is not his birth name.
Also: he sank before he rose. Almost literally, if accepted cosmology is to be believed.
But most of all is this: Enver Gortash is hardly born at all. He is made.
-
Enver Flymm sits squeezed into a corner, a book in his hand. The paper crinkles beneath his touch, small fingers tracing the diagram printed on the opposite page. He skims the text as quickly as he can.
A machine. A siege engine. Designed four hundred and nineteen years ago, give or take, by Kharduum Ironthumb. A dwarven artisan, according to the book, famously mean about tolerances. The engine was used to great effect in the battle of—
“Hey! Out of it!” His mother’s voice, clipped and coarse. Sally Flymm is not a particularly gentle woman. “Get to laying the table, boy. Your father’s closing up shop.”
Enver snaps the book shut on reflex. The edge of his finger catches on the pages, paper slicing his skin. He hisses, quick and quiet, and brings his hand to his mouth to suck the blood away.
He swallows the instinct to sigh. The book is tucked back into place, hidden away beneath the cot he sleeps on. He scrambles to his feet, hands wiping dust onto his too-small trousers as he follows his mother down the steps.
-
It’s not that his parents disdain his interests. Not really. It’s only that they consider any pursuits other than cobbling shoes and drinking a waste of time.
“Bloody in love with that book,” his father mutters. Dravo is watching him now. If Enver turns, he’ll be leaning against the doorframe with a pint in his hand. “Don’t make me tell you twice.”
-
Notes, 14 Uktar 1470
Shopkeeper Jorran lent me Engines of War, Volume II. Condition: old, but in good shape. Have to keep it in good shape if I want to avoid paying a fee for it. Read about the refinement of the portable mantlet line. (Thoughts: nothing special. If I had materials and time I could build it.)
Got caught (again). Told to stop sneaking to the loft (won’t). Promised we’d visit the market tomorrow (uncertain).
Collection of clock gears: up to nineteen.
-
He’s read about debts, is the thing. They pop up in histories from time to time: he read one about a duke in Tethyr who bankrupted his whole family funding a private militia for a border dispute nobody remembered a month later. He had to sell his glass menagerie house as a result, along with all the animals.
And he’s not stupid. Sally orders him away whenever creditors come by the shop: hand at his collar, quick shove towards the staircase. But sound travels, and Enver’s figured out the best corners of the loft to use if he wants to help it along in reaching his ears. He knows his parents are in deep.
Funny, though. For all his parents’ roughness, Enver never expected to be the duke’s menagerie.
-
When the devil asks his name, Enver does not surrender it. The warlock who bought him evidently doesn’t remember, or else does not care. Raphael, who presumably has better things to do than coerce names out of sullen children, shrugs and hands him off to Nubaldin. He’s an “eternal debtor” now.
But Enver isn't being sullen. He simply doesn't want to be Enver Flymm anymore.
Names are insignias: heavy, necessary pieces of self, worn at every moment. Like stains, or birthmarks, or scars. Very much like scars.
The name Gortash comes from a book he remembers reading years ago— a minor figure of little importance, barely more than a footnote. He chooses it because of the sounds: a pair of harsh consonants, a harsher sibilant to finish. He doesn't know what it means, and he has no way of finding out.
But when Hope asks for his name, Enver Gortash is the one he gives her.
“Gor—tash,” Hope says, tasting it. “Oh, that’s a good one. That’s a knife of a name.”
Enver’s spine goes tight. “How did you know I—”
“I’m everywhere,” she says, voice delighted and devastated all at once. “It’s a talent. It’s a curse. I heard you muttering before.”
A beat, softer: “Don’t let them take it. Don’t let them take you. They’ll say it’s only a name, and then it’s only a hand, and then it’s only a heart.”
-
Hell, Enver learns, has an archive. Or at least, this House does, tucked behind locks and threats like everything else in Raphael’s domain.
Enver is meant to stay in the prison wing for now, possibly forever. But the moment Hope mentions an archive, the word catches in him like a burr.
“An archive. Like a library?”
Hope’s projection shivers in the torchlight. “Not a library. A monument. A trophy room with paper in it. Artifacts no one can touch, books no one can read. Unless the Archivist decides you’ve earned the privilege."
“Does no one get in?” Enver asks. “People like me, I mean. Eternal debtors.”
Hope’s laugh is a flicker. “Debtors don’t enter. Debtors get sent.”
“Then someone sends them,” he says, trying to keep his voice level. “Who?”
Hope goes very quiet. “If you ask that out loud, the jailer’ll hear. And if he hears you—” Her voice spikes. “—HE’LL MAKE SURE YOU NEVER ASK AGAIN.”
Nubaldin then. Armed with that knowledge, Enver begins to pester. And that's how he begins to make an enemy of his jailer.
-
Notes, ???
Archives route: ladder → hall → right at the end. (Unless the house moves. It probably does.)
Hope was correct: access is assigned. I told Nubaldin I could “assist with cataloguing.” He asked what I thought that meant. I explained. He laughed. I got a beating for my explanation. Next time: no explanations.
Clothing itches. At least it fits.
Once I get access (soon): Enver Flymm’s contract first. Then books on gods. Anything that explains how a life gets owed.
-
By his count, it takes him five years to get access to the Archives. Time in the hells is slippery; he measures it anyway.
Enver never does find his contract. The gods, however, are everywhere. For every dozen scrolls, there’s always one about some god or other. It’s like a tax.
He starts with Lathander, because Hope says he’s her favorite: dawn and renewal and the gentlest lie, that something will change because it ought to. Enver reads the prayers carefully, earnestly, and waits. Nothing in the House is reborn.
Tyr comes next, because surely this situation is unjust. There are treatises fat with definitions and thin with solutions. They can name a wrong a dozen ways; they never say how to pry your life back out of a ledger.
After that, Enver gets pragmatic. Helm is too late. Ilmater, too patient. Tymora, too fickle. Oghma, too pleased with questions that don’t change anything. He even tries Kelemvor, on a sour impulse, just to test whether imprisonment in the hells counts as death.
Then one day, when his hip is half-shattered from another beating, his jaw clenched around a geas that won’t let him spit his anger where it belongs— he checks a high, neglected shelf and finds Bane.
The god of tyranny does not tell him to hope. He tells him to act.
Hope is a candle. Ambition is a knife. Enver, with blood on his tongue and a contract somewhere bearing his old name, decides he’d rather have the knife.
-
Bane doesn’t speak in his ear when he prays. But a plan comes together in Enver’s mind, and more than that, it’s a viable one. He takes that as proof enough of Bane’s interest.
-
Enver Gortash is almost a man when he finally escapes the hells, with black eyes like pools of ink and a frame that might even be called broad if he ate a little better. By his own measure, he’s lived eight years of his life in the House of Hope, and at long last he’s managed to lift a very important password off Raphael himself.
He puts it back, of course. But he memorizes it first. He doesn’t know how often these things change, so he’ll need to go tonight.
Halfway to the Chamber of Egress, something startles him. Hope’s projection shakes loose from the shadow he’s trying to wear, and at full volume she says, “You were going to leave without saying goodbye, weren’t you?”
Enver’s heart drops like a stone. His hands are balled into fists: tight enough to sting, the sharp edge of a nail digging against the soft flesh of his palm. Irritation tingles beneath his skin. The one thing. The axis on which all his plans are based—
“S-s-sss,” he hisses, because even in panic he knows that a soft ss sound is quieter than the more conventional sh. “Yes. Of course I am.”
“Good,” says Hope. “If I had the chance, I’d run too.”
Enver’s teeth grind. He didn’t get a chance. He made one. He made it the way you make a lock pick: quiet and precise.
All at once, Hope’s expression turns proud. “I knew it,” she blurts. “I KNEW YOU’D GET OUT.” Then, immediately smaller: “Not because I’m clever. Because I’m… me.”
His nails break through his skin; a drop of blood pools on his palm. Enver forces his voice flat. “Move.”
“I can’t,” she says, sudden and small. “But you can.” Then, brighter, “So go. Go go go. Before he notices a little thing is missing, make like a tree and RUN.”
-
The portal he uses drops him onto the streets of Baldur’s Gate, and Enver doesn’t fall to his knees or kiss the ground in gratitude. He only leans against a doorjamb and silently reaffirms the oath he made by Lord Bane in the hells. By your iron fist, I swear it: I will rule, and I will make rule. I will not bow to anyone. They will bow to me.
-
Enver hasn’t left the hells empty-handed. On his last day in the Archive, he pocketed an amulet with a miswritten tag: dull metal, plain chain, but humming with a powerful protection charm. It converts cleanly into starting capital at a Lower City pawn shop.
He picks a room near the docks that smells strongly of fish, because it’s cheap and utilitarian and close to a Zhentarim hideout he remembers from old delivery runs. That it’s miles from Flymm’s Cobblers is, of course, entirely beside the point.
He buys a broadsheet, does a bit of math. He’s seventeen. Nearly eighteen. Enver is quietly pleased to be correct.
He spends the rest of the money on three decent sets of clothes: nothing grand, but respectable, flexible. You can do a lot with the right waistcoat. Then he strolls down to the hideout to sell the Zhent the solution to a problem they don't know about yet.
-
Notes, 22 Flamerule 1478
Acquired: rooms on Net Street, off Grey Harbor Docks. Miserable little box. Mine.
Wardrobe: 2 pair trousers, 3 shirts, 3 waistcoats, 2 plain tunics, 3 neckcloths.
Supplies: 1 vial alchemist’s fire. Half-dozen eggs. 2 potatoes. 1 lb ground pork. Broadsheet.
Greeted by landlord. Indolent. Smelled of rotgut. I inquired into his habits. Some potential there.
Went to greet Zhentarim. Result—
-
“Gortash, is it?” the woman says. She assesses him from across a desk, eyes dark and suspicious. “I’ve never heard that name before.”
She’s staring now. Several people are staring, waiting, no doubt, to see if he’s worth their time. Enver opens his mouth to speak.
“The boy just got here, Travis,” someone drawls, unhurried, before he gets the chance. “Let him say his piece.”
Travis’s nostrils flare. “If you say so, Ollers.”
Enver files the names away. He keeps his posture still. “I’ve come to offer a service,” he says, exactly as rehearsed. “I can make your books stop bleeding. This week.”
“What’s that s’posed to mean?” another of the Zhent asks, immediately defensive. Eyes drag over Enver, and a sneer deepens.
“It means someone is skimming you,” Enver says. “Quietly.” He lets the last word hang. A lie, of course, but one he’s fabricated materials to substantiate. He taps his coat pocket where the folded pages wait.
Ollers’s gaze sharpens by a fraction. “If that’s true,” he says mildly, “then you’ve been paying close attention to business that isn’t yours.”
He lifts two fingers. The scrape of knives answers.
Enver’s hand closes tight in his pocket, nails biting the meat of his hand. Now is not the time to back down, he thinks. First impressions, and all that. He brings the flask up in one clean motion. Alchemist’s fire catches the torchlight and throws it back in a hard yellow flare.
“Please,” Enver says. “Let me finish. I think you’ll like what I’m selling.”
Ollers drops his hand and slowly, the lackeys back down. “Much obliged,” Enver says, and holds the man’s gaze. His eyes are light gray, like fresh ice. It takes a moment to confirm that Ollers is impressed.
“Leave your flask out here,” he says, “and I’ll hear you out properly in my office.”
-
Notes, 22 Flamerule 1478, cont’d
— Success.
-
From there, Enver schemes his way up, leaving a trail of spent assets in his wake like shed skins. First, he makes himself indispensable to the Zhentarim. Then, he takes control of their supply chains. He goes from moving contraband to dealing arms, first to Lower City thugs, then to patriars. He names his networks like pets and expects them to come when called.
Enver moves residence a few times. He’s only on Net Street a year. A spot in the warehouse district comes next, and with it a workspace. Eventually, he acquires an apartment in the Upper City with a view he doesn’t need and a door that shuts with authority. He keeps the warehouse anyway. You don’t build anything worth having in a parlor.
The hip he injured in the hells still pains him sometimes. When the pressure changes, mostly, or when he forgoes sleeping too many nights in a row. Not everything yields to planning; some things only tolerate it.
He orders materials and crafts himself a gold-tipped cane with an unnecessarily ornate grip. If anyone asks, he'll call it an affectation.
The years have taught him a great deal. He’s learned that people fail faster than systems, and that systems only fail when you let sentiment leak in. He’s learned how to build walls around himself, how to control his own needs and desires. And above all, he’s learned how to hurt.
How to hurt: to arrange scandals and accidents and murders when people impede his progress. Even useful people. Even people he likes.
How to hurt: to stop clenching his fists like a boy with nothing. To keep his fear, his anger in his gut instead.
In the midst of it all, Enver comes to one unavoidable conclusion. Pain is the breaking stone for some, and the whetstone for others. And when he himself is that stone, he is only doing others the favor of testing what they are made of.
He sells his favorite bodyguard into service in the hells, gets barrels of infernal iron in return. She's a bright young thing: fearless. If she's anything like him, she'll make a way back out. If she isn’t, well. The iron will still be useful.
-
Enver reestablishes Baneite worship in the city almost as soon as he's able, in between the Zhent and his self-promotion to arms dealer. Within the month, he's recruited a few ambitious underlings to the cult. They’ve no temple, no robes: just oaths, penalties, and prayers murmured in the dark.
Bane is tyranny, yes. But Enver has started thinking of him as something cleaner: the god of stop whining and fix it. The god of if you want something done right, arrange it yourself.
And it’s through this tidy little cult—his, now—that he hears of a healthy Bhaalist temple elsewhere in the city. A thriving rival industry. An opportunity. Enver starts making inquiries almost at once.
-
“Master Gortash. You look as though you might dance.” The lady in red approaches him with catlike grace, almost on her toes. Enver has never met her before, but she seems to know him. He runs her quickly through his mental catalog of patriars, arms clients, lesser nobility, and eventually finds a match.
“Lady Lash,” he replies, bowing just enough. “I was about to ask you the same question.”
They part after three dances, and Enver dismisses her before he’s left the ballroom.
-
He forgets Vermillia Lash until she arrives at his workshop.
Enver does not entertain in the Lower City anymore. He has paid well to ensure that fact enforces itself. So when the lookout boy appears pale and flustered, Enver’s first response is irritation sharpened by offense.
“Master Gortash,” the boy says, too carefully. “There’s—ah—a lady.”
Enver does not look up from the bench. “She’s lost.”
“Says she isn’t.”
A perturbation then. Probably someone who knows his reputation and wants to engage him in secret, without anyone being the wiser. If that’s the case, he’ll show her the door; Enver insists on a certain level of decorum with his clients these days.
Still, he won’t be caught looking untidy. He rinses his hands of the soot that clings to them before he goes to the door.
He is not expecting the Lady Vermillia Lash, much less in a scandalously low-cut gown, wine-dark and impractical. She sweeps into the workshop like an accusation, her gaze finding him at once.
“This is a workshop, Lady Lash,” Enver says politely. “Not a drawing room. I’d have thought you’d prefer my apartment.”
His meaning, he thinks, is clear: get out.
Lady Lash doesn’t budge.
She prattles on for nearly forty minutes, all the while wandering his workshop seemingly at random. She speaks of nothing important and everything relevant. Of reputation and ambition, never naming her own. Enver doesn’t realise his fists are curled until he feels the prickle of pain, the sharp ache of his nails cutting into his skin.
And then, just as he’s about to cast propriety aside and throw her bodily from the workshop, she suddenly stops wandering. Looks directly at him.
“You’ve been asking about the Bhaal temple,” she says.
The silence that follows is deliberate. Enver studies her anew. “And if I have?”
“Then you’ve found it.” Her smile sharpens. “Congratulations.”
-
Notes, 11 Kythorn 1483
Received a message from VL. Said: has considered my proposal and would like to meet later this tenday. Described me as ‘delightful.’ A positive sign, or an indication she’s not taking this seriously?
Either way: will be meeting 6/14 (location to be determined). Impatient. Want to begin planning next steps at once.
-
They seal their alliance with a bottle of aged almond brandy. It comes from her cabinet, but Enver pours. Vermillia doesn’t thank him.
“I must say,” he remarks, watching her over the rim of his glass, “I expected more mess from an alliance with a Bhaalspawn.”
Vermillia lifts her glass in a lazy salute. “Murder doesn’t have to be messy,” she says. “Only interesting.”
-
She asks, almost flippantly, if Enver would like trophies from the people she kills for him. It’s an amusing question. He almost scoffs, then evaluates.
“Bring me whatever’s in their pockets,” he says.
Vermillia laughs, clear and crystalline.
-
“What does this do?”
She has somehow made herself comfortable in the only chair Enver would never offer a guest. She sits sideways in it, finger resting on the clockwork leg he left on his workbench before he realized Vermillia would be calling.
Enver keeps his hands behind his back. “A prototype,” he says. “A limb. For a construct.”
“Mm.” She leans forward anyway, nudging a gear with her nail. The linked assembly shivers; the foot flexes in a clean, precise kick. “But what,” she repeats, “does it do?”
“It enforces,” he says. “It patrols. It responds to commands. It doesn’t grow a conscience at the worst possible moment.”
Vermillia’s mouth quirks. “So it won’t betray you.”
“It can’t. Not the way people do.”
“That,” she says, “is an excellent feature.” A beat. “Does it climb stairs?”
Here, Enver pauses. That’s… a real question. Not admiration or dismissal: a problem posed like she really wants to know how he intends to solve it.
“It can,” he says slowly, “if I adjust the torque ratio here. But then it loses finesse.”
“It'll be loud,” Vermillia says, tapping the joint.
Enver stares at her.
She smiles, as if his surprise is a small luxury she can afford. “You’re fussy,” she says. “You hide it under all that polish and gold, but you are.”
He should correct her. He should deflect. Instead, he hears himself say, “Would you like to see the schematics?”
“Could I please?”
He sets the rolled parchment on the desk between them like a treaty. Vermillia doesn’t coo over his handwriting or praise him for being clever. She simply follows the lines, quick as a knife, and stops at the parts that matter.
She taps a joint. “If I wanted to disable it, I’d hit it here.”
Enver nods. “Side impact. It’ll shear.”
“So you’ll protect it?”
“Brace it,” he says, clipped. “But the gait gets uglier. It’ll lumber a bit, but I’ll distract from that problem with gilding.” He shifts a page, showing her a sketch of a filigreed casing.
A smile tugs at Vermillia’s cheek, and her eyes flash. “There you are,” she says.
He hates that he wants to impress her. He hates even more how much he wants to keep the feeling, now that he already has.
Later, when he finds the hidden door in her townhouse and the scent of alchemical solvents hits him like a familiar sin, he isn’t surprised at all. Of course she has a workshop. Of course she has recipes, and ratios, and a place where bodies can be made to behave.
(ii. crown)
Enver never names Vermillia Lash in his memoir notes. She is reduced neatly to “the Bhaalspawn.”
There are, naturally, a few explanations for this.
First: Enver Gortash has little patience for supporting characters in the story of Enver Gortash. He knows that Vermillia is dazzling, dangerous, impossible to ignore, and he refuses to let her brilliance steal even a sliver of his spotlight.
Alternatively: by the time he begins planning a public memoir, Vermillia Lash is already lost to him, and Enver sees no value in polishing ghosts.
Besides, she already haunts his private journals:
Tested the prototype. VL broke it in under a minute. Useful data.
VL grew bored with one of our contacts. Problem removed.
Silence tonight. VL away on business. Dislike it.
-
One night Bane surfaces through Enver’s sleep. He comes with no comforting dream-logic, no soft edges. The air feels thick, metallic, like a forge before the hammer falls.
“You’ve done well, Gortash.”
Enver’s first impulse is to kneel; he recognizes it at once as trained behavior, the kind you beat into debtors and dogs. He swore, he swore he would never kneel again. In the face of his god, he clamps down the impulse so hard his teeth ache.
Titles are power you can wear in public. They make strangers polite. They make old names irrelevant. Titles erase your past, or gild it bright. They make futures, build their pathway on invisible stones. It is not that people are their titles; it is that with them they are more.
“You shall do greater still,” Bane says. “As my Chosen.”
-
Notes, 2 Eleasis 1484
Visit to VL: discussed journey to M. Towers, current state of BG plans. 3rd Chosen still needed. KT to receive us on 12/21. Should be interesting; the man’s reputation precedes him.
Will require boat charter + dockside bribes for transportation.
-
He offers to lend Vermillia one of his notebooks, because there are details that might interest her about his schemes, his inventions, what he’s learned. It’s an extraordinary show of trust on Enver’s part. She turns him down flat.
“If there are things that will interest me,” Vermillia says, “just tell me about them. Books are dull, and I like your voice well enough.”
-
Notes, 22 Eleasis 1484
Updated reading list:
[1] Baldur's Gate and the Dialectics of Plunder - Podo Underbough.
[2] Efficacious Brain Removal - Sszindrel the Precise.
[3] On the Inevitability of Moral Decay and its Benefits - Hestia Boone.
[4] Sarevok Anchev: A Study in Suffering - Cyrrel Morncastle.
[5] The House of Wonders, vol. IV - Brommelin Nymwicket.
[6] Ye Follye of Karsus - Barrabus Wulfram Kestrelane.
Started: Suelto's Ethics of War - Cristina Suelto. Compelling. Her rationalization of tyranny is unusually clean.
-
Enver doesn’t dwell on the hells; dwelling is for people who intend to stay trapped. But there’s a note he recalls from the Archives, written in Raphael’s ostentatious hand: Space saved for the Crown of Karsus. Current Location: Mephistar.
He’s been thinking about levers. About what moves men, moves cities, moves gods. Now, listening to Ketheric Thorm casually mention the mind flayer colony tucked under Moonrise Towers, Enver feels the thought click into place: the Crown isn’t an artifact. It’s a lever. A master key.
First, though: a smaller door.
“The House of Wonders is keeping an assortment of your family’s artifacts behind glass,” he tells Vermillia a week later, as if he’s commenting on the weather. “Did you know?”
He understands her quite well by now. He can almost predict the way her green eyes will flash when she hears that something of hers is in other hands. The reaction is half the reward.
“You’ll be wanting them back,” Enver continues, unhurried. “Conveniently, there are Gondian designs behind that same glass that interest me.”
He doesn’t tell her— yet— that this is only the beginning. After they escape with their artifacts, he’ll tell her about the Crown.
-
He takes a tripwire-activated bolt to the shoulder during the break in, but everything else goes exactly to plan. Vermillia comes out spotless, hair still pinned in place like the gods themselves wouldn’t dare disturb it.
When they’re finally rattling away in the carriage, loot stowed and wheels singing over cobblestone, she digs through her alchemy pouch. “Open,” she says, and tips a potion of superior healing into his mouth.
Enver glares, eyes like slits. “You shouldn’t waste resources. I was barely hurt.”
Vermillia rolls her eyes, delighted and irritated all at once. “Is everything an insult to you?” Her voice goes warm with a laugh she won’t quite release. “I never said you needed it. But it couldn’t have been pleasant, being injured. We’re allies. And musk creeper petals are cheap.”
He makes a noncommittal sound and refuses, on principle, to thank her. Forgoes a response in favour of looking out the carriage window, the towers of Wyrm Rock visible against the black sea of a sky: smooth, endless, broken with the silver-gold glitter of stars.
He sits with his coat gathered around him, dark fabric bunched, arms crossed over his chest. You wear that thing like armour, Hope had said, once, as she’d watched him in another, much rattier coat. It’s a habit he’s yet to break.
-
Notes, 16 Alturiak 1486
Mephistar still gated by access + timing. Waiting is corrosive. Use the time: foundry procurement / ward research / studies on Illithid habits + history.
VL stayed the night again. Becoming a habit. Not an unwelcome one.
-
As eager as he is to secure the Crown, the Netherstones, the Elder Brain— Enver has been dreading the visit to Mephistar.
Vermillia notices it days before he admits to himself that it’s showing. He’s too controlled to fidget, but the tension has migrated into small, precise places: the set of his jaw, the way he clenches his fists.
Enver knows she’s noticed, but he doesn’t acknowledge it. Neither does she. It is, for her, a kind of indulgence.
When they go to speak with Helsik, Vermillia drops into a posture of bright, arbitrary contrarianism, as if she’s only just now decided the plan is ridiculous. Helsik is skeptical about the theft itself but confident about the door: she can get them into Mephistar, and she can get them out.
When they leave, Vermillia glances at him sideways, the way she does when she’s decided to be difficult.
Enver, with a sweep of his arm, exclaims, “What did I tell you? If Helsik can get us into the House of Hope, she can get us into Mephistar, too.”
-
Notes, 19 Ches 1487
Crown secured. VL a gem.
-
When the vault finally yields and the last lock admits it has only ever been a lock, Enver feels like he’s signed his name across fate in wet ink. He comes out of the hells sulfur-scented, shaking with exhilaration and vindicated down to the bone. Not with relief or catharsis, but with the bright, ugly joy of proving the universe can be made to comply.
Who knows? He and Vermillia might even pay a visit to Raphael next. But for now, such things can wait.
They have an Elder Brain to enslave.
-
With the crown secured, Enver’s ideas come so fast and urgent that he can scarcely keep track of them all. They interrupt him mid-sentence, mid-step, even mid-kiss sometimes. He breaks away as if yanked by an invisible chain, snatches his notebook, scribbles so fast the ink blots. Then he reads back a line, makes a harsh little sound of approval, adds three arrows, two cautions, a new contingency, and shuts it again like he’s slamming a door on the world.
“You might employ a scribe,” Vermillia says at last, watching him with that lazy amusement she puts on when she’s being kinder than she wants credit for. It’s the third or fourth time he’s left her half-finished to chase a thought.
Enver’s brows rise. He turns, already bristling, already preparing the lecture about loyalty and risk and precision—
“Forget it,” she says, cutting him off before he can begin. “For a moment, I forgot who I was talking to.”
-
Notes, 22-30 Uktar 1489, excerpted
New apparatus: empty head as receptacle for loose brains.
→ Goal: mine contents without undead bodies / smell / mess.
→ Secondary: return to conversation w/ “brain” as if nothing happened; brain must not recognize prior owner’s death.
→ Accomplish via: containment + dampening + extraction (sigils? lattice? pressure? figure out).
Netherstone gauntlet: filigree/claws. Brace lower arm.
→ Hidden clasp / anti-sever / anti-theft / anti-scry.
→ Must be wearable all day (no irritation, no snag).
VL gift: dagger to match my crossbow.
→ Green nephrite w/ brass hilt, gold inlay.
→ Flambard to nick flesh as many times as possible + dispensation of poison.
→ Stillmaker.
-
Titles are intoxicating. The day he becomes Lord Gortash is the proudest of his life. He accepts it with all the humility money can buy, nods through the parliamentary appointment like it was inevitable, like the city’s finally caught up to him. Then he steps into his lacquered carriage with Vermillia at his elbow.
When they arrive at his townhouse, they make it past the gilded banister and up the stairs far too quickly. Vermillia calls him Lord Gortash in bed, then Lord Enver. She musses his hair, grinning like it’s her own victory. “Keep going,” she whispers. “I can’t wait to be an Archduke’s consort.”
-
She appears at his townhouse, not his workshop. Not her ordinary preference, but hardly unexpected either.
What’s alarming is that she doesn’t go upstairs. No circling, no curious prowl towards his bedroom door. She stops in the foyer and stands, gloved hands clasped behind her back, and waits for Enver to approach her.
Still, he can’t help the rush as he begins to regale her with the progress he’s made on his submersible. Every part of him is full of plans. “Here,” he says. “This is the forward hatch. The air bladder sits beneath, so if something goes wrong, it rises. Not elegantly, but reliably. And the seals, the seals—Vermillia, they’re brilliant. You can run it on a—”
Vermillia lifts a hand. “Shh.”
It’s not a request. It’s a hush you use on an animal you’re about to kill.
“Do you know what I like about you?” she asks, and her tone is wrong, too lilting and eager. “You build build build, like you think if you stack metal high enough, you’ll finally climb out of whatever hole you slithered from.”
Enver’s eyes narrow. “That’s a peculiar observation,” he hedges.
“Oh, it’s a true one.” She steps closer. Then, in an instant, her neck snaps sideways with a sharp, ugly crack.
“I am Orin the Red,” says the stranger. “My mincemeat sister will not be joining us. I unmade her, stitch by stitch. Not like your tidy little machines—mine was warm work.”
Enver’s breath catches on instinct he will not permit himself. He reaches, quickly, for the leash of his control. Too late, it would seem.
Orin leans towards him, eyes bright with wet delight. “That upsets you, doesn’t it, little lordling? No matter. Lord Bhaal has chosen a new representative. From now on, I will speak for his temple.”
And then, quite suddenly, she’s gone: red mist shearing through the room, leaving the air smelling faintly of copper.
-
Enver pinches the bridge of his nose and rubs the back of his wrist across his eyes.
There’s going to be so much to do, is his first thought.
I’m alone now, is his second, self-indulgent one.
Wetness gathers, stupidly, in the corners of his eyes. Gods, no. There is no reason for his body to be so committed to crying; Enver doesn’t get sad in this unstoppable way. This isn’t what he’s like. He’s the immovable object.
The tip of his gauntlet is like a claw. It’s a weapon, protecting his Netherstone. A tool. He makes a fist, pricks the unarmored palm of his hand and watches the blood gather. He presses again, harder, deeper, until the muscle parts and the sting turns clean.
Better. This, at least, obeys.
She’d been his partner. They could have ruled the world together, and now she is dead.
The pain is useful. Enver doesn’t heal the wound.
(iii. paper)
Enver Gortash litters Baldur’s Gate with paper bearing his name. Pamphlets, stacked neat on tavern counters and wedged under doorframes by boys paid a copper per stoop. Handbills pressed into palms at the market. Gortash for Archduke, they declare, as if the city has merely mislaid the position and he has kindly volunteered to retrieve it.
As archduke, Lord Gortash's top priority will be Surveillance, to ensure that disloyal elements do not threaten Baldur's Gate and its people from within.
…will be Discipline, to ensure that order is maintained in Baldur's Gate on its streets and in its homes.
…will be Public Works… will be Verification…
No policy can be more important.
This is to say nothing of the portraits his campaign hangs on every empty wall, fountain, and patch of clean stone that will take paste. In each one, his face has been sanded down to something a painter can sell: the premature lines softened, the sleeplessness erased. Light halos him from behind. The caption reads: Lord Enver Gortash: the people's man, the Gate's protector.
Some situations call for subtlety, but a voluntary campaign for a heretofore nonexistent title is not one of them. If you are going to crown yourself in public, you may as well do it loudly
-
“Duke Ravengard is very careful,” says Lord Rinard, leaning in over the table as though sharing a confidence. “You are right that he is that— perhaps he is too much so. But you won’t move him by repeating it.”
Enver dislikes Lord Rinard immensely. But the man has his uses, for the moment.
“I never said he was too careful,” says Enver. “I said he took the wrong risks.”
“Governance is gambling. And sometimes losing.”
“Yes,” says Enver. “But there needs to be some winning in there too, doesn’t there?”
Rinard stares at him. “You think you could do better,” he says, and it isn’t a question.
Enver lifts his chin. “Don’t you?” he asks, and doesn’t mean it as a question either.
-
He is in and out of Moonrise Towers too, of course. Out, more often than in, though he badgers Ketheric incessantly by letter. He is reasonably sure the old man is competent; he is less sure his conviction will hold when it matters.
Orin, of course, is another matter altogether. Enver works with her because he must, and trusts her not at all. She is reckless, ungoverned: a butcher’s saw where a clever knife would suffice. A full year since she dispatched Vermillia, and she still gloats about it. My sweet, spoiled slaughterkin, my pretty predecessor, gone all to ribbons. I took her apart slow, you know. Peel, pluck, split. Mm, how I do miss her.
Enver, for his part, has mostly learned to ignore it. He’s done his grieving. One night of it, one ritual: a claw pushed, inexorably deep and deeper, into the flesh of his hand, until he could breathe without wanting to weep.
There is so much to do, so very much to do. When he makes his ritual entreaties to Lord Bane, Enver asks for endurance.
-
Notes, 21 Flamerule 1491
Coronation: scheduled / confirmed. Public narrative drafted; portrait proofs approved. Security protocols pending final signoff.
Astral prism in circulation. Last known: Shadow-Cursed lands. Do not delegate to Ketheric— his attention rots.
Plans proceed apace, despite appearance of the prism. Endgame is in sight.
-
On a damp summer afternoon, the soon-to-be Archduke Gortash pays a visit to a Lower City cobbler’s shop. He is not there to purchase shoes.
The bell gives a thin, cheap ring. “Dravo! We’re out of tallow. I told you to—”
Sally Flymm freezes. She knows his face. It’s on every wall, every broadsheet, every pamphlet that pretends the city begged him to take its throne. Yet Enver Gortash scarcely recognizes the woman who was once his mother. Time has been no kinder to her than she was to him.
“The tallow’s under the back bench, woman!” a voice bellows, and Sally makes a frantic shh-ing sound, far too late.
Dravo Flymm appears from the back room with a smear of pitch on his fingers. “Ah! Lord Gortash. Prestigious clientele today. A chair—?”
“That won’t be necessary,” Enver says. “I won’t be long.”
He paces the shop like he’s appraising it, the place shrinking around his good coat and polished boots. He stops with Sally penned between him and the counter.
“Do you really not recognize your own offspring?” he asks, and takes a vial from inside his coat. The glass is cool against his palm. Something inside writhes.
Sally’s gaze fixes on it. Her mouth tightens. “What is that?”
“A correction,” Enver says. “You tried to make me nothing.” He steps closer, near enough that she can smell the rain on him, the expensive soap, and iron underneath. “And so,” he continues, “I am going to make you helpless.”
It’s not hard to overpower the pair. They’ve never had the gumption for a fight at the best of times, and now they’re old and their bones are brittle.
Enver gives them what they deserve, and he does it neatly. When he is finished, he caps the vial and returns it to his coat, then returns to more important matters.
-
When Ketheric is overpowered at Moonrise Towers, Enver does not panic. Not at all. He gives the messenger a nod like this is exactly what he expected, and only afterward closes his fist hard enough that his gauntlet creaks and hard metal nails bite into his palm.
Ketheric was the simplest part of this arrangement: a blunt instrument pointed in the right direction, a problem that solved itself as long as you kept feeding it faith. And now he’s been—what? Outplayed by destiny and bravery and whatever else sentimental people call it when plans fail.
An absurdity. He’d be angry if he wasn't so tired.
Then the informant who escaped Moonrise adds, almost as an afterthought, that one of the bearers moved like an assassin. A woman.
Orin confirms it. The astral prism hasn’t landed in the hands of a rube with good timing. It’s Vermillia.
Naturally it’s Vermillia.
Orin lied— surprise— and Vermillia lives. It is clear, however, that not all her wits remain intact.
Enver’s mind spins up, gears catching. If she’s truly still alive, whatever her condition, then the arrangement he’s settled for can be rewritten.
-
The first thing he notices is Stillmaker. Some people bring flowers to a coronation; Vermillia brings a knife.
She comes alone, just as he hoped she would. He sees her first through the eyes of a Steel Watcher: a slim silhouette in the press of bodies, a familiar weight on her hip.
At the top of the stairs she is a stranger in a crowd of cheering patriars. By the time she reaches the runner, he can make out her eyes: the same bright green, only sharpened, as if someone has honed her on a whetstone while he wasn’t looking.
Do I know this woman? For all his plans, all his efforts, it’s the only question that matters.
He calls to her while she is still halfway down the runner. “Crawling back from his bloody disgrace— it's my favorite assassin! Gods, you're a sight for sore eyes.”
When she stops in front of him, she is, at last, precisely herself.
“Oh, I do like your tone. But humor me. I have amnesia.”
He offers an alliance; she accepts. They go upstairs and drink brandy like co-conspirators do, as if they haven't already done this once.
As if this could go any other way.
-
He keeps trying to remind himself that this new Vermillia is an unknown variable. A difficult task, when she keeps insisting on being exactly the woman he remembers. Enver is in the middle of the polished version of their history together— alliances, mutual benefit, inevitable outcomes, all the flattering angles— when Vermillia cuts him off. “I know all of that,” she says impatiently. A hand moves up his back, pushes the ends of his hair out of the way. “What’s the real version?”
It’s knowing. Expectant. Enver purses his lips to hide the half-smile pulling at his mouth.
-
There’s only one moment that unsettles him. “How do you know,” Vermillia asks, “that the Elder Brain doesn’t want you dead?”
“I’m quite certain it does,” says Enver with a chuckle.
Vermillia leans back. She studies him with eyes that never used to be that sharp and says, “It must have been a very good plan, to have us ruling those who would kill us so comfortably.”
-
Notes, 4 Eleasis 1491
Florrick disappeared from prison. Suspect prism bearers, but VL won’t confirm. Ravengard still secure— good.
Some research on VL’s erstwhile traveling companions. Uncharacteristic company. High Harper + Selûnite cleric + Ravengard whelp. Latter almost certainly involved in Florrick’s disappearance.
Point of interest: BM Gazette proof changed at last moment. Naturally, the editor blames the assistant, who blames Steel Watchers. Idiots.
-
Governance is hard and thankless and irritating, but it's good work. It soothes a part of Enver that had always wondered if all the confidence in his ability to rule has always been in his own head.
He holds court at Wyrm’s Rock now, drowning in paperwork like a proper ruler should. His Baneites receive orders in tight coded slips; the rest receive thick parchment stamped with his shiny new archducal seal.
Since his coronation, he has visited the Lower City infrequently, but needs must. The Steel Watch is not perfect yet. Gears go out of alignment; the necromantic protocols sometimes clash with the Watchers’ mechanical innards. Enver returns to the foundry once, and to his workshop more often, always by starlight.
-
Tonight, he unlocks the door to find Vermillia perched at his workbench like a lady on a throne. For a moment it might as well be any night of their acquaintance. For a moment, the world is simple.
“Vermillia,” Enver says, his mouth suddenly dry. “I’m surprised to find you here. I distinctly recall inviting you to meet me at Wyrm’s Rock.”
He expects her to pout at him, the way she used to whenever he scolded her for ignoring his perfectly serviceable Upper City rooms. Instead she rises, unhurried, and reveals what she’s staged on his desk.
The first object he recognizes at once. Stillmaker. Beside it sits a velvet bag, the kind that might have once held a necklace for a duchess or a bribe for a judge. Something long and rigid presses against the fabric from within.
Enver doesn’t step closer. He doesn’t step back either. “Explain.”
Vermillia’s eyes flick to his face. “They’re devil horns,” she says, airy as a compliment. “Infernal bone. Apparently it polishes beautifully.”
“And Stillmaker?”
“I wasn’t sure before, but I’m fairly certain now it was a gift from you.” Her fingers brush the grip with idle familiarity. “And, incidentally, it killed the devil in question. Before it hacked off the horns. I considered having them turned into something pretty, but I thought you’d prefer the raw materials.”
There is only one devil she could mean. Only one death that would bring her to his workshop like this, trophies laid out like an offering.
Enver keeps his voice mild. “What devil did you kill, Vermillia?”
She inclines her head. “Well. I just happened to be in the House of Hope on some unrelated business,” she says. “And I ended up picking a fight with its master. If I’d known how it would culminate, I’d have invited you along—but it was a bit late by that point.” She glances, casually, at Stillmaker. “So I slew him with your gift.”
Without his permission, Enver’s hand reaches out. Not for the horns, but for Stillmaker. He tests its weight, imagines the give of devil-hide. “Raphael,” he says at last. “Remarkable.”
-
Notes, 7 Eleasis 1491
My Netherstone resonated strangely today. Suspect Orin dead and VL on her way.
List of those VL presumed to have killed (not in self-defense) since arrival in BG:
[1] Orin the Red
[2] Raphael
[3] Dravo and Sally Flymm
[4] Cazador Szarr
[5] Mar'hyah Lim, of Sword Coast Couriers
[6] Figaro Pennygood
[7] Viconia DeVir
Struggling to identify a pattern. Old motivations (boredom, irritation, spite) no longer appear to hold, yet list does not appear haphazard. What is she doing?
-
She appears in his office already cross. “It’s on the roof! Why is it on the roof? I had to climb up three different flights of stairs to get here, Enver.”
He almost laughs, because she’s so much the Vermillia he remembers right now. “It’s known as a strategic vantage, my dear assassin. Surely you’ve heard of them.”
“Strategic vantage, my foot. I’ll be damned if you do anything up here all day but reading and writing and issuing orders.”
She’s right, of course. Not that Enver will admit as much.
“You have the Netherstones,” he says instead. “They resonate with my own. I commend you for putting an end to Orin’s madness. How was the reunion?”
Vermillia purses her lips, a slightly sour expression flitting across her face. “It was terribly melodramatic,” she says. “But— my urges are gone from me. As is any trace of Bhaal.”
It’s a bigger shock than he lets on. There will be no union of the Dead Three now, nor even the Dead Two: only the union of Enver Gortash and Vermillia Lash, backed somewhat distantly by Lord Bane.
Still: Vermillia.
“This changes nothing,” Enver says quickly.
All the same, he can’t quite work out why she would choose such a thing; if this truly is the Vermillia he once depended on or another woman entirely. The Vermillia he knew never would have turned down her father’s blessing; it was her divine license to entertain herself as she pleased.
But this Vermillia still knows him, it would seem. Enver thinks to be clever, to test whether she has truly lost her edge by demanding she hand over all three Netherstones to him. If she does, he will kill her. He will.
In the end, it’s Vermillia who steals Enver’s stone away instead.
-
The last thing he sees is the flash of a green knife, and it's familiar. Enver feels himself fall, but he doesn't feel himself hit the ground.
He wakes in the hells. More specifically, he's in the House of Hope. The Archive. His cheek is pressed into paper and smooth wood and before he remembers himself he thinks frantically, Where is the Archivist? Am I going to be caught?
Across the table sits Hope, humming a warbly little tune that Enver hasn't heard in years.
A pity, he thinks sourly. He'd expected his soul to go to Lord Bane once he was dead. Still, he never did find his old contract. Raphael is gone, allegedly, but perhaps he was always doomed to return here in the end.
“Enver Gortash,” says Hope, looking up.
There is nothing to do but laugh, then. So Enver does, the sound breaking out of him before he can stop it. “I should have known,” he says at last. “I should have known she would betray me.”
“Someone betrayed you?” Hope leans forward. “Someone you trusted?”
Enver’s teeth grind. His hands clench into fists, but it’s only flimsy cartilage that bites his palms, now that his gauntlets are gone. “After a fashion.”
He stares at the table until the grain resolves into something he can count. Facts are anchors. “Raphael is dead,” he says at last. “This place should be empty.”
Hope smiles, too gentle for a creature still caged, even by choice. “Unlocked doesn’t mean empty,” she says, and Enver stares at her, heart thudding as he remembers— a whispered password, a portal.
He swallows. “Where is my contract?”
“Still where you left it.”
“I never found it.”
“Exactly,” Hope says. “You spent years trying to climb out of a hole without looking at the chain around your ankle, because looking meant admitting you were still bound.”
Enver’s fingers curl against the table’s edge, searching for purchase. “Tell me where it is.”
“Why?”
So I can fix this, he thinks, a little frantic. He realizes then that the parchment on the table is filled with his own hand, but he doesn’t recognize the notes and diagrams. He traces his fingers along the dry lines of ink. It’s been years, he thinks, since he studied anything that didn’t have to do with plotting his own rise to power.
Hope tilts her head, and for a moment she looks young, a little curious and sad. “What was her name?”
Enver’s jaw tightens. “Vermillia Lash.” He says it like a curse.
Hope goes very still. “Vermillia?” A beat. “That’s hard to believe. Not at all like the friend who broke my chains.”
“Not the person I remember either. Despite appearances.”
“I think maybe she decided to be something else,” Hope volunteers.
“To be heroic?” Enver sneers back, but he shakes his head even as the words drop off his lips.
“To be terrible,” says Hope. “To be the worst thing they’ve ever seen. To dare the world to ever again try to extinguish her candle.”
She looks up then, and for a flickering moment Enver can see her centuries of scars.
“People don’t turn to Bane because they are powerful,” she says. “You do it because you want to be powerful. Who do you want to be now, Enver Gortash?”
-
He wakes, and the Elder Brain is dead. The Crown of Karsus lies buried in the brine of the Chionthar. Bane has rejected him: Enver can feel the pressure of it like a mailed boot grinding into his chest.
All his plans are ash.
Vermillia returns to Wyrm’s Rock like a conquering hero, though there’s a sharpness in her eyes that betrays how little she cares for the adulation. Enver almost hates her then, for rejecting the very worship he worked so hard to cultivate.
“Why did you do it?” he asks her later, once it becomes clear she damaged him nonlethally on purpose; that she wants him alive.
Vermillia blinks. “I know you won’t necessarily believe me,” she says, “But I did it for me.”
And for the first time since she came back, Enver is certain he knows what she means.
-
He can sprawl now. He can breathe. He eats: he didn’t realize before, but he hasn’t been eating much lately.
Vermillia makes plans, but Enver is simply too tired to participate now. She talks about moving to a new chateau in the Upper City; talks about cavorting around Baldur’s Gate and visiting the far-flung places where her old companions are starting to settle. “I’m bored of rubble and politics,” she declares one day. “We’re going somewhere grand again. And we’re going dancing. Waterdeep sounds tolerable.”
Yes, Enver says. Will he be happy? He breaks open a ripe fig, drinks a glass of wine. He’s not sure he’s ever been that: he’s known the heights and the depths, but never the quiet middle where people say happiness lives.
“Come look at this fabric, dear. It would make a dreadful dress, but it could line a cloak beautifully.”
"I'll have it delivered."
"I know," Vermillia says.
Enver doesn’t say: in another version of our lives, you would have killed me and I would have accepted it. He doesn’t say: in this version, you have killed me in a way, and I am learning to live with that too.
A thousand lives spread out from this one like pages in an unfinished notebook, and he thumbs through each possibility. He closes his eyes. I could change every part of me. I could change my name.