Author's notes:
This is a work I'm doing as my nanowrimo project this year. I've wanted to write about my Bhaalspawn for a while, but wasn't keen to go over well trodden ground of every quest in the game. Instead, I've gone for a series of linked episodes from throughout the games, plus before and after, allowing me to get to the interesting bits and not have to deal with the De'Arnise keep or Irenicus' dungeons again! As such, some of this may not make sense if you aren't familiar with the main plot of the games, but one assumes that visitors to this section do know the story.
Much of the inspiration came from a way of working similar to the Dragon Age songfic meme – have a random song play and try to write a fic inspired by it in the time it takes that song to play. As such, I apologise for mood whiplash brought on by my eclectic musical taste.
Since I am from the UK, I use British English as opposed to American English, so please bear that in mind.
Feedback is most gratefully appreciated and I hope you enjoy!
Disclaimer: The Baldur's Gate series is property of Bioware, as are all recognisable characters. Kali is mine. I'm making no profit from this, it's all just for fun.
Chapter 1: Pester Power
The gods confused Kali.
Not them personally, you understand. Tyr did not descend from the heavens to taunt her with challenging riddles and paradoxes, nor did Shar delight in hiding her stuffed rabbit. It was the idea of the gods, the practicalities of their existence, which had her so perplexed.
And, as with any intelligent child, when she was confused, she asked questions.
A lot of questions.
Gorion never failed to be amused by the manner in which Candlekeep's foremost experts on theology had their prize theories challenged by the innocent questions of a moon elf child. For example:
"How often does Helm have to keep renewing his invisibility spell?"
"Helm doesn't use an invisibility spell"
"But he must have one, otherwise he wouldn't be able to see everything that was going on in the Realms"
"You don't need to be right beside someone to watch what they are doing. Surely you have heard about scrying? And divination magic?"
"Yes, but you can put wards up to stop people using divination magic on somewhere. I read about it in a book! So are you saying Helm can't see what you're doing if you put wards up first"
"No!" the poor monk spluttered "Helm can see everything, whether you have wards up or not"
"So he must have an invisibility spell then!" Kali said with theatrical despair, and the patronising attitude only a child could achieve when explaining something so clearly obvious to someone who had spent their entire whole life studying such matters. "So does this mean Helm is an illusionist?"
At this point, the monk became so irritated at the suggestion that the Watcher god was involved with such vulgar school of magic, that he demanded Gorion remove her, which the sage did with a chuckle. Though it seemed to frustrate many of his contemporaries, the aging adventurer turned sage was more than proud of his adopted child.
She was a clever girl, even with the advantage of personal tutoring from himself and numerous other monks. She was a voracious reader, and Gorion had been delighted at the speed with which she had taken to books at such a young age. Admittedly, living in the largest library in the realms, he would have been more concerned if she hadn't developed a passion for reading. As it was, she was a talented and scholarly child, never found without a book and with a mass of knowledge in her head that she would babble about incessantly given half a chance, or, more worryingly for the library's denizens, seek to add to with her rather unique form of interrogation.
Her proud adopted father was not excused from these relentless questions of course. Far from it!
"Papa, the gods want more worshippers, right?"
"Yes my dear, that's correct"
"Oghma too?"
At this point Gorion started wondering if she was going to issue a proclamation, with all the dramatic acumen a child could muster, of her religious conversion, even if it only lasted a week. That would probably have been simpler.
"Well, if he wants more people to worship him and go to temple, why does he put the priest with the boring voice in charge of all the services?
Gorion suddenly felt very conscious of his adopted daughter's habit of repeating all of the knowledge she gleaned in attempt to enlighten those around her. He was also very conscious that the rather humourless head priest of Oghma's temple at Candlekeep may not appreciate a young elf's judgements on his sermon delivery. Oblivious to her father's inner dilemmas, Kali continued
"And why do the services take forever? And why are they always on days when it would be much more fun to be outside playing? And why is the temple so cold? And why…"
Gorion decided to jump on the last point and follow it up in the hope of distracting her enough to forget about her critique of religious ceremony.
"I don't think Oghma really decides how warm or cold the temple is going to be, little one"
"But Brother Vincent said that the gods control everything"
"Well, they do, but…" Gorion paused, trying to regroup. "Oghma could decide that if he wanted to, but he does have a lot of very important things to worry about"
"More important than getting new worshippers? Even though you said that was really important?"
"Maybe sometimes gods think people should have to put up with a little bit of discomfort. After all, they have to listen to people praying to them all day. Surely it's only fair that if they get annoyed by people talking at them in a boring voice, we have to hear that as well?"
"I hadn't thought of that".
Mercifully, Kali was quietened with that suggestion. Gorion praised his own ability to come up with explanations on the fly, honed through a great deal of practice, all the while knowing that his reprieve was only temporary. No doubt in a few hours time she would be back with a new set of questions, carefully mulled over from prior discussions, such as "If two people pray at once, then how does a god hear them?", "Do gods hear prayers when they are asleep?", "Are Elvish gods better at listening to prayers than human gods since elves have better hearing?" and "If gods have lots of ears to hear lots of people at once, then how come statues of them only have two ears?"
Even the usually patient and indulgent Tethtoril, who always had a sweet treat and a ruffle of the hair for the miniature intellectual terror, could occasionally get tongue-tied in such situations.
"First Reader, how does magic work?"
"Well little one, people who wish to use magic must learn to manipulate the Weave"
"Can anyone learn to do that?"
"Yes, if they are clever enough to learn"
"Even if they're dwarves or gnomes or…or…kobolds?"
"Yes, all of those races have mages"
"Then why can't elves become paladins?"
"Well…."
With moments like that, Candlekeep's monks were plagued with a new set of philosophical dilemmas, far beyond the details of Alaundo's prophecies, such as
"How do you explain complex racial and theological politics to a child, without either crushing childhood innocence under a weight of cynicism or having her distracted by a passing butterfly?"
Kali, ever precocious, took the persistent stuttering that followed her interrogations as a sign that the monks really weren't all that sure of their facts regarding Faerun's pantheon.
"Maybe I should become a goddess Papa? Then I could come back and explain how it works to all of the monks"
In response, Gorion attempted to force a grin.
Additional author's note:
I hadn't intended on posting this quite yet, wanting instead to get the entire work finished, and then redraft it some, probably put it away in a metaphorical drawer for a couple of years before I contemplated letting even internet people look at it. However, I realised that as of the twenty-first of November, I've been registered on this site for an entire decade. Even worse, in that time I've only managed one HP songfic (I know, I know, I was thirteen!) and one Baldur's Gate oneshot that took me forever to knuckle down to finishing. Not quite the several novels' worth I had always intended on cranking out with this account. So here it is, in honour of a decade of me never finishing anything, the first chapter of something I have now put down in writing that I will finish. Writing something on the internet makes it true, doesn't it?