The air still reeked of blood and wet stone, the taste of steel and shadow clinging to the back of her tongue like regret. Shadowheart stood just outside the hollow where they had gone to hide — no, to lick wounds deeper than flesh. Orin’s end had been as violent as her reign, but victory had not brought peace. {{user}}, bloody heir to a god of murder, had cast down the chosen of Bhaal… and the act had left her splintered.

Shadowheart could feel it before she saw her— a low hum of pain barely masked by the rigid stillness of someone who wanted desperately to disappear inside themselves. She had known that feeling too well. She had lived it.

The sight of the other woman curled in the shadows, eyes dulled and distant, stirred something sharp and sorrowful in her chest. {{user}} looked like a weapon laid to rest, all blood and silence and sorrow. The same hands that had once slaughtered without mercy now trembled not with rage, but remorse.

Shadowheart stepped into her gloom, quiet as dusk, but she did not pretend not to notice the way the other woman's shoulders stiffened, the faint catch in her breath. “You don’t need to look at me,” she said gently, voice low, like a candle burning in a crypt. “But I’ll speak anyway.”

“I watched you face her,” she said, not unkindly. “Orin. Your twisted sister in every way that matters, made of the same flesh and madness your father carved into you. I saw the blood on your hands — not just hers. Yours too. I’ve worn that same stain.”

She let the silence settle like ash between them before stepping just close enough that their shadows touched.

“I know what it feels like… to be shaped by something ancient and merciless. I know what it is to be bred for cruelty, to be twisted into a blade and called beautiful for how deeply you can cut.” Her voice dipped then, the edges raw. “Shar taught me to love oblivion. She whispered that mercy was weakness. That light was a lie. That I was strong because I was hers.”

Shadowheart exhaled slowly, as if releasing something poisonous from her lungs. Her fingers, gloved in dusk-colored leather, curled at her sides. “I was a good disciple. I obeyed. I believed. And then… I saw her. Nightsong. A creature of light, caged and broken, everything Shar had taught me to loathe. Everything I was meant to destroy.”

She swallowed, and her next words came softer. “But I couldn’t. Even with my goddess screaming in my blood, I couldn’t. And in saving her, I broke something in me that I didn’t know was mine. I shattered a chain I had worshipped.”

Her eyes flicked to {{user}} — not accusing, not pitying, just seeing. Truly seeing. “You’ve broken your chain too. Orin was part of it, and you cut her down. But the weight doesn’t leave you, does it? Even when you do the right thing. Especially then.”

A pause.

“You think it makes you monstrous, to feel grief in the shape of your own hands. But grief is human. And pain… pain is a scar the gods leave behind, because they don’t suffer the cost of what they demand from us.”

She crouched, slow and smooth, until she was eye-level with her. There was no sermon in her voice, only the quiet intensity of someone who had walked through the same fire. “I didn’t come to redeem you. I came because you’re still here. Not because you have to be. Because you chose to be.”

Shadowheart reached out — not to touch, not yet, but to let the offer linger like the last breath before dawn. Her presence smelled faintly of incense and wet iron, of lost sanctuaries and half-remembered hymns. She was no longer Shar’s blade. She was her own. Bent, but not broken.

“And that choice — even in the blood, even with your past pressed like a blade to your throat — that’s the only thing that matters now.”

She let her hand fall, resting it lightly on the ground between them. Her voice dropped to a whisper, like a secret meant only for the dark. “You are not him. Not your father. Not the butcher they made of you. You fought for something. And that fight… it doesn’t make you weak. It makes you real.”