For what might be the last time, Safiya and Adahni stood in front of the mirror in their shared room. The companions had spent the day conferring quietly around a table, and each knew their role in the fight to come. With her paints, Adahni covered the tattoos on Safiya's face, this time adjusting the black wig she'd nicked from the theatre troupe to the red wizard's head, braiding it and tying it up to mimic her own hairstyle. Safa wore a suit of soft clothes that had been dyed to mimic leather armor and enchanted to protect her as much as they could without interfering with her powers. Adahni switched out her flat boots for ones with slight heels so she and the red wizard would be the same height, and both painted the area around their eyes with bandit masks of black paint. Unless looking at them carefully, side by side under bright lights, one unacquainted with them would not be able to tell one from the other.
Back outside at dusk, they reconvened with their other companions.
"So we've got this down, right?" Adahni said, "We get in. Safiya, you stay towards the back of the group. I'll confer with the generals. Then we split up, Gann and Okku with Safiya, Kaelyn with me. Gann and I can keep in contact over long distances, we'll coordinate like that. Safiya and your group will deal with the demi-lich. According to my reading, he wants three tomes that will guide him on the road to Godhood - you go and you find them for him, but you do not under any circumstances give them to him, if that means killing him, you do it. When we've brought the God of Death to his knees, I will go to the spot in the wall where my soul lies. We meet there, in the City of Judgment, living or dead."
"I hope this works as well as you believe it will," Kaelyn said.
"As long as Safiya remembers how to talk like I do, I think it will," Adahni said.
"Fuck shit cunt tits," Safiya spat, "OK, I think I got it."
"You've got me down pat," Addie sighed, rolling her eyes.
"The resemblance is uncanny," Gann said.
"Don't get any ideas, hagspawn. I'll thank you to not carry over whatever creepy crush you've got on Addie here to me," Safiya warned.
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about," the hagspawn retorted.
"This has got to be the crassest speech I've heard before a final battle," Okku rumbled.
"Final, such a pessimist," Adahni scolded.
"No sense in putting this off any further," Kaelyn said.
"Agreed," Safiya said, "This wig itches like a rank son of a bitch. There, that was Addie-like, right?"
"That does sound like something I'd say," the bard said.
"Get it out of your system, you're going to be someone's mother," clucked Gann.
"Can't think of that right now," she replied, "This'll be the last battle for a few years, if I'm lucky. Longer than that if I'm not."
"I'm proud of you," said Kaelyn lowly.
"Not yet," said Addie, "Hopefully, by the end of this, you'll have a reason to be proud of me."
The sun was just under the horizon when the band tramped through the streets of Mulsantir. One at a time, they slipped through the portal and into the shadowlands where the sun would never rise. There were spirits in the street, ghosts of knights and ladies, of blacksmith and brewer alike, standing silent and motionless, as though to salute them as they passed from the stables up the hill to the Temple of Myrkul.
"How do we know the rest of the host will be there?" asked Gann.
"Time has no meaning on the Fugue Plane," Kaelyn said, "For those faithful to the Betrayer, they are standing, eternally at attention, waiting for their master to return."
"That's depressing," Safiya remarked.
"For them it's but a blink of the eye," Kaelyn said.
In contrast to the streets outside, the temple of Myrkul was deserted, silent except for the muted gurgling of blood-black fountains. Once again, Adahni and Kaelyn stood before the Betrayer's Gate. This time, the curse within Addie stirred, recognizing his own face on the murals. She quieted it - quieted him - and in a fluid motion, she drew the Sword of Gith from its scabbard and thrust it into the keyhole. There was a great crack, like a thunder clap too close for comfort - and the gate swung creakily open.
Walking through, Addie recognized the gray stillness that was the Fugue Plane. She expected her three generals, the generals, but those were not the three that first greeted her. Under a skeletal tree, three shades stood, looking much as they had in life, but with the muted colors that everyone and everything had in this place of the dead. She recognized Shandra Jerro right away, her eyes still sparkling with the same vivaciousness as they had when two of them walked the same plane. The second took her a moment, for the paladin Casavir was not wearing his habitual armor, but instead the robes of a monk, and it struck her all of a sudden how much of his identity was wrapped up in those shells of steel. But it wasn't just that, she realized. They were so much younger than they were when she knew them. Casavir had been thirty-two, but looked much older, gray hair already creeping up his temples. Shandra had been two years older and, though worry and guilt and who knows what else had not touched her as much as Casavir, lines had started cutting across her forehead and around her eyes. But these two were younger than Addie was now, Casavir's hair black as night, his face smooth. Shandra's cheeks were fuller, her eyes bright and without the perpetual dark bags underneath them.
The third shade was standing, her back to them, face against the tree. She was tall and willowy, wearing what looked like a farm girl's dress, but for the life of her Adahni could not place her.
"Have you come here for me?" she asked.
Shandra and Casavir looked at each other, then back at her.
"We were just discussing that," Casavir said, his voice the same warm baritone she remembered sometimes in her dreams, "None of us have been quite sure why we were called here, but all of us did feel the pull to assemble here."
"Kelemvor is summoning what pull he has over the righteous dead to try to dissuade you from your cause," Kaelyn warned.
"We were given no such instruction," Shandra said, "We just… we came through planes and shadows to come here. We didn't know why until we saw each other."
"I don't want them involved," Adahni said to Kaelyn, still not sure whether what she was seeing were the souls of deceased friends or some trick played upon her by the God that ruled them, "I'd rather rot in the Wall for three eternities than see them find the same fate."
"I think we are here to say goodbye," Casavir said, "For you do go to your doom."
"I've gone to my doom alongside you before," Adahni said.
"It was not yours, but it was mine," the paladin corrected her.
"And mine," Shandra added.
"Are you leading them there too?" asked Casavir, "As you did us, and Khelgar, and Zhaejve, and Grobnar?"
"No," Adahni said, "Cas, you can't…"
"No, no," Casavir said, a slow rumbling laugh coming, "You mistake me. To the last I followed you because it was the right thing to do. And… don't think I have forgotten my love for you, even in death."
Well there's a story you haven't told me… or thought about much, Gann said in her head.
"I know we once pledged that we would meet in the afterlife," he continued, "I didn't think it would be like this, but here you are, and here I am."
"Have the whispers on the wind told you why she has come?" asked Kaelyn.
"She is here to tear down the Wall of the Faithless," the third shade said, without turning around. Adahni could not place her voice.
"That's the most ridiculous, grandiose thing I've heard in my entire life, and the few years of death I've experienced," Shandra said, "You haven't changed a bit."
"Fraid not," Adahni chuckled, "Unfortunately, much like the last time we met, this is not my choice, nor is it one I would have made on my own. But if I'm to have my soul back, I must find an understanding with the God of Death. Even if that means tearing down the wall."
"Kelemvor is reasonable," Casavir said, "Not a sadist like Myrkul nor mad like Cyric. I think you will find a way."
"You haven't changed a bit," Adahni said, "Did you go to a place where it is always springtime?"
The paladin smiled, a wide grin that bared his teeth, one he had seldom graced her with in life, but it was genuine and the dread in her gut eased a bit as she saw it.
"I am granted the peace I never had while I lived," Casavir said.
"And Shandra? Did you find…"
The farmer girl smiled and nodded.
"I hope you know your deaths have always haunted me," Adahni said, not quite sure how else to express her regret for the part she'd played in their untimely deaths.
"We don't benefit from your mourning," Shandra replied, "But still…"
"The bards sing your names," Adahni lied. Well, not a lie really. Even as far away as Bezantur and Mulsantir, the ballads and plays also featured the companions of Adahni Farlong, but Casavir as the rival of the betrayer always got more stage time than Shandra, though her tragic death was also quite popular.
"Let them sing, or let them not," Shandra shrugged, "Well met, Addie. I must go back to my land."
"Land?" Adahni asked, confused.
"Oh, I hope you will see it one day," Shandra said, "But I also hope that that is not for many, many years." The shade approached Addie then, taking both her hands, "Time is nothing to me, but it is something to you. I wish you a hundred thousand more drunken songs before you come to join me." Shandra bowed her head as a goodbye, and turned to walk away. As she did, she did not so much disappear as fade away, her shape becoming nothing as she returned to the afterlife she had earned in Adahni's service.
"My springtime is calling me as well," Casavir said, "I hope you succeed, at least in saving yourself," Casavir said, "Kelemvor is… reasonable. And you've got more ahead of you."
"I'm sorry I left you there," Adahni said, finally giving voice to the ghost of a thought that had never really materialized for her.
"It… comforts me," the paladin said, "To think that you did not die in that dark place. That was the thought in my mind before I came here. It is comforting that you did not."
"Even though it was the ranger that… you know what? Nevermind," Adahni said, "I am glad you have your peace."
"We will go back. As pigeons, or as foxes," he said, repeating something he'd said to her, long ago.
"Simple woodland creatures," she replied.
"You have your task," he said, "The task at hand, as you always said. I hope, one day, when we are pigeons, you will keep that aspect of you."
"I don't know that I do," she said, "But that's for a bit, now."
"A long time," he said. The outlines of his body were already fading.
"It was good to know you are… content," she said.
His kiss on her forehead was a breath of wind, and he was gone.
The third shade was still facing the tree. Slowly, almost reluctantly, she turned, and Addie's stomach sank as she recognized her.
"Please don't be angry with me, Kyla," she said, as she looked the closest thing she'd ever had to a sister, or a mother, in the eye.
"You're going to get him out," the shade said, amber eyes snapping and sparkling, brighter and out of place amid the muddy hues of the Fugue Plane.
"I will," Adahni promised, "I have to. Kyla… I don't know how to tell you all that has happened…"
"I don't know how he died, or why, but the Wall of the Faithless is an abomination, and I won't have my son, my little boy, taken by it. I saw him there, I saw his face, contorted in pain. He looks no older than twenty, and yet he's died?"
"He hasn't, not quite," Adahni replied, "He lives, I'm not quite sure… I just…."
"You were supposed to look out for him," Kyla said, miserable, "You promised."
"I did what I could," Adahni said, forcing herself to be calm as the visions of a gaunt, bearded, motionless, Bishop sprang to her mind, "I made mistakes… but he is living. He is the reason I came."
The shade that was Kyla relaxed, her features softening, "Mistakes, yes. I have made them. I did what I could. I gave him the best life I could have. He's the last of my family, the only one I have ever loved."
"He's not though," Gann piped up.
"Shut up, Gann," Adahni sighed.
"He's not the last of it," Gann said, "The last of it is before you."
"What is this… strange man talking about?" asked Kyla.
Adahni glared at Gann.
"Spit it out," the shade commanded.
"Gods damn it all, I'm carrying his kid," Adahni blurted out, "I didn't mean for it to turn out this way, but, fuck it all, it did."
"That is all kinds of fucked up," Safiya observed quietly.
"We've been all kinds of fucked up," Adahni said to Kyla, "Look, I know you would have beat the tar out of me if you'd been around, and I'd have deserved it, but it's…. It's just what happened. It's what's been done. He's grown now, he was grown when… when it all started, I'm not a monster like..."
"Like our father," the shade said, "I wouldn't have accused you of that." She paused, her face serene, and asked, "Do you love him?"
"I do," Adahni replied. The words came out without hesitation, unexpectedly, surprising her with their readiness - and veracity. "I would do anything to save him, you have to believe me. If it turns out it's got to be either me or him rotting in that wall, I'd rather it be me."
Kyla reached out one pale hand and put it over Adahni's swelling belly.
"You'll get yourself out, and you'll get him out. You may pass."
Kyla was already fading away, back to whatever afterlife she had gotten for herself. As she disappeared, her outline becoming faint. As it did, other forms took shape, solidified. Over the rolling hills of the outskirts of the City of Judgment, a host stood. Men and women and creatures of all species. The blue dragon, the demi-lich, and the angel, much as she had seen them in her dreams stood around the outskirts. Safiya nodded, and went with Gann and Okku to meet the demilich.
"All right," Addie said to Kaelyn, "Let's hope Safiya is as good a mimic as I think she is. It's time."