wasn't sure the comments was the right place for this SO. After the Gortash Fight is when Calem realizes how much Karlach is scared and wants to live. Before he thought she was more like him and really just genuinely okay with dying. He begs her to go to the hells after that so he has time to go to Eorzea and grab Cid and Nero. He's sure the people he knows could build her a new heart, he just needs to give them time.
You see, that's the real fucking kicker about Karlach, really. The whole thing about her saying she'd rather die than go back to Avernus? Only really applied when she really had nothing truly tying her to Faerûn. Throughout the entirety of the game, we see Karlach slowly fall in love with life again, something that she had, briefly, lost in Avernus when she was going through the slog of The Blood Wars. She's literally seen the worst of what humanity / hell could truly do. Sell a friend. Kill. Murder. Fucking steal. The lot of it. So the second she high tailed out of it, there was always that phew, i'm back, if my engine kicks it, it kicks it. But Dammon gave her hope. Tav. The other companions. She fell completely and utterly in love with living again now that she could do it on her own terms.
The fact that she had friends? Honest to God friends who were less of a what she could do for them / they could do for her in turn. The fact that she willingly stuck her neck out for others and they did so in kind, because they cared about her and what happened to her.
The fear really kicks in around act 2 because she was functioning on mindless optimism, and that carried her right the way through to act 3, when she is standing over Gortash and she realised that while, yes, it was a victory, it was a hollow one. And death looming over her head like a guillotine? Kinda made her realise that she wasn't going to get fixed. She was either going to die here, or she was going to end up going back to Avernus. That loneliness. The mindlessness of fighting and now she wouldn't be offered whatever small grace she'd had fighting as Zariel's champion, because she would also be faced again Zariel's best.
Karlach swore blind that she didn't know why Zariel chose her because she was nowhere near her best soldier.
Though if we're being realistic about it, I am thinking Zariel saw a little bit of herself and how she was before The Ride™️, but that's a headcanon for another day.
Aaaaand I'm realising this isn't exactly what you planned this to look like when I answered this but ramblers are gonna ramble.
P.S: please take her to eorzea she needs a fucking break.













