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(i. during)
It’s like— having a dragon that lives in her chest, yanno? Not the weird githyanki red dragons or the undead lightning-thing that Ansur turned out to be. The big fire-breathers that Dad used to tell stories about: eight-inch claws, molten-metal breath. Bad tempers.
The one in Karlach’s chest is fucking temperamental. It’s got a mind of its own, and it’s trying to fight its way out of her ribcage most of the time. Stupid dragon, she thinks. Another dumb childhood dream that turned out rotten in the end.
-
When Vermillia returns to camp, dressed in swishy patriar velvet and determined to ally with fucking Gortash against Orin and the Brain, Karlach's heart damn near explodes.
Not her engine. Her heart. The soft, squishy part of her that’s long since decided Vermillia’s one of her favorite people.
Karlach stares at Vermillia and, before she can stop herself, blurts, “Wow. You always dress this nice when you’re teaming up with slavers, or is this a special occasion?”
Vermillia just smiles like it’s all terribly clever. “A bit of both, I suppose.”
And for a moment, Karlach just wants to laugh it off and make it a joke, like it doesn't hit like a hammer to the chest. Still. Gortash isn’t just another bad man to Karlach. He’s the bad man. She thought Vermillia maybe cared about that.
“I don't wanna talk now. Give me time. A lot of it.”
-
Karlach wasn’t Zariel’s only test subject. Not even close. Other poor sods got their chests ripped open too; Karlach’s just the one that lived.
They put fire, an engine, a dragon in her chest, and Karlach got stronger. Strong enough to lift stone and tear steel. Her muscles sang with heat and power. It hurt like the hells and felt wrong in all the ways she still can’t explain, but part of her liked it too. The engine worked. Just not for anyone else.
Gertie went first, as every single one of them, even Gertie, had known she would. Dwarves are built sturdy, but they're still so small: her lungs were too tiny to keep up with the damn thing.
Brask held Gertie's hand while she died, because Danel was starting to burn out even then. And Karlach was just burning. They’d locked her away in a bare room with nothing flammable for a while; Danel came and knocked on the door to tell her Gertie was gone.
-
Thing is, though: she’s home now. And home is kind of an attack: it ambushes her with stupid little joys until she’s grinning in spite of herself, like the city’s grabbed her by the collar and gone, no, no, you don’t get to only be angry. Karlach’s always treated happiness like a dare: if she can still find it, she’s winning.
They run into Fytz by the old Central Wall, and Karlach gets to reminisce about old times with someone who knew her when she was just a scrappy, knobby-kneed kid. (And, incidentally, who remembers what a piece of shit Gortash was, even then.) She says she'll visit Fytz for dinner later, and pretends so hard it almost feels like a real promise.
She visits the cemetery where her folks are buried. It’s the same as she remembers: flowers and cheap tombstones and the wind in the trees. “I’m sorry I haven’t visited,” Karlach tells her mum and dad. “But I’m back now. And I brought friends.”
Shadowheart and Wyll and yes, Vermillia, flank her from the back, listening quietly, making space for Karlach’s grief. They’re good friends, she decides, even if one of them does have shit taste in allies.
She chews her lip and tries to ignore the thought. She tries to remember her dad in his battered armchair, head bowed, hands old, calling her kiddo like she's still six. Tries to think about her mum, braiding her hair and helping her move her bed right under the window so she could wake up with the city.
“I’m happy,” she tells them. “And getting up to some really important shit.” As if important was something Pluck and Caerlack Cliffgate ever wished for their daughter.
“Anyway,” she finishes, swallowing back the knot in her throat. “Taters.”
-
Karlach’s outlived a lot of people who deserved better. Her mum died of a fever that could’ve been treated if they’d scraped together coin a little faster, and when that happened, Karlach thought it was the end of the world. Poor sap. Didn’t know the half of it.
Danel talked while he died. About his kid sister. About food. About summers in Elturel and half-remembered songs. His cheeks stayed rosy even when everything else was failing him, like he was pretending to be alive right up to the end.
And Brask’s engine just gave out one day, bursting under the pressure of the power they were trying to cram into him, the weight of all that heat. It was sudden. Karlach remembers folding over gasping, like something in her chest had snapped too. She’s scared, still, that one day it’ll happen to her the same way.
-
Gortash barely even acknowledges Karlach when they all climb to the top of Wyrm’s Rock with the Netherstones. He's too pleased with Vermillia and their neat little alliance to notice much else.
Except. Karlach lunges at him, all fury and pressure in her chest, and he deigns to look her over and say, “Karlach! So you made it out after all. And just look at you— your fury's made you strong.” And he smiles like he’s proud of himself.
Karlach thinks, for a moment, of the discoveries they made at Flymm’s Cobblers, how Gortash clawed his own way out of being sold to a devil, and realizes: fucking hells. Bastard thinks he did me a favor.
Her jaw clenches. She doesn’t look at Vermillia. If she looks, she’ll see— what? Amusement? Agreement?
But Vermillia steps half a pace closer anyway, a velvet-shadow at Karlach’s shoulder. It feels like she’s taking her side.
Vermillia cold-clocks the fucker about four seconds later, a swift blow to the head with the butt of her dagger. Then she bends, elegant as ever, and nicks his Netherstone straight off the stupid, gaudy gauntlet he wears. For one blistering moment, Karlach thinks he might actually be dead.
But no. Of course not. Vermillia’s territorial about shit like this; she doesn’t care that this should be Karlach’s kill.
-
Gortash thinks he knows why Karlach survived. He calls her strong, like she’s passed some kind of test. He says her fury kept her alive. Karlach just thinks how little he must know about living.
Yeah, she was angry. She still is. But Brask was strong too. Danel had a home to get back to. Gertie had so fucking much to live for, nineteen and small and dying for other people.
Karlach just got lucky. She lived because she lived. That’s all that ever happens.
-
By the time they’re climbing up toward the Brain, Karlach can feel her chest working wrong.
Not in the way she's used to, like being cooked alive from the inside out. This is sharper. Like the dragon’s stopped thrashing and started listening. Like it knows there’s something bigger than Karlach up ahead and it’s eager to bite it.
Vermillia's talking tactics, making sure everyone knows their jobs. “None of you are allowed to die today,” she says, as if that's enough to prevent it. Shadowheart’s murmuring prayers. Gale's fiddling with his staff. Wyll keeps glancing at Karlach like he can will her into being careful.
But Karlach isn’t careful. Karlach doesn’t know how to be careful when the whole city’s hanging by a thread.
She thumbs a soul coin and her overtaxed engine burns so hot it nearly comes back around and feels cold. Heat floods past her ribs; her muscles go light with it, humming, eager. The dragon in her chest bares its teeth and Karlach grins, buoyed by the relief of having something simple to do.
She swings her axe.
For a handful of heartbeats it’s glorious: strength without consequence, fury with a target. The kind of power Zariel built her for. And then her chest catches.
Not pain, exactly, but wrongness. A stutter. Like the engine remembers Brask, and wants to try bursting. Karlach’s breath hitches and her vision warps at the edges. She can’t tell if she’s going to fall or explode.
Vermillia's hand closes around her wrist hard enough to bruise. “Karlach,” she says, low and furious, like she can bully her body into behaving. “Stay with me.”
So Karlach swallows bile and forces air into her lungs.
The engine doesn’t break. It just hurts. It hurts and hurts and hurts, like it always has, like that’s the only honest thing it’s ever done.
-
She’s been waiting to die since she was fourteen, curled up next to her mum, both of them burning with the same cheap fever. Her mum went quiet. Karlach didn’t. She keeps not fucking going.
She heard how Gertie went cold through a locked door. Watched Danel burn away. She saw Brask’s engine burst like a star, but hers kept ticking, a whole decade on the front lines of the Blood War.
Then it’s the tadpole. Weeks of waiting to turn into a tentacled nightmare. Months of looking at every headache like it’s the start of the end. She swings her axe into a fucking Netherbrain and thinks, right. This is it. This has to be it. But it never is.
So she’s waiting to die on a dock, and the sunset is so fierce it looks like the sky’s trying to set itself on fire. The wind feels cool on her face, like she’s almost forgotten it could, and Wyll Ravengard catches her. You’ll keep waiting, he tells her, like it’s a promise. You’re not done yet.
Vermillia’s standing behind him, green eyes flashing like a dare. “We’re survivors,” she tells Karlach. “Go survive.”
The difference between them is like this. Vermillia survives like a blade does: polished, sharp, cutting anything that gets too close. Karlach survives like a big, dumb, lucky hammer. But somehow, they both keep standing.
(ii. after)
When she and Wyll finally get her engine properly cooled off, after four too-long years of killing devils and demons in Avernus, Karlach comes home to Baldur’s Gate to find that Vermillia’s gone and married the evil bastard. Fucking Duke and Duchess playing house in a big chateau in the Upper City.
Well. If that’s how it is, then Karlach’s not interested in seeing either one of them. She and Wyll get a place together, modest but respectable, but they’re off adventuring in the countryside more often than not. Blade’s gonna blade, and all that.
She should have known Wyll was too good a person to avoid a friend forever. He and Vermillia get brunch one day (Karlach’s picturing posh finger food and bubbly wine), and pretty soon Vermillia’s stalking Karlach down the street, like Karlach owes her an explanation.
“It’s good to see you,” Vermillia says, and all Karlach can think is, gods. The fucking nerve on this one.
Vermillia goes in for a hug, and part of Karlach knows it’s a concession: Vermillia isn’t a hugger, but Karlach is, and Vermillia’s bothered to remember. Karlach dodges it anyway, a clean step back and a gesture with her arm that almost manages not to feel defensive. “I don’t hug people who sleep next to evil fucks,” she grinds out.
Vermillia’s eyes flick to Karlach’s empty arms— the space where the hug would’ve gone— and then back up, pleasant as a hostess.
“All right,” she says. “Don’t.”
Karlach points at her, finger shaking. “I told you what he did. I told you I was young and stupid and I trusted him, and then I was in Avernus with my chest ripped open and—” Her voice cracks. She swallows it down and tries again, quieter, meaner. “And you chose him anyway. You knew. You knew that, Vermillia.”
“I did,” Vermillia says, and it’s not a confession, just an acknowledgement.
“And you married him.”
“Yes,” she says. It lands like a thrown knife.
Karlach steps forward, heat rising even though there’s no heat left to blame it on. “Why? Go on then. Tell me. Was it the money? The titles? The fancy fucking house?”
Vermillia tilts her head. “If you think I need a man for money, Karlach, you really have been gone too long.”
“Then what?” Karlach growls through bared teeth.
A carriage rolls past, lacquered and loud. Someone tips their hat at Vermillia like she’s part of the architecture. Karlach feels suddenly, viciously, like she’s the only one standing here with blood still under her nails.
Vermillia’s gaze sharpens, a quick flash of irritation— not at the question, but at being made to answer it on the street like she’s on trial. “Because he’s mine,” she says simply.
“Oh, fuck off.”
“No,” says Vermillia, tartly.
Karlach stares at her, blinking hard. “You’re not even sorry.”
Vermillia considers that, head still tilted to the side. “I’m sorry,” she says at last, “that it happened to you.”
“That’s not the same,” says Karlach, and leaves before she has to listen to any more fake fucking apologies.
Worse than the anger is the part of her that still misses Vermillia. She's a piece of work, sure, but she was stubborn and shrewd and always there when it counted. Karlach could use another friend like that.
She goes home and locks herself in her bedroom, then slides down the door until she’s sitting on the floor. She can’t decide if she wants to laugh or cry. Either way, she wants to do it so hard she can’t breathe.
-
Karlach learns what happened to Gortash after the Brain was defeated in little dollops. Wyll remarks that he still maintains the Steel Watch, but they’re under City Watch jurisdiction now. A tighter leash.
A page in the Gazette seems to indicate that after the battle, the Parliament encouraged him to step down, since the state of emergency was over. An old gossip column notes that he kept the ducal title, dropped the arch-. As far as Karlach can tell, he married Vermillia about a year on. She took his title, since it technically outranked her own; he took her name.
That last bit surprises Karlach. Gortash always seemed so fucking proud of being Gortash.
-
(And another thing: she knows, she knows, that who lives and dies is random and stupid and unfair. But whatever god decided to let good people die in the hells while Gortash gets to live needs a kick in the nuts. Or, yanno, whatever divine beings are supposed to have instead.)
-
She isn’t expecting to run into him at some big fundraiser thing she goes to with Wyll. Post-save-the-city, Wyll's back on excellent terms with Florrick and his father’s old guard, and he makes appearances at these things sometimes. Karlach, honestly, is just here for the food.
She sees Vermillia off in a corner chatting up some pompous whatshisface and gives a little nod, gets one back. Somehow, Karlach stupidly doesn’t make the connection that she and the evil bastard come as a matched set these days. Gortash— Lord Lash, gods help him— is a few tables away, gabbing with a pair of patriars like nothing’s changed at all.
Karlach gets up. She almost can’t stop herself. If she still had her engine to worry about, she’d blame that, but fuck it. This is all her.
Gortash smiles when he sees her. “Ah, Karlach. You look well,” he says pleasantly.
Karlach crosses her arms. “Yeah. Guess I’m just stubborn.”
“A useful quality,” he replies mildly. “Hardship has a way of refining those who survive it.”
She looks at him then, really looks at him. Studies him even, the way Gale would study a spell scroll. Dressed in his gaudy-as-hell coat with little gold flames embroidered down the front, eating with patriars he doesn’t rule anymore, she suddenly realizes he’s not a threat to her anymore.
He looks smaller than she remembers, somehow. She pictures him groping for control in Raphael’s place, telling himself stories about how strong and powerful and safe he would be one day.
“You ever think maybe some shit just hurts?” Karlach says. She exhales through her nose, almost a laugh. “Mate, sometimes the forge doesn’t make you stronger. Sometimes it just burns.”
-
She fucks off with Wyll to go fight trolls up the coast for a few months. It clears her head. Swinging an axe still feels good, and the hugs she gets from the kids they rescue might just be the best thing in the world.
Back in the city, she sucks it up and sends Vermillia a note. After Avernus, she’s sick of being angry. Let’s meet up, she writes. Elfsong Tavern, for old time’s sake.
-
“You don’t have to like him, you know. I never expected you to.” Vermillia’s halfway through taking off the evening’s makeup, when she stops and looks over her shoulder at Karlach, lobbing the words like an Orthon’s bomb.
“Good,” huffs Karlach. “Because I never will.”
Vermillia hums assent, softly. She turns back to the mirror. “I still want to keep you,” she says, and it’s the closest Karlach can imagine to an admission of care from this ridiculous, stuck-up Bhaalspawn she calls her friend. “I value you— a great deal.”
“Well, you’ve got me,” Karlach sighs. “For whatever it’s worth.”
-
Maybe the old folks have got it right with their truisms, Karlach thinks, walking down Vermillia’s posh cobblestone street with the sun setting fiery behind her. Time is a thief. Life is a gift. The past is the past and it is what it is. Maybe that’s the only story that works at all. Just that, and life, and the red, red sunset lighting up the sky.