Chapter Text
Wyll is ten years old. He dreams of a great and shining star beneath the Gate.
It blinds him: a white-blazing orb floating in a chasm so massive you may as well call it the midnight sky. A single star, struggling to repel an ever-creeping dark. The heat of it singeing his skin.
In the way of dreams, he knows he is beneath the city. He knows the star should not—cannot—go out.
The sound of rushing water overtakes him, tidal waves in darkness, an overwhelming dread. He jolts upright in bed, choking on a scream.
Moonlight drifts through his window. On the street below, a watchman paces: one of Father’s men, maybe. Father is an important Fist whom many people depend on.
The room is silent save his ragged breathing. He looks to his books, his globe, his toy soldiers. He looks to himself in the mirror: a wide-eyed boy in his nightclothes, huddled up beneath the sheets.
“Get out,” his reflection says.
A rushing feeling takes him. He falls back against the pillows, asleep.
***
Wyll is fourteen years old. A Grand Duke is murdered, and this somehow means that Father must become Marshal of the Flaming Fists.
“The city,” Father says, gripping Wyll’s shoulder, “is what’s most important. The city above all.”
“I know that,” Wyll tells him. His penmanship practice lies abandoned on his desk next to his history books. He doesn’t mind lessons, knows they’re important, but right now the Gate is in chaos—riots, kidnappings, murder—and he wants to help.
“I could patrol with the Fists. Or sneak into the Guildhall; they wouldn’t suspect someone my age.”
“What I need from you,” Father says, resting his other wide hand on Wyll’s other narrow shoulder, “is to prepare yourself. Study, train, improve your mind and body.”
“But Father—”
“Your heart is good, Wyll. But before anything else, you must shape yourself into what the city needs of you.”
He cups the back of Wyll’s neck. Gives him a steady smile. “Don’t fear, son. I will find the man responsible for Abdel’s murder, and the full strength of the Fists will be brought down on his head. Any conspirators will be exposed. And Wyll…”
He hesitates, looking to the window: to the smoke of the Lower City. “You may hear…rumblings of discontent. You may hear me called severe; even draconian. I want you to know that these are temporary measures. Anything I do, I do for the good of the Gate.”
Then Father leaves to become what the city needs of him.
Wyll fumes through the rest of the evening. He considers sneaking out of the manor; proving he can help.
Father suspects the Guild’s involvement. Wyll could pose as an assassin seeking work. No, as a servant boy from the Parliament, ripe with information for the right bidder. He savors these scenarios as he readies himself for bed: imagines himself smart and brave and strong.
But as he slides under the covers, he glances at his bookshelf, and realizes his seven-part plan was nicked in its entirety from Prince Haryk and the Twin Scimitars.
Father was right. He isn’t ready. He hasn’t formed himself, yet, into the shape of someone who’ll do what needs doing.
One day, maybe.
He sleeps, and the star finds him. For the first time in many years, he dreams of it shining in the chasm under the city.
Then there’s a searing brightness, the terror of rushing water, and Wyll blinks awake in his bedroom. The night’s only half gone.
He takes a careful breath through his nose. Creeps from his bed to sit on the floor in front of the mirror, his legs crossed.
“Why did you come here?” his reflection asks him, indifferent.
“I—I don’t know what you mean,” Wyll says. “You’re in my mirror.”
“Am I.” There, so quick he might be imagining it: a spark of interest in his own brown eyes. “How…unexpected. Very few things surprise me.”
The voice is not his own—not quite. It carries strange echoes, something deep and resonant. Like speaking from a cistern.
“Where do you think we are?” Wyll says. “What do I look like to you?”
He reaches out to press his thumb to the glass. His reflection moves in tandem. Only its face doesn’t mirror his own: a foreign creature, considering.
“I see a boy somewhere he has no permission to be,” the reflection says. “A boy under the city. With me.”
Wyll’s heart beats double-time. “I dreamt about that. Are you a star?”
His reflection looks at him, briefly taken aback. Then its face smooths back into placidity. “I am not a star. I am…a tangle of thought, kept conscious by the slow drip of sentience from the streets above. The center that holds. I played nursemaid to this city, many years ago. Now I am bound to it.”
Then Wyll’s reflection curls its lip back like a dog bares its teeth. “I am the Heart of the Gate.”
The branches outside draw strange shadows on his carpet, bars of light and dark, no matter how neatly the manor’s trees are pruned. His toy soldiers stand ready on his windowsill, outgrown.
Wyll rises to his knees. Presses a hand to the glass, urgent. “Do you know who killed Grand Duke Abdel Adrian?”
The reflection goes still for long enough that Wyll wonders if the strange presence has left him—if he’s merely studying his own face.
Then it says, “From the streets, tendrils of thought reach me—sustain me. The city great and terrible. A mortal machine. I do not know who killed your Duke, boy. But I know what will happen next.”
Father’s imposed a curfew on the city. But as soon as it lifts at first light, Wyll bolts straight for Wyrm’s Rock. He begs Father to search the Parliament building for smokepowder; for signs of a plot to eliminate the Peers in a violent inferno.
At first Father doesn’t believe him. But then a Fist confirms unusual activity near the building last night—creeping figures in the shadows—and he relents. He finds a cache of smokepowder in the basement, big enough to rain chunks of mortar blocks away.
He calls Wyll into his study that evening. He asks where he’d learned these things. Wyll concocts a story about a masked informer who’d found him at the market: a Guild member, perhaps, who’d lost his nerve.
Father claps a hand on his arm. “Well done, my son. You were very brave, bringing this to me. You’re becoming a man of intelligence and honor: exactly what this city needs.”
Wyll’s heart swells, a star in his chest.
When he turns to leave, he feels Father’s eyes on him, curious. Considering.
***
Wyll is fifteen years old. His father’s been elected Grand Duke, a turn of events causing no small amount of consternation among the nobility. What’s more: Father refuses to surrender command of the Fists, and there’s no law on the books to force him.
“It galls them to see a family rise from humble origins,” he tells Wyll while saddling their horses. He likes to do it himself, leaving the groom standing awkwardly against the stable wall.
Wyll doesn’t remember their humble origins—his earliest memory is of his nursemaid reading to him in the manor, his mother’s distinguished relatives tittering in the hall—but he understands his father best through the lens of history. Takes pride in it, even: Ulder Ravengard, son of a blacksmith. Wyll Ravengard, son of a son.
They mount their horses and trot out together towards Dusthawk Hill. The sun beats down.
Father sighs, his expression suddenly far-off. “If you want something done right, you do it yourself. Remember that, Wyll. Don’t let crooked men get so much as a foothold—even if it means you must take on more of the burden directly.”
Wyll nods, considering. His studies have expanded to include Baldurian politics and law and import policy. He’s learned more about protective cheese tariffs than he’d have ever expected, preparing to one day lead the Gate.
When they reach the open field, Father shoots him a sly grin. “Think you can beat your old man?”
“Not a doubt in my mind,” Wyll says. “But I think I need to adjust the stirrups first, they’re not quite—”
He spurs his horse to a gallop. Father cries false start, but chases after him anyway, laughing. The wind nips at Wyll’s cheeks. The city rises on the horizon, a sentinel.
That night, the Heart finds him. It happens more frequently now: Wyll goes to sleep with a question on his mind—the Guild’s movements, the plans of Father’s rivals in Parliament—and the mirror gives him the bits and pieces it’s gleaned from the minds of the Gate.
With a little creative repackaging, Wyll’s advice seems a great help to Father, who bangs on about his son’s “born instinct for leadership” any chance he gets. Wyll’s thought about coming clean, but no one’s likely to believe that the beating heart of Baldur’s Gate is speaking to a teenage boy through his bedroom mirror.
He sometimes feels guilty that Father thinks him a savant, but not enough to outweigh the pleasure of his approval.
There’s more, though. Something stranger.
Sometimes, when Wyll stands on city cobblestones—when the smell of spices drifts from the market stalls—when he hears the fishermen call out their catch on the wharf—sometimes, then, he feels a map stringing through his head like spider’s silk. The folds of his brain twist like alleyways; like the main boulevards and their byways.
The map and the territory. The Upper City, the Lower, the Outer. The press of sentience all through it.
The Heart’s senses, infecting his own.
“I must ask you a favor,” his mirror says that night. That’s never happened before.
“I suppose you’ve been nothing but helpful to me,” Wyll says cautiously. “What do you need?”
“Something that will help you, as well. Help the Gate.”
His reflection tilts its head: just slightly, at first, like a curious dog. Then it keeps tilting, stretching its neck as far as it will go. A motion bizarre on Wyll’s body. It’d look better on a swan, he thinks, or some other long-necked creature.
“Well, go on,” Wyll says, shifting uncomfortably. “Tell me.”
“What do you know of the Knights of the Shield?”
“They’re…legends, yes? A secret society? Father says—”
“Convince your father,” the Heart says, “to hunt the Knights.”
Shadows shift on his ceiling: a watchman’s lantern, passing by. One of father’s Fists, he knows, pacing the same midnight route for years.
“I can’t just tell him to look for a legend,” Wyll says. “If you have any evidence—”
“They must pay for their crimes. Their atrocities.” His reflection’s nails dig into its thigh, clawlike.
“I can try,” Wyll says carefully. “It would help if you gave me a lead.”
His reflection leans forward, and Wyll finds himself leaning to meet it. They rest their foreheads together, against the glass.
“I suspect you were born for this,” the Heart tells him. “To protect the Gate.”
(Wyll searches for the Knights, or for evidence to bring to Father. He becomes familiar with the city’s twisting sewers; with the cavern system that lies along the Chionthar. He never finds hard evidence of Knight activity. Nor does he find the chasm and its star.)
(“Keep looking,” his mirror tells him. “Keep looking.”)
***
Wyll is seventeen years old. The sky over Dusthawk Hill is burning.
“You can save them,” the devil says. Her red hair moves in strange currents, invisible to the naked eye. “You can save them all.”
The city’s a haze on the horizon, just emerging from a torrential rain. Even from here, he feels the subtle rhythms of the nighttime streets. The press and flow at the docks; in the pleasure district. Like veins shot through his head, the citizenry stuck in his circulatory system.
Souls dangling over the fire, ready to be snuffed in an instant. On the cliffside below, robed figures link hands.
“What do I have to do?” he asks, his breath coming in sharp bursts.
“Just be yourself, pet.” She waves a hand, and a scroll forms itself from the very heat of the air. “Be the plucky creature I found tracking cultists in the sewers. Just do it for me instead.”
He’d been investigating on his own. The Heart’s still better at parsing the city’s thoughts than he is, but this time it had described only insubstantial tendrils of intent: a fear among the rats. A washer-woman in the shop district who’d daydreamed of a strange midnight meeting. A bard in the Blushing Mermaid who sings the strangest songs.
All adding up to a cult of Tiamat. A plan to bid the dragon rise.
“Tick-tock,” Mizora says.
Puddles dot the grass.
At his feet, his reflection watches him gravely. “Do what you must, boy. Sometimes sacrifices must be made for the love of things.”
And Wyll was born to protect the Gate, so he closes his eyes and signs.
Hellish power floods him—burning, twisting, claiming. It sears through the sensory network of his mind, lighting up along the spiderweb filaments the city’s grown within him.
He screams, doubled over with it.
Mizora laughs. She presses the back of her hand to his cheek.
After the slaughter, she forces a sending stone into his eye socket. It’s utter agony, power surging down the optic nerve, hooking into the meat of him like anchors hitting silt. Dragging along the bed of the Chionthar.
The eye’s magic touches the city in his head—prods it, scrapes it, tries to erase it. Instead, something at the core of him explodes. Shoves outward.
Mizora stumbles back, eyes wide.
His hand moves. He grabs her wrist, nails digging in like claws. A voice pours from his lips—echoing, speaking from a cistern.
“The city will not release him,” it says. “Do what you will with the boy, but the city is not yours to take away.”
Mizora’s face has gone pale: lit up curiously in the dark. As though his gaze is a light source, white and blazing.
She collects herself with an angry breath through her nose. “A short leash it will be for you, pet. Lest your would-be patron start getting ideas.”
She shakes free of him, and he falls to the ground. He loses time—drifts, then wakes up half-submerged in mud. The rain’s started up again.
Father stands over him. Wyll’s head is in Mizora’s lap.
He tries to explain—to plead. The city’s faded to a murmur in the back of his head.
“So this is how you do it,” Father says, all broken glass and fury. “You’ve always known things you had no reason to. And all this time—”
He cuts off, choking. In the rain, it’s impossible to know if he cries.
Wyll scrambles to his feet. The mud cakes his arms; his thighs. He opens his mouth, again and again, and the words seize inside of him. He’s a game hen shot through the throat.
He wants to say: I took on the burden myself. You taught me that. Don’t you remember?
He wants to say: I made myself into what the city needed of me.
Mizora laughs—or at least he thinks she does. The sound might be coming from the place his soul should be.
Father won’t look at him. He says, “Go.”
Severe, perhaps. Draconian. But anything Ulder Ravengard does, he does for the good of the Gate.