zohar delane (au: thirty years later)

RE: POST - CURSE OF STRAHD.         *

zohar and her party defeat strahd. hooray! things are good for a while — they return to faerun, basil takes back her crown from her shithead brother, appoints zohar the leader of her knights. zohar reconnects with talya for a few years. zohar's mother gets remarried (to anya, the shoemaker-turned-mayor), and zohar is the maid of honor at the wedding.

it doesn't last, though. the four of them are all traumatized from barovia, and it haunts them. zohar has trouble sleeping, thinking of the horrors she'd seen there. they grow apart until the four of them have more animosity than friendship towards each other.

it's only a matter of time before she finds herself back in barovia, willingly, this time. it's easy to rationalize it to herself — it's been over a decade, and she owes it to the people there to check in on how they're doing. the party hadn't stuck around for long after killing strahd; they'd put kasimir the dusk elf in control, and they trusted him, but she wants to see for herself how barovia is progressing. and something is pushing her there — something is telling her she must return.

RE: BAROVIA, AGAIN.         *

when she returns, barovia is far too similar to the way she'd left it. kasimir has been corrupted by power. the land is broken again. zohar becomes broken, too — she takes control of krezk, while giselle is half-feral in the forests and basil is a corrupt leader in her own right.

a false goddess has been whispering in zohar's ear since she arrived back in barovia. the not-sarenrae began with the same kind touch as the true version, but in the years since has turned cruel and cold, nothing like the goddess zohar once loved. she does not notice the unnaturalness of this change. she is failing sarenrae, and that has caused her to be cold, zohar reasons — so she does more, kills in sarenrae's name, becomes overly devoted to false ideals of justice, becomes cruel.

zohar and basil become enemies (the kind of enemies that almost dated once & have enough sexual tension to fill a castle with — you know, that kind), and basil burns krezk to the ground. zohar, while plotting her revenge, takes up residence in the abbey of saint markovia. the abbot long-gone, zohar befriends the mongrelfolk. they are, in fact, her only 'human' contact for a while, & she begins to see them as the perfect creations of sarenrae. by age fifty, zohar is unrecognizable as her past self — her smile is cold and brutal, one eye gone (thanks, basil) and the other turned bright gold, her scar spread across half her face. gone is the revolutionary leader, full of hope and optimism.