Across the Sword Coast, the temples and shrines had been unusually quiet. For months now, no cleric had collapsed without warning, gripped by a sudden vision of the Servant of all Faiths. There was a general sense of relief about this amongst the clergy. It had been happening so often that it was becoming a nuisance. Countless temple carpets had been spoiled by acolytes dropping their slop buckets and breakfast trays while lost in prophecies. More seriously, clerics had been interrupted in the middle of life saving healing rituals. A handful had even met with accidents themselves, falling from ladders or drowning in the bathtub.

It began to be said that whoever the Servant of all Faiths was, she must have fulfilled her destiny. Whatever calamity she'd been chosen to protect them from must've finally been dealt with. The storm, it seemed to them, had passed without anyone noticing.

Of course, not everybody was so easily lulled. The senior members of the paladin orders were still formally investigating the matter. While Shar and Lolth, the two deities most closely involved, had advised their followers directly that the threat was still looming.

Faerun's pessimists, mortal and divine, were soon proven correct. The Shade Lord was gone, his control of the Temple of Amaunator released at last. There were no more undead wolves to gnaw on Amauna's bones. Deep in her underground tomb, the spirit of the prophetess was free to broadcast her warnings again.

She was not selective in her choice of prophet. Up and down the Sword Coast, wherever a receptive mind was bent in prayer, the long-dead girl would possess them and start rambling.

"All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again."

Her life may have ended in ignominy and failure, but they had not called her a prophetess for nothing. Her own unforgivable sin was destined to be repeated. Someone would succeed where she had failed, in unlocking the power of a major god. They would use that power to do what she had meant to do and destroy all the evil of the world in one fell blow.

They must be stopped. Amauna used every scrap of power remaining in her to radiate her message like a blaring psychic siren. At least the gods had listened and chosen a new champion. Perhaps, if her warnings helped, she may finally be forgiven. Whatever was left of Amaunator might be persuaded to release her from this prison of undeath. She could only hope.

"Thou must heed me, thou must prepare!"

In the halls of the Most Holy Order of the Radiant Heart, Prelate Wessalen moaned and gripped his head. Skulking in a valley at the base of the Cloud Peak mountains, Alorgoth the Doombringer had to be caught by one of his followers. It was starting again.

Her broadcast even echoed faintly in the depths of the Abyss, and the souls of the Bhaalspawn listened, for her message concerned them more than anybody. It was not Amauna's vanished god whose existence was in peril this time, but they themselves. One recently deceased soul paused in her mauling of another, to see the vision first-hand at last.

"I told you we needed Viconia," Sarevok moaned from the cracked and blasted ground.

How he regretted complaining that existence in the Abyss was boring! These days he would give anything to have boring back. Not that his disembodied spirit had anything to give. A vast, skinless wolf, the horror of their plane, looked down at him with harsh grey eyes. She held part of his liver in her lipless jaws, chewing it thoughtfully between her teeth like a lump of gum. They had done this many times before, but Freya never seemed to tire of the hunt, and he couldn't die again. At least not for long.

"So that's it is it? We're all gunpowder for some act of divine terrorism? One big blast of god-essence and bang! Half the poor sods up there die, and so do we?"

"Not as many as half, sister," Sarevok managed. He liked to remind Freya that they were brother and sister. Vainly, he hoped that some very dormant sense of familial loyalty might persuade her to give up bullying him. "But you seem to have grasped the general gist of it."

Freya dropped his liver, letting it flop back into his insides. It quickly reformed itself and the wound sealed, ready to be chewed on again the next time the Bitch of Baldur's Gate got bored. Which was very often down here.

She cocked her head to one side, flexing the exposed muscles of her neck in a most unpleasant way. This really wasn't necessary. Strictly speaking, the souls down here could adopt any form, though it was easier to maintain the one they were accustomed to in life. He had, from a safe distance, watched Freya's spirit try to turn back into both her handsome human body and the great golden wolf. Only she seemed unable to keep either appearance for more than a few seconds at a time. Afterward, the skinless dog would crouch on her haunches panting. Whining to herself pitifully about 'divine debt,' and that silly girl Skie Silvershield that she'd used to hang around with.

Sarevok discretely tried to edge out from under her while she was pondering Amauna's revelation. Both paws landed squarely on his chest, pinning him down. After a while, her dense, canine brain seemed to finish processing the information and she pronounced her profound verdict on the situation:

"Bugger that for a lark!"

Her assessment was simpler than Sarevok's, but their general feelings on the matter were the same. The main difference was that he did not embrace the alternative either. One day, when the last Bhaalspawn was dead, their essence would remerge. The lake that had become droplets would once more become the lake. All of their souls would blend together, and Bhaal would be reborn.

Despite having a walnut for a brain, Freya was unique amongst the Bhaalspawn in having discovered this in life. She had accepted that she and Bhaal were the same being before she'd even died, and why not? According to Bhaal's own butler Cespenar, she was the most similar of any of the children he'd met so far to the original Bhaal. She was loud and charismatic with an overbearing personality.

They had everything down here from serial killers to newborn babies, but it was clear that some of the merged personas were going to have more influence in the reborn god than others. If they were droplets being mixed together, then Freya was a great big blob of black ink. It was obvious whom the new Bhaal would most resemble when all was said and done.

Sarevok was less sure about his fate. He had yearned to become a god in his own right, but he had no desire to be dominated by Freya for all eternity. To have his own mind and soul thoroughly eclipsed by hers. Better to be a mortal.

"Hey! I see her! Here doggy, here girl!"

Freya moved her vast purple-red paw from Sarevok's chest, allowing him to get up. Her bare, bloody tail began wagging automatically and she turned her nose in the direction of the voices. He watched her entire demeanour shift from murderous hell-hound to happy puppy and cursed the universe. How was it possible that he, (he who had dedicated his life to discovering every detail of their father's legacy!) had been outdone by this stupid creature?

With a friendly bark, she bounded away from Sarevok to the souls of waving children. Bhaalspawn who had survived the Cult of Bhaal's sacrificial altars, but perished not long after. They had been petrified of the flayed wolf when she had first shown up down here. With her lidless bulging eyes, blood-sweating flanks and hellish howl, who wouldn't be? Truthfully, he had been terrified by the apparition himself. They soon learned, however, that Freya was a threat to nobody but the slayer of Gorion. Him, and those adult shades unwise enough to torment the children in her presence.

The brats had quickly discovered that not only was their new pet a fine protector, but she could give rides, play fetch and dig the best holes. In a desolate hellscape where entertainment was scarce, she'd proven a big hit. Sarevok glared at the little wretches. He had never harmed a hair on their heads even before Freya showed up. Yet the hellions still delighted in another game; hide and seek. He'd hide, they'd seek and then report back to the fleshless dog so that she could tear him to pieces over and over.

For her own part, Freya had always longed for a big litter of puppies. This was certainly not the way she had imagined her wish coming true, but she was not unhappy in the Abyss. Except for her outstanding debt to the Silvershields and the knowledge that Skie remained trapped in the Soultaker dagger. That fact gnawed at the proto-god day and night, though there wasn't a thing she could do about it. Yet.

Children, and her soft spot for them, had led to a very peculiar alliance. There was a pale young man who fell to the Abyss shortly after Sarevok himself. A wan, lanky wizard to whom he'd paid very little heed at first. Eric, it transpired, had also managed to get on the wrong side of Freya in life. Doubtless he would have joined Sarevok as prey for her daily sport. Yet he was one of the few adult Bhaalspawn who had been willing to tend to the hundreds of crying, miserable babies trapped with them in their accursed existence. On that basis alone, she had let him off the hook.

One day, the sickly necromancer, jiggling a sad baby in each arm, had summoned the courage to seek Freya out. Sarevok knew about this because she'd had her bloody muzzle buried in his entrails at the time. The conversation which followed had intrigued him and, for the first time since his brutal death, had given him a ray of genuine hope.

"You put your own girlfriend under a geas to bring you back? You really are disgusting," Freya snarled, ironically, since her own chops were dripping with human offal. "Why are you bothering me with this, Eric? You were frantic to stay alive at all costs. That was your whole thing if I recall."

"I was desperate to avoid the afterlife," Eric corrected her. "I thought the Abyss was eternal torture. This… this isn't nearly as bad as I imagined it would be." One of the babies began bawling in his arms, and the necromancer looked strained. "Except for these poor creatures."

He had avoided hell, but effectively the infants hadn't. Lonely, helpless babies. Unloved and uncuddled without the mental capacity to understand why this was happening to them. They were suffering the fate he had always feared; eternal torture. He and some of the other less evil Bhaalspawn did their best with them, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. The vast majority of Bhaal's offspring had perished as babies beneath his priests' cruel knives, and they were all here now.

"And we all get to be a god eventually," the hell dog added. It was not clear how exactly she spoke, and Sarevok had given up trying to work it out. She had no lips, canine vocal cords and her mouth was entirely taken up by his own femur which she was chewing like a stick. Yet she somehow succeeded in producing words.

"Yes. And that," Eric agreed. "Listen, Freya, if Bubbles succeeds in pulling me back it will be your problem too. It will delay our ascension!"

"You think a powerless courtesan is likely to succeed?" the wolf asked, unconcerned. Sarevok strove to ignore his pain and strained to listen.

"She is not powerless anymore," Eric fretted. "That ring contains all of my learning and most of my magic. Bubbles knows everything I knew about necromancy and more. I would bet my life on her succeeding. In fact, you might say that I did."

Freya dropped Sarevok, and slowly the unfortunate ghost started to reform. She padded over to Eric across the cracked red earth that separated lakes of hellish larva. The wolf placed her horrifying face very close to his. Blood-stench filled his nostrils and he winced.

"What do you want me to do precisely?" she growled.

"You are the strongest entity in this plane," Eric replied with as much bravery as he could summon. Which in his case was never very much. "When she tries to pull me out, I will fight it, but it would help if you could pull me back."

"Done," snarled Freya. "Now clear off. Sarevok and I have some catching up to do."

"Is that really necessary?" Eric flinched. He had done nastier things to less guilty people while he was alive, but only under the influence of numbing potions. Watching others suffer without them made him squeamish.

"You're trying my patience, boy," the wolf growled. "Clear off."

Eric was certainly not about to challenge her on Sarevok's behalf. He quickly made himself scarce, taking the little ones with him.

Freya turned her fearsome muzzle back to her victim. Savage grey eyes stared unblinkingly. He never troubled himself to run anymore. It was impossible for a man to outpace a wolf, and he would only be making the chase more fun for her. Better to get it over with quickly, but while she shredded his body, his mind was getting to work.

Bhaal, he knew, had sired his offspring with mothers of all races, including the immortal elves. Waiting for them all to die might take a very long time indeed. Sarevok was not game for centuries of being Freya's chew toy, until her overbearing personality engulfed him completely. Eric wasn't taking Bubbles up on her offer of restored life.

"But I will," Sarevok thought.