Apologies for being slightly off topic (or on topic?) but I wanted to add my voice to this incredibly long thread. The way Karlach's story resolves as it is right now in incredibly cruel, and nonsensical. It's not just cruel in writing, but it indirectly implicates all of the other companions around her as callous and cruel as well, as it indirectly makes them callous and uncaring to her situation. As numerous people have stated early in this thread, there are a number of ways for other companions to defy death that can also be shared with Karlach, and I'm really wondering if whoever made this decision didn't fully consider that this also implicates a level of cruel indifference in the other companions, or perhaps they just don't care.
I am feeling a little bitter though, since I'm only just reaching the end of the game for the first time, and tried to see if there was a way to help her that I was missing---since the game itself sprinkles a thousand hints and foreshadowing that you can---only for me to find out here that it's not at all possible. If that was your intention, you should not have written her story this way. And if it was your intention, it needs to be clearer from the very beginning. You're not just killing Karlach, you're also making the other "good" characters indirectly cruel through inaction, and stringing the player along with breadcrumbs that lead nowhere. As others have said, there are other companions where a perma-death would make more sense as the conclusion to their story, but it just does not make sense in the narrative you've created once we arrive in Act 3 for Karlach.
If she's to have an unavoidable death, it should be through player choice or inaction, not some inevitability because some content had to be cut and the reaching implications didn't matter. I know that the "return to Avernus" ending also exists, but that is not what I would consider a good or happy end, either (unless some sort of DLC is planned to expand on that, in which case that could also potentially resolve this, but still ...)
Anyway. Apologies again for being extra salty in here, I am just very passionate about Karlach. I love her and I love this game, so to have discovered that this is supposedly the end of her story deeply sours me on act 3 as a whole. It just doesn't make sense, given the context of the Steel Watch, given the context of Dammon being present with his forge, given the context of having access to multiple points of Divine Intervention, as well as a True Resurrection scroll. All of this, this entire thread and all the people asking for something to be done, could have been avoided if the possibility was provided (or taken away) through player choice.
Hell, I would've been more inclined to accept it if the companions didn't all universally love Karlach. The other companions clearly don't all like each other, and if they were even simply neutral towards Karlach then inaction is logical. But if there's any ONE person they all universally care about from the beginning to the end, it's Karlach specifically. Even if we the player do nothing, the rest of them love her and thus, arguably, would try to help her in some way. This is just another "this does not make any sense" example to add to the fire here.
