The Journal of Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle

Home, the river town and the bright realm both, before it fell. This one I do not need anyone to tell me.

Elturel began as a river town and spent most of its life as one, a cliff above the Chionthar a day or two upriver of Baldur's Gate, the market and strongpoint of the farmland around it. It grew rich off the trade that had to pass it and kept that trade safe with its riders. There was nothing holy about it. It was a hard, prosperous farming city that knew what came up out of the Fields of the Dead to the west and kept a cavalry good enough to turn it.

What changed it from a city into the seat of a realm was the Companion: a second sun hung over the city that did not set when the true sun did, that lit the whole country bright as an overcast noon and was poison to the undead and torment to the things that love the dark. The word given out was that it was a blessing of Amaunator, granted to a faithful city, its workings known only to the High Observer. The country believed it, because the proof was overhead every night and the roads were safe for the first time in living memory. We know better now. The Companion was never a blessing. It was the visible half of a bargain struck with Hell, and its price was the city, payable in full on a date the man who signed it knew and the city did not.

Around it the realm of Elturgard was built, righteous to the edge of cruelty: ruled by a single High Observer, a servant of Torm answerable in theory only to the god, with officials as righteous as the law above them and a punishment waiting for any merchant whose faith ran a degree soft. Safe, prosperous, and not an easy place to live if you were not as bright as the state required.

The last High Observer was Thavius Kreeg, and he is why there is no city to go home to. He held the office that knew the date the bargain came due, and rather than warn us or spend his years trying to break it, he made a second deal to save himself. When the day came the light went black, the chains came down, and Elturel was dragged off its cliff into Avernus entire, walls and people and all. A hundred and fifty of us came through his portal in the first wave. The rest went down with it.

So what we are fighting for is neither the river town nor the bright realm. It is what is left of both, chained over the wasteland with the Companion dead and silent overhead. I would not cross the road to save Elturgard the theocracy. I would walk into Hell for Elturel the city, the cliff and the river and the farms and the people who came to it to be safe, which is, I notice, precisely what I am doing.

The city that took us in, such as its welcome was.

Baldur's Gate sits a day downriver of where Elturel stood, on the same Chionthar, which is worth holding onto: the road we fled down and the road New Elturel was raised along runs between two cities on one water.

It began as nothing. Poor soil, a fishing hamlet, a foggy harbour better known to wreckers than to honest captains. What made it was a seafarer, Balduran, who came home rich beyond reckoning, spent a fortune walling the harbour, sailed off again and never returned. The wall outlived the man. Farmers turned it to their own use, people sheltered behind it, and the settlement became a city and took his name, though no Baldurian will call themselves a Balduran, which is reckoned an insult to the founder.

The wall made the city and the wall split it. The landowners inside it taxed the carts coming up from the harbour through the gate the place is named for; the harbour men paid until they would not, then breached the gate and stormed the high town. It ended in a truce brokered by four sea captains, installed as dukes half in jest, and the jest has governed the city since: a Council of Four, elected for life. Baldurians settle power by deal, not by dynasty, and have done since that first quarrel over a toll.

What followed was money. The trade swelled and the city with it, until it out-traded Waterdeep and Amn both. The old high town became the Upper City, where the patriar houses keep their manors and their own Watch; the harbour became the Lower City of markets and docks; and the people the city needs but will not house spilled past the wall into the Outer City entirely. Three tiers, and the wall meant to keep enemies out marks, just as plainly, the line between who the city protects and who it merely uses. Under all of it the Guild runs the poorer streets, and the Fist and the Guild have contested the place longer than anyone now living has been alive.

It has stayed rich by staying out of other people's wars and profiting from all sides. That is the city we walked into as refugees: old, rich, tiered, and honest in exact proportion to what you have to trade. We did well enough out of it in the end. I have not forgotten that we were on our knees in the wet grass first.

The company Kaelis and Eryador serve, as I have come to understand it.

Baldur's Gate keeps an army and calls it a watch, and the two have never quite been separated. The Flaming Fist began a century and a half ago as a mercenary company, raised by a soldier named Eltan who rode it all the way to a dukedom, and for a long time it sold itself by the cohort to whoever could pay and lost whole companies on expeditions no one came back from. What it is now is the garrison of the Gate and the watch of the Lower City both: the strongest blade on this stretch of coast, turned inward to hold one city instead of hiring out to ruin others.

It runs on six ranks, and a Fist learns them before anything else. A Fist is a private; a Gauntlet a corporal, which is Eryador; a Manip a sergeant, which is Kaelis; then Flame, then Blaze, which the Portyrs carry, Liara over the whole Fist while Ravengard is away and Harker over the Basilisk Gate; and at the top the Marshal, which is Ravengard, who never set the rank down when they made him a Grand Duke. A Manip's order is the Marshal's order by the time it reaches a private, and a private who needs that explained does not stay one.

It recruits from the bottom of its own city, and a fair number arrive out of a cell with the choice of a uniform or worse. That is its strength and its rot at once. Some Fists are the thing the recruiter promised. Others take the bribe and swing first. The Gate is a corrupt city and the Fist is no cleaner than what it polices, but at its best it believes it is the one thing standing between the Gate and the Guild that would otherwise own the place, and at its best it is right.

What I keep returning to is the oddness of where it has ended up. An order built to hold one gate on the Chionthar now has its Marshal starving behind a wall in Hell and two of its officers, ours, somewhere east of Knucklebone. The chain of command still, on paper, runs all the way home.

Nuovis's order, set down as she tells it.

Nuovis's people are the oldest answer to an old problem: that the wild and the settled will each eat the other if nobody stands between. They are druids and wardens scattered in small cells across Faerun, benevolent and feared in equal measure, because the same order that drags a lost traveller out of a snowdrift will burn a logging camp that took more than the wood could spare, and it does not always say in advance which it has come to do.

Their creed is not preservation, and Nuovis is sharp about the difference. A fire is nature; so is the regrowth after it. What they keep is the balance, so that no one part swallows the rest. She gives it in three lines: the order of nature is kept in all its forms; anything that would break that order is put down; and aid is given to anyone left hurt or exhausted, because the wild is harsh and harshness is not licence to let people die in it. The first is why they exist, the second why they are feared, the third why they are trusted, and a druid who keeps only the second becomes the thing the cautionary tales are about.

They wear no uniform, only a single green token somewhere on the person, and they take no side between good and evil on principle, because a keeper of the balance who has picked a side has stopped keeping it.

I owe them more than I find comfortable. That grove on the Baldur's Gate road is why we have a town. Nuovis's word opened the door; we paid for it in the Cloakwood, burning a Shadow Druid rot out of a grove they could not reach in time; and in return their druids raised New Elturel out of living wood faster than any mason could have laid a stone. Warden Willowmantle, who walked us through the Cloakwood, is the order at its best, an ally who is also a friend.

Which is why this place sits worse on Nuovis than on the rest of us. Avernus is an ecosystem in the strict sense, predator and prey and a flow of energy through the whole of it, except the energy is souls and it runs one way, into furnaces and coins and throats that give nothing back. There is no balance here to keep. There is only a machine running on the very thing her order exists to protect, and she reads it, step by step, more clearly than any of us.

Cael's order, as the living order tells itself.

Cael's order is the cavalry of Elturgard, and older than the realm it serves. They began as the army Zariel raised to shut the infernal gate, and ended that war broken, a few hundred where thousands had ridden out. Jander Sunstar rebuilt the remnant into a standing order sworn to Elturel, and they have been the city's shield ever since. A Hellrider is told the homecoming in their first season and never let to forget it; the whole idea the order holds of itself rests on having ridden into Hell once and come back.

In the old creed the work was plain: ride the western marches, keep the roads, stand between the farms and whatever came up out of the Fields of the Dead, and ask no thanks. They held no land and chased no titles, and the mark on their plate was an upturned crescent.

The order changed when the realm did. When the Companion went up and Elturel became the seat of Elturgard, the Hellriders became its holy cavalry, and the crescent gave way to the sun and its companion, which is what Cael wears. With the new mark came prestige and a place near the top of a theocracy of light, and not all of them carried the old plainness with it. The split runs quietly through the order still, between those who hold a commission as a station and those who hold it as a debt owed to people who will never know their name. The ones worth following are the second kind, and they are usually the ones who have bled for it. Cael is the second kind.

They keep Jander's forms: they ride in lances, sworn companies under a captain, and the bond inside a lance outlasts most marriages. Many swear to Torm, and it shows, the oath is the thing, and one that breaks under pressure was never worth swearing. Their watchword is "For Glory," said into the charge and said over the dead. It is also, I will note, the phrase Maggie put in our mouths at Knucklebone, which I have not stopped turning over.

They have never stood lower. Sixty or ninety of them hold High Hall under Ravengard with the city starving behind, no horses worth the name, riding what they can drive. For the first time since Jander brought the order home, they are in Hell again, for Elturel, exactly as the old creed always warned they might be.

The Homecoming General, as Cael and every Hellrider tell it.

Every Hellrider learns his name in their first season, so I have it from Cael several times over now. Jander Sunstar was a sun elf of Elturel, born when the place was a river town and not the seat of anything, and he had carried a sword for it the better part of two centuries when the fiends came up out of the Fields of the Dead and the city's own horse could not hold them. When Zariel came and raised her army to shut the gate, Jander was among the first to kneel to her, and she made him a general.

What waited beyond the gate the order tells in few words: Avernus was worse than any warning, thousands rode in, the line broke, and the angel was lost. The story they keep is that it was Jander who would not let Elturel's sons be thrown away on a war already finished. He gathered what survivors he could reach, cut a road back to the gate through ground that wanted them all dead, and brought them home, and the gate was barred behind him so nothing of Hell could follow. By their account he came through it last, on foot, the bar dropped at his word.

He could have hung up his plate on the strength of that one deed and no one would have asked more. He did the opposite. He stayed in the saddle and spent the rest of his long life making the broken order whole: drilled the children of the dead, set down the lances and the ranks and the rites the Hellriders still keep, and turned what was left of Zariel's army into Elturel's own shield, sworn to the city and the farms and the western road rather than to an angel or to glory.

He fell a long time ago, holding that same western road one last time while the country folk were brought inside the walls, on the very ground the first fiends had come up through. They brought home his crescent plate and little else.

Cael speaks of him as the proof the order holds against its own fear: that a man can ride into Avernus and come back, that the gate can be shut. I write it down as he tells it. I have also learned to hold a clean story a little more lightly on the day I am to stand where it is buried, and we are nearly there.

The angel the Sword belongs to, and the question waiting at the end of it.

This one is Kaelis's to carry, but it touches all of us, so I set it down. The Hellriders were founded on Zariel's charge: when the lower planes threatened to break through, an angel of pure light came down to lead a holy war, and Elturel's knights rode with her through the gate. Most never returned; it closed behind them with the war still raging. In every account the order keeps, she was tireless, merciful to the innocent and pitiless to fiends, the ideal the Hellriders swear themselves to. Her name is on their chapel walls and in the first verse of their hymn.

She was lost in Avernus, and the order tells it as a tragedy, the brightest light left burning too long in a dark place. What they say less often is what she became. She is a devil now, an archduke of this very layer, the lord of the place her own order once charged into, the same being twisted into a thing that hunts mortal souls and sends devils up the road to take them. Her cult festered in Elturel; Thavius Kreeg, who sold the city, was its high priest. The order has lived inside that contradiction for centuries by insisting the angel and the devil are no longer the same being. The line holds less well now that she has dragged the city out of the sky.

The war council is split on her. Garrick has voted to kill her and be done; the angel is dead, he says, and what remains is a devil who burned his city. Alouette argues for redemption, that the order sent her into the cause she fell in and so owes her at least the attempt. Ravengard has not committed; he is waiting for the question to turn practical.

It will turn practical through Kaelis. The Sword he carries the Aspect of is the only thing in the multiverse that can either destroy Zariel or restore her, and whoever wields it decides which. His oath gives him no clean answer, and neither do I. I only note that the choice is coming, that it is his, and that the rest of us had better know our own minds before it lands on him.

What Eryador serves, and what he reads in this place that the rest of us cannot.

Eryador's god was the first god of death, and he gave it away. Before Kelemvor weighed the dead or Myrkul wore the crown, there was Jergal the Final Scribe, across whose desk the whole world's dying passed to be recorded. He held the office for an age, grew weary of a power that asked nothing of him but bookkeeping, and stepped down, letting three mortals take the portfolios he no longer wanted and fading to a seneschal who serves whoever sits the throne and outlasts each of them. So Eryador does not serve death as terror or as judgement. He serves the orderly accounting of an ending that comes to all things in their proper time. Jergal is not unkind. He is not anything. He records.

His church keeps that temper. They are scribes who spend their lives in dry crypts maintaining the registers of how the dead died and where they went, and the work is the worship. What a cleric of Jergal cannot abide is a death left off the books: an ending that has not happened when it should have, a soul neither alive nor gone on nor recorded, a name the ledger cannot close.

There is an old account under this, which he has not said aloud and I will not press. The three mortals who took his god's throne were Bane, Bhaal and Myrkul, the Dead Three, whose cult we tore out of the dungeon beneath Baldur's Gate. The priest of the original death walked into the temple of the usurpers and closed some of their entries himself.

None of it prepared him for the descent. He looked into the haze on the way down and saw the dead in their hundreds, devils come apart over that battlefield and not one of them permitted to pass on, and that was only the air. The ground is worse, because there the thing has been made into an economy. A damned soul becomes a larva, farmed and sold by the sackful. A soul of consequence becomes a coin, burned in a furnace for fuel or spent across a notary's table, and we carry a bagful of them now and have spent them like money, which is the trap of the place. And the Styx does not carry the dead onward to anything; it strips the memory out of them by the root. Every part of it is an ending withheld and put to work.

So Eryador walks through Hell reading an account that will not close, mile after mile of names that should be in the ledger and are in furnaces instead. His doctrine says all things end in their proper time. What he is looking at is the proof that down here they do not, and that someone has made very good money seeing to it. I do not think the church ever had a priest standing where he is now, and I do not think it gave him an answer for it.

From the working journal of Countess Henzia-Mathilda von Trouser-Waffle, Diviner. Written at a halt east of the Wandering Emporium, the air gone cold ahead of us in a way that owes nothing to weather, the tomb a day off and perhaps less.

I keep a page in this book, several pages now, for the things the others tell me that I do not want the road to take with them when it takes them. This is not a country where a man can be relied upon to be alive next week to repeat himself, and I am the one of us who writes things down. Cael has caught me at it and calls the page by a blunter name than the one I gave it. He is a soldier and his name is the more honest of the two. It is my book, so my title stands at the head, and his is now recorded here exactly once, which is the whole point of the exercise.

This page is owed to Cael, who has been talking since the Emporium in a way he does not usually talk, because we are driving toward the graves of his order's founders and the fact of it has loosened something in him. The history he has poured out, the Homecoming and Jander and the changed crest, I have set down on its own pages and will not repeat here. What I keep on this one is the man.

He is carrying it the way you carry a full cup across a long room, watching it the whole way, afraid of spilling. Every Hellrider tells the founding the same way, and I have learned to hold a clean story a little more lightly on the day I am to stand where it is buried. But it is not the story I am watching. It is him. Whatever waits in that cold, I would have us be careful of Cael in it.

Mind the cold. It is the tomb's, and it means we are close.

H.