Baldur's Gate II Throne of Bhaal (29 page)

Abdel realized Bhaal’s world was indeed alive, but it wasn’t attacking him or impeding him. It was drawn to him. It recognized the immortal essence within Abdel, and it wanted to fawn and fondle him. In trying to summon the Ravager, Abdel had only intensified the yearning of the jungle.

With awareness came mastery. Abdel stopped resisting the plants and instead focused his will on shaping them. He imagined the thick vegetation retreating, drawing away like respectful servants retreating after their master had dismissed them. The vines, roots, and branches encasing his body receded in response to the will of one of Bhaal’s children.

Abdel envisioned the jungle parting before him, clearing a path to the hidden door that led to Melissan, and again his mere desire made it so. The way before him was obvious now, a narrow corridor knifing through the dense growth that led straight to a single wooden door standing untouched by the forest.

The leaves rustled as he walked past, like subjects waving at the procession of a new king’s coronation. Unimpeded, Abdel marched to the door and opened it without hesitating.

The realm of Bhaal vanished, and Abdel found himself in the void once again. But this void was already occupied. Melissan hovered in the emptiness, her body encased in a pillar of glowing power. The ends of the shining column stretched to infinity in every direction, but its width was barely enough for a single person.

At least, Abdel assumed it was Melissan in the light. The tall, attractive woman he remembered from previous meetings was gone. In her place floated a hairless, smooth skinned being who was neither male nor female. Melissan had become both ageless and sexless. She had shed all previous identities, and was in the process of being reborn, remade, and rebuilt as an immortal.

The new Melissan noticed Abdel hovering in the void beside her. When she spoke Abdel was not surprised to discover her voice had already begun to adopt the infinite depth of an immortal.

“So the Avatar of Bhaal has triumphed over Balthazar. I am impressed.” Despite her words, Abdel knew she was mocking him.

“Have you come to stop me, Abdel? Come to strip me of my destiny?”

Abdel said nothing, but simply nodded. Melissan drifted free from the column of power, gasping slightly for air as if she had been taking a long drink.

“If you want Bhaal’s power, all you have to do is come and get it,” she taunted.

Angry, vengeful thoughts propelled Abdel through the void as he flew at her throat. His outstretched hands clasped themselves around the entity’s neck and squeezed. Melissan disintegrated into sparkling dust, then reformed a few feet away.

“Your ignorance is amusing,” she chuckled. “You cannot kill me here, Abdel. This is Bhaal’s world, and I am now a part of it. Not just a part of it, Abdel. I am this world! This world is me! I have become one with the immortal essence!”

Abdel recalled how his encounter with Sarevok in the Abyss had been similarly ineffective. He realized it might truly be impossible to kill Melissan in this world, but somehow, he vowed, he would make her pay for Jaheira’s and Imoen’s deaths.

He hurtled toward her again, but Melissan simply raised a smooth hand and repelled his assault with a flick of her wrist. Abdel felt himself spiraling toward the glowing column in the center of the empty universe.

Melissan watched with interest as the big sellsword was sucked into the pillar. Abdel felt the euphoria of infinite power washing over him. He felt the endless possibilities of immortality, the unlimited potential of being a god. He was drowning in the essence of Bhaal.

His euphoria turned to panic. Abdel could feel himself dissolving. He was becoming incorporeal, his form washing away in the river of energy raging through him. His physical manifestation was being wiped away, buried beneath the all-consuming identity of the immortal. Like Melissan he was becoming one with the sum of Bhaal’s essence. Unlike Melissan, Abdel was not prepared for it.

“Good,” Melissan cooed, “give yourself over to Bhaal’s power. Mingle your essence with that of your father and your siblings that I may devour you all.”

Abdel tried to break free of the glowing pillar. It was like swimming from the center of a whirlpool. The currents drawing him back to the center were too strong to resist.

“Do not struggle, Abdel,” Melissan advised. “This is what must be. From Bhaal’s common seed all the Children were born, and to a single pool you must all return. You are all one and the same. Bhaalspawn, offspring of the Lord of Murder. It is what you are. It is what defines you.”

“No,” Abdel said weakly, his very will to resist vanishing beneath the onslaught, his identity and sense of self eroding. His memories were vanishing despite his efforts to hang on to them, spilling through his clenched fists like grains of sand.

Imoen, Gorion. The names meant nothing to him now, and then even the names were gone, swept away by the irresistible currents of the collective infinite identity surrounding him. Everything he had been was being stripped away, until only the essence of his father remained. Even his own name was lost now. All he had left was the face of a woman, her slightly pointed ears and violet eyes hinting at the elf side of her parentage.

Jaheira. He clung to her memory, refusing to lose the last spark of his individuality. He strength from her name. Jaheira. He managed to conjure up recollections of not just her face but her voice. Jaheira. Abdel could feel substance returning to his body. He could hear his lover’s laugh, he could feel her warm touch. Jaheira.

‘Your submission to the collective essence is inevitable,” Melissan declared. “You are a Bhaalspawn.”

Jaheira. He could remember her clearly now, the half-elf druid who had stood by him during his darkest times. The lover who had even resisted the call of death to spend one last night by his side. He remembered everything about her: the feel of her soft touch, the smell of her long hair, the sound of her laugh.

And he remembered what she had told him. Remember who you are. At last he understood. They were all wrong—

Gorion, Sarevok, Melissan, the Five, Balthazar. Even Jaheira had been wrong, though it was her words and love that had saved him and led him to true understanding.

“No!” Abdel’s voice resonated with renewed strength. “I am not just some speck floating in this infinite whole! I am not just a Bhaalspawn!

“I am Abdel Adrian! Hero of Baldur’s Gate! Savior of the Tree of Life! Son of Bhaal, ward of Gorion, lover of Jaheira!”

Abdel finally understood.

He stopped trying to deny the part of him that was his father’s legacy. The taint of Bhaal was within him, it was a part of who he was. Gorion and Jaheira had tried to suppress that part of him, and to please them Abdel had tried to separate himself from it. Balthazar had succeeded in accomplishing what Abdel could not. He had cut himself completely off from his immortal taint, caging it so completely that he was not able to call upon it when he needed it. That was not the answer. By denying that part of his soul, Abdel left a hole in his own identity.

But Sarevok, the Five and even Melissan had gone too far in acknowledging the essence of the Lord of Murder within the Bhaalspawn. They had fed and nurtured the small bit of evil within them, until it became consuming and they lost themselves to their father’s fury. That was not the answer either.

He was a Child of Bhaal. It was a part of him. But only a part, nothing more. It did not define him—he would not let it define him. He was who he was, nothing more, nothing less. He was Abdel Adrian.

“I am Abdel Adrian.” he declared once more, affirming his individuality against the force drawing him in toward a single, collective existence.

The current sucking him down toward the center of the pillar was suddenly gone, and Abdel was able to float back out into the void to confront Melissan again.

Surprised, she watched him emerge from the glowing column of divinity. Abdel casually swung his fist at Melissan’s face. As before, her form simply dissolved and reformed, completely unharmed by his punch.

“Your fortitude and persistence surprise me, Bhaalspawn,” she admitted. “But no matter. I have no need of your essence to complete my ascension. And once I am a god I will crush you without a second thought.”

‘You are no god,” Abdel said simply. “You are Melissan, nothing more.”

He reached out again and swung his fist through his foe’s insubstantial form. But this time he felt a hint of resistance as he made contact. From the expression on her face as her spirit reformed, he knew Melissan felt it too.

‘You are Melissan, Bhaal’s Anointed,” he insisted, “False protector of the Bhaalspawn. Betrayer of the Five. Manipulator. Liar. Deceiver. But you, Melissan, are no god. You are an invader in this realm. You are not a part of this world. You do not belong!”

Abdel’s fist caught Melissan beneath a suddenly solid chin, and he felt the jaw bone crack beneath the force of his blow. Her hairless head snapped back, and her mouth twisted into an O of shock and pain.

Long before he had met Melissan or even Jaheira, long before he had any hint of his immortal heritage, Abdel had been a brawler. A blade for hire. A mercenary and a sellsword. He settled his disputes with fists and weapons, and all his problems could be solved with simple brute force.

With the knowledge of who and what he truly was, Abdel’s life had become much more complicated. The responsibilities and challenges facing the son of a god were convoluted and complex, and required more than mere fisticuffs to solve. But now, on the cusp of immortality, facing the greatest challenge of his life, Abdel had returned to his simple roots.

“I am Abdel Adrian,” he declared, slamming his heavy hands into Melissan again and again, “and you are no god.”

He pummeled the suddenly all too physically real spirit of Melissan with his bare hands, pounding her body into submission as it feebly tried to ward off his fists. He beat the woman who had betrayed and manipulated him since Saradush until she was nothing but a bloody, bruised pulp of physical, mortal existence. Then he grabbed the thing that would be a god by its shoulders and hurled it into the glowing, pulsating pillar.

The column flared momentarily as Melissan’s screaming form was consumed by the light. The essence of Bhaal that she had already managed to steal became one with the greater whole. The insignificant physical shell that remained—the part of Melissan that was still Melissan— was instantly and totally obliterated by the divine power.

Abdel waited for an eternity to be sure his enemy was truly gone. Once he was confident Melissan’s existence had been completely annihilated, he willed himself back through the door between the void of Bhaal’s true essence and the realm of the Abyss Bhaal had chosen to make his own.

He emerged from the door and found himself amid the thick, decaying vegetation once again. Abdel waved his hand, dispelling the entire jungle with a single thought. In the distance he could see a ring of sharp, forbidding mountains. These also vanished on nothing more than a whim.

“You have done well, Abdel Adrian.”

Hearing the infinite voice of the celestial entity did not surprise Abdel. He doubted anything would surprise him for a very, very long time.

“Now what?” he asked, his voice betraying the weariness he felt in his very soul.

“You stand on the edge of godhood,” the creature explained. “You are the last heir to Bhaal’s immortality. It is yours to take.”

Abdel shook his head. “It’s not mine. It never was.

The creature tilted its head slightly. “There is much you can do with this power,” it reminded him. “Your greatest desires can be achieved in an instant.”

“Can I bring Jaheira back? Or Imoen? Or Gorion?”

“No,” the being admitted. “Even a god must accept certain events as things that cannot be undone. But there is much you might accomplish as an immortal, Abdel.”

“There is still much I can accomplish as a mere mortal,” Abdel pointed out.

“Your wisdom is most unexpected in a Child of Bhaal.”

Abdel shrugged. “There is more to me than my bloodline.”

“You understand that if you reject this destiny you will lose the essence of those you have absorbed within you. You will cease to be an avatar, and you will become a normal human male, with all the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of other men.”

“I understand.” With a rueful smile, Abdel added, “I’m looking forward to it. I was not meant to be a god, or even an avatar. It is not who I am.”

“Then I shall free you from this burden.”

Deep within his body Abdel felt the faintest pull. It lasted but a moment, and was completely painless. He peered into his soul and discovered only the tiniest ember of Bhaal’s spirit within himself. This miniscule portion of immortal essence was his to keep. It had been a part of him at his birth and it would be a part of him when he died. But it was simply that. A part of him. A small, virtually insignificant piece of a much greater puzzle.

The big warrior turned his attention back to the celestial being who had guided him through this bizarre journey. Abdel couldn’t read any emotion on the face of the man, but he sensed this was not the end the entity had anticipated.

“You seem disappointed.”

“Not disappointed, merely surprised. This possible destiny was foreseen by the one I serve, but certainly it was not expected.”

“What happens now?”

“I shall disperse the essence of Bhaal throughout the world,” the celestial entity promised. “The Lord of Murder will disappear forever.”

The words should have filled Abdel with joy, but he had lost too much, paid too dearly, to feel any happiness within his soul. Gorion, his foster father. Imoen, his sister, Jaheira, his true love. Even the death of the reborn Sarevok added to the seemingly infinite list of those who had stood by Abdel, and fallen.

“You are not responsible for those deaths, Abdel,” the divine messenger assured him. “You cannot carry the guilt of their blood on your shoulders.”

“And what of the pain?” Abdel asked. “Regardless of the guilt, the pain is still there.”

“Your wounds go deep,” the being admitted, “but in time even your scars will heal, Abdel Adrian.”