The Broken Mercy

by Punkyna

Summary:

Once, a god of suffering heard a prayer he could not answer.
Once, an old thing in the dark laughed and said, “Break the rules.”

Buried beneath Baldur’s Gate, a vampire waits to be forgotten.
Above him, a chosen by pain walks —until the moment she unearths him.

This is not chance.
This is the loophole in a god’s silence.
This is the wager of bleeding god.
A Story of ruin forced to love.
He was made to hunger.
She was made to endure.
Neither was made to survive.

But if they do, the game ends differently.

Chapter 1: Unearthing the pull

Summary:

The pull began as a whisper—soft as grief, steady as breath.

It led her across half a continent, past war camps and ghost towns, to the crumbling edge of a forgotten cemetery.

What she finds buried there should not have survived.

But something did.

Not dead. Not alive. Just… waiting.
And when she opens the tomb, nothing in her life prepares her for what looks back.

It was the kind of night that smelled like dry bread and city fog. Nothing strange or special.

Mundane in every sense of the word. Nothing sacred, nothing good, nor bad. Just the residue of a city that didn’t bother pretending to sleep.

Baldur’s Gate pressed in all around—grimy windows shuttered, street lamps wheezing their last oil-lit breath. Somewhere nearby, someone was snoring. Somewhere else, someone else was screaming.

Neither sound reached the fog-sunken outer district of Tumbledown. No outside sounds reached here, really. This Outer City district, nestled beyond the southeastern edge of the Lower City, was perpetually shrouded in mist rising from the River Chionthar. Isolated and forgotten by the rest of the city proper, much like its inhabitants. No one came here unless they had to. And no one ever had to.

The buildings were, if not abandoned, worn down by use and neglect. Near the cliff edge, the once grand estate of the mercantile Szarr family remained looming and shrouded in silence. Long abandoned by the lord’s family in favour of their Upper City palace, what remained of the estate and the surrounding lands had been repurposed into the sprawling expanse of Cliffside Cemetery some centuries ago. The cemetery loomed above the river, slouching into the mist like an old drunk into his grave.

The Grave Wash Crypts area was the worst of it—a neglected, overgrown tract tucked behind the cemetery proper, where records had long since faded and the names eroded from the stones. This was where the city sent its dead when they were too poor, too plain, or too numerous to bury within the walls. Not even the gulls made noise here, reflecting the city’s disregard for the dead—just the silence.

Grave Wash’s layout was a maze of leaning tombstones and crumbling mausoleums. The cavern systems beneath it stretched and spiralled into many crypts, catacombs, or worse. Many were used for clandestine and nefarious purposes. Thieves, necromancers, and monsters called some of these depths their lair. The living rarely bothered with what lurked there, and the dead didn’t seem to mind.

East of Grave Wash, the remnants of the Szarr family mausoleums loomed in the centre, tucked near the cliff. The stone facades were weathered by time and neglect. The iron gate had long surrendered to rust. No squeal. No click. Just a gentle sway in the night breeze.

It wasn’t haunted. It wasn’t holy. It was just... there.

And there she stood at the threshold, both arms slack at her sides, looking blankly at the small “private” section of a graveyard within a cemetery.

Her cloak was stiff with road dust and dried salt, while her boots were damp and ruined by months of walking. Her knees ached, as did the rest of her, really. Her jaw was locked from days of silence. She was tired.

So very tired.

She had followed this particular pull for weeks since she left the border of Amn, where it had first pressed against her ribs like a bruise waiting to bloom. It hadn’t been sharp in the beginning. It didn’t scream. But it was loud in the way grief is loud when left to rot.

Something was in pain.

She didn’t feel the pain itself, not directly. That was never how the pull worked. It didn’t send her visions or agony. Just presence. A direction. A pressure. The echo of something suffering, waiting to be found.

This time...

At first, it had been a hum—just beneath the bones, quieter than hunger. She thought it was a minor mission, but the more she walked toward it, the louder it got, the more pressing it became. The closer she drew to the city, the heavier it felt.

In Grave Wash, it was deafening—so loud, so crushing in its insistence that her knees buckled as she crossed into the district. It coiled around her ribs like iron bands, squeezing tighter with every breath. Her head throbbed with it. Her chest felt carved out, hollowed by the sheer density of the feeling. She remembered clenching her teeth to keep from weeping, from falling. The pull didn’t speak, but it let itself be known through her bones like wind through a ruined cathedral. Every step forward felt like wading through tar. The unbearable ache of knowing that something wounded was calling to her so loudly drowned out her own thoughts. She kept going, started running. Travelled as fast as she could. And the further she went, the more this pain blended with her own. She needed to hurry. She couldn’t breathe.

She arrived at the Gate of the old Szarr family section, breath shallow and hands trembling as the rusted iron arch loomed above her. The pull wasn’t just a direction anymore—it was a pressure so complete it invaded her thoughts. Now it roared with fury and urgency. With the weight of what felt like millennia of pain hidden in stone and silence.

Her vision blurred. Her knees shook. There were long, stuttering moments —when she forgot how to breathe. It wasn’t panic. It was saturation. A tide of presence that eclipsed her, filled her lungs with silence until she choked on it. The grief here didn’t weep or scream. It drowned. The feeling compressed every breath into effort, every step into defiance. This wasn’t the quiet ache of plague. Not the brittle grief of famine. This was something else. Older. Denser. Buried. She may not be welcome here, but she had been summoned.

She passed under the Gate and started climbing down into the foggy clearing. Surprisingly, the private graveyard didn’t fight her. It didn’t welcome her either. It simply waited. Still. Indifferent. A breeze stirred the rotting leaves near her feet as she stepped into the grass. She forced her mind to focus on that blinding, constant pull pressing in from all sides.

She walked between rows of sagging names and broken stones, her steps careful, precise yet hurried. The pull guided her like the echo of a heartbeat, frantic and exact. It led her not to a grave or a crypt, but to an outcropping between two entrances and a set of four graves near the old Szarr family partition. The place was an overgrown patch with a single old tree, no marker and no name.

Nothing.

She stopped.

The pull was loudest here.

A permanent, strident scream.

She knelt.

Pressed her fingers into the soil.

A single tear streamed down her face.

The soil was... packed.

Cold.

Coarse.

Tangled with roots.

Nothing remarkable to the eye—but beneath her hand, it burned.

Something beneath.

Just pain.

Deep,

Further than she could dig.

Slowly, she looked around, taking in the old noble enclave of the dead, now abandoned by blood and city alike.

This was a graveyard.

Ornate mausoleums leaned wearily against one another, their sigils dulled by soot and rain, their ironwork clasped shut with rust.

An old graveyard.

Whatever pride had once lived here had long since crumbled into rot and moss.

Who suffers in a graveyard?

The dead did not call like this. Not with such weight. Not across such a distance.

What is calling her?

This pain had summoned her halfway across the continent—three months of walking, scraping coin for passage, sleeping beneath carts and stone bridges with nothing but that low hum beneath her ribs.

He who watches her sent her here.

He whom she loves had pointed to here.

He had guided her to battlefields before. Plague towns. Orphan dens. Places where suffering was loud, deep, and tragic.

But here?

It was permanent, unfathomable, and unchanging. Ongoing, old and fresh at the same time.

What is suffering here?

And then, like rot rising beneath damp stone, a darker thought.

The Bhaalspawn Crisis. More than fifty years ago, the cultists of Bhaal had crawled out of these very crypts, dragging with them knives, chains, and prophecy. She remembered the stories—read even in the history tomes of Ss’khanaja—of blood pooling in the sewers, of shrines carved from old bones. When the last of the Bhaalspawn fell, the Flaming Fist of Baldur’s Gate swore the cult was gone.

But the Undercity ran deep here—sewers, catacombs, and old vaults dating from before the city was even Baldur’s Gate—entire warrens of rot and silence where things festered.

It wasn’t impossible that a pocket of cultists had endured, too broken or too faithful to surrender.

She remembered transcribing Uxsais’s historical annotations on Bhaal’s interference with their supply lines near the Gate, as she called the crisis. The notes lamented that the cultists’ bodies were not all retrieved after the crisis. She also speculated on the presence of remnant cells hiding in the Undercity and recorded many whispers of ritual killings in the ruins beneath Cliffside Cemetery.

She frowned.

Could it be one of them? Or some pitiful prisoners kept for sacrifice? A relic of a cult too fanatical to die? Maybe this was their doing. Some ancient rite. Some failed vessels.

But something didn’t fit.

The Cult of Murder didn’t keep victims alive.

Her jaw clenched tightly.

A ritual, maybe?

But the pull was too... tender. The suffering is too raw and permanent.

This wasn’t a scream of slaughter. It was the slow, constant throb of someone made to endure for a very long time.

That wasn’t Bhaal’s style.

Unless the agony was the offering.

Some others liked these types of offerings.

Shar, Mistress of Loss, taught her followers to bury memories so deep they could never be reclaimed.

Loviatar, Maiden of Pain, whose worshippers believed agony purified the soul.

That didn’t track either; both of them required the suffering of the willing.

Sharans wanted their dark lady’s embrace and killed or fought the heretics who didn’t, only torturing them long enough to get what they needed.

She also knew all too well that Loviatar only enjoyed suffering dedicated to her. The goddess despised above all else pain that was not offered freely by its bearer. While many sadists worshipped her, most knew they would gain no favour by offering the pain of an unwilling victim.

It must be something else.

Could it be necromancers from the Reaching Moon sect? Or some noble’s hidden dungeon, lost to maps and prying eyes?

Maybe even an old Harper holding gone rogue—there were stories of sanctums buried beneath the cemetery, filled with relics, prisoners, secrets no one wanted found.

Her breath caught.

Why this one?

Whoever they were, they had suffered.

Too long and too quietly.

Who are you?

She looked around and began to survey the area, using the pull as a guide. For an hour, she navigated the multiple entrances to the Szarr mausoleum, trying to pinpoint the source. But eventually, the pull didn’t lead her to the grand tomb. It drew her lower down a narrow slope where lanterns dared not reach.

The pull led her to a half-collapsed servant crypt, tucked behind shattered tree roots and fractured crypt walls. In the centre was nothing more than a slant of heavy stone, swallowed by roots and neglect. The arch above the side entrance had broken in two, leaving a scar of old brickwork that looked as though it had wept.

No marker. No name.

“Who the hell are you?” She repeated.

Her jaw flexed. “This is going to be ugly, isn’t it?” 

She drew the spade from her pack—short-handled, iron-toothed, dulled at the edge, not blessed, not enchanted—just a tool.

That was all it needed to be.

The dirt and rubble fought her. Thick with clay, veined with roots, peppered with bricks. Her knees braced, fingers blistering.

She didn’t stop. The pain was part of it. He never sent her where it was clean, and she never shied from what hurt.

Minutes passed. Then an hour. Her small candle guttered in its holder, shadows dancing wild across the sagging stones. When the spade wasn’t enough, she switched to her hands, raw-knuckled, breath low, steady.

Then, the stone revealed itself—a tomb lid.

Her knuckles struck it. Hollow. Hard and cold.

She brushed away the soil with careful, bleeding fingers.

A tomb. Plain. Shallow. No engraving. No markers. No respect.

Someone hadn’t wanted it found—but hadn’t cared enough to hide it well.

This made even less sense.

She expected a latch, a stone ceiling. But a sarcophagus...

The state of the ground was too packed, overgrown with roots. This collapse on the grave was old, at least half a year, if not more.

No one could survive buried this long.

She pressed her palm to the lid. Felt the natural grain of the stone. Felt something else beneath: a thrum, deep in her chest, like a bone bruise in reality.

She was certain of it—the source of the pull was under this lid.

She sat back on her heels, took a few deep breaths, centring herself and drowning her rising emotions and stray thoughts behind the familiar fog of numbness she often conjured.

Her hands, still bloody, rose to a tiny, nondescript necklace tugged from under her shirt.

After a beat, her only friend's familiar, reassuring presence began to wrap around her from behind in a gentle embrace.

“This better not be some metaphorical nonsense,” she muttered. “Or I swear, you won’t hear the end of it...”

The spade slipped under the lid. She pried.

It creaked open.

The first thing that hit her was the smell—not rot, not decay, but a dry, stale reek of sealed air and something older. Mildew. Damp silk. A faint undercurrent of blood that had never quite dried. It clung to her throat, sour and heavy, like the breath of a room that hadn’t been opened in months.

Then she saw the body. She studied him with the calm detachment of someone who’d catalogued more corpses than names.

A man—Moon elf, possibly—curled on his side, shirtless, knees drawn in like a child in mourning, one arm twisted beneath him as if he’d tried to shield himself in his final moments. His skin was paper-thin, bleached nearly translucent, stretched tight over jutting bone—ribs like splintered wings. Shoulders knotted with strain. Veins blue and motionless beneath the surface.

His cheeks were hollowed into sharp shadows. Lips cracked, split at the centre. The corners of his mouth were caked with crusted dirt and dried blood—as though he’d bitten his own tongue trying not to scream.

His hair clung to his scalp in filthy, uneven clumps—once white or silver, maybe, now dulled to the colour of old ash. Blood, sweat, and grave dust matted it into clots. His hands—twisted inward like a corpse in rigour—were clawed, nails shattered and caked in filth. Blood darkened the nail beds. The tips were torn open, the way fingers split when they dig—desperately, hopelessly.

The trousers he wore had once been fine—hand-tailored, by the quality of the stitching—but they were torn past modesty, clinging damp and stiff to the angles of his hips and thighs. The fabric was shredded along the seams, stained with earth, ash, and things older than either.

His legs—both of them—were broken. One bent grotesquely at the knee, the other twisted at the shin with a protrusion just shy of a compound fracture. Long, jagged bruises ran the length of his thighs, some so deep the skin had turned nearly black beneath the dirt. One ankle had been bound, possibly shackled—there were faint impressions of metal and old infection. She couldn’t tell if it had ever healed.

Across his chest and stomach bloomed the unmistakable signs of violence: raised welts, ragged lash lines, places where blades had pierced deep enough to kill—hundreds of open wounds—some minor, many deliberate, most surgical. Many had stopped bleeding but hadn’t closed. The flesh around each was raw, inflamed, as if someone had gone to great lengths to ensure they wouldn’t heal. No sign of infection. Marks of torture—methodical and personal.

Flaying gashes crossed his lower ribs, deep and brutal, with pieces of skin partially lifted and hardened over. She caught the faint shimmer of brands—letters or sigils on his back, though she couldn’t quite make them out beneath the grime and in his current position. And deeper than all of that: puncture wounds. Too many to count. Stab wounds, precise and brutal. Some over the heart. Some low in the gut.

The body had been used and not killed. Broken.

There was no bloat. No smell of rot. No sign of time’s usual erasures. Just a terrible stillness. The air inside the tomb was heavy with it.

And then it hit her—something was wrong.

No rot.

No bloat.

No stench.

The body should’ve been bloated or dry and crumbling.

But it was still.

Preserved.

Not with magic. Not with...

Confusion hit her first. A collapse sealed the tomb. The body should be rotting at this point.

Then understanding dawned on her. He was still alive.

His chest rose.

Barely.

Again.

Her eyes snapped to his face. His eyelids twitched. Opened.

Bloodshot. Unfocused.

Red.

His lips parted. A breath escaped—dry, cracked.

And then she saw them.

The faint glint of fangs beneath the filth.

Her voice didn’t waver. “Vampire.”

She should’ve recoiled.

Should’ve drawn a blade.

Not again.

It should’ve felt wrong.

Like it did back then.

"Of course it’s a fucking vampire", she chuckled lowly.

She remembered the first offering.

---

“Blood is bond. Flesh is coin. Power is purpose.” 

The banquet hall—doubling tonight as a pre-ritual chamber—was lavish to the point of heresy. Obsidian floors glistened like still water. Living tapestries crawled softly across the walls, whispering psalms in Spider Cant. Violet myrrh smoke spiralled from bone-fanged braziers. Nobles, draped in silks woven with silver and fangs, milled about the outer rim—watching, waiting, whispering.

This was The Offering—a rite hosted only once a decade, when House Z'ress Aleanrahel opened its gates to grant the most coveted, most enticing of ascensions:

The Kiss of Lolth.

She was fourteen. Maybe younger. Smaller than the platter she carried. Her wrists wrapped in grey cloth to hide bruises. Her face veiled in translucent silk bearing Theren Z’ress Aleanrahel’s brand—her assigned keeper, the Matron’s elder son.

In here, her silence was expected.

Her obedience was consistently enforced.

But...

She was supposed to leave after serving.

Yet she knew Monthir would be waiting, frustrated that Theren hadn’t been chosen to attend. If she returned early, she would bleed for it.

So she hid. Pressed herself against a pillar draped in black silk and stayed utterly still.

And then, the room changed.

A whisper ran through the hall like a shiver of spider legs.

He was coming.

Not the vampire lord himself—he would never grace a choosing ceremony—but one of his marked underlings, gifted authority in his name—a holy vessel of Val’Zaroth.

Three houses had bargained dearly for this chance, offering sacrifices, gold, rare bloodlines, and even political favours from their rulers. The reward: one of their young might be chosen to become a vampire. None knew the chosen would be bound eternally to Val’Zaroth—they only knew they would be brought closer to Lolth.

Half the untrained slave pens had been emptied that week as a gift to satisfy the visiting vampire’s retinue of four. All the offerings tonight were drow.

The doors didn’t bang open. They unfolded, like silk parting for a breeze.

The vampire entered.

He glided like a shadow over glass. His cloak held above his bare chest flowed behind him like ink spilled in zero gravity. His eyes were twin blades—crimson, honed to eviscerate. Not the lord, but one of his hand-chosen children, sent to deliver the Kiss.

His chest bore the spider brand of Val’Zaroth—silver ink scarred into flesh, its legs splayed down his ribs. His torso shimmered faintly from hundreds of ritual wounds, carved to mimic the Spider Queen’s descent.

The two priestesses of House Z’ress Aleanrahel flanked him. Ones she knew all too well.

One held a chained chalice wrought from silver and obsidian.

The other carried a curved ceremonial dagger, its hilt soaked in ichor from the last bleeding earlier that evening.

He was beautiful.

He looked broken.

They thought him divine.

Nearly two dozen nobles were in attendance.

Three Matron Mothers, including her true owner.

Matron Xulvira Z’ress Aleanrahel.

The Mistress oversaw the whole scene with the same composed smile she bore most days. Her hair was intricately braided, centred on an opulent headpiece that mimicked the spider-shaped war helm she favoured. She towered behind the seven aspirants from noble or near-noble bloodlines, each kneeling in crimson offering freshly washed and perfumed robes.

Behind her slave veil, the girl’s breath caught when her eyes scanned the offerings.

For a slight second, nausea rose as she saw Sedlan at the far left.

The Mistress’s youngest nephew. A quiet boy of forty-five.

One of the few who had never hurt her. He trembled slightly in his robes.

Looking very small in such a cruelly gilded room.

She took a steadying breath.

After some time, the chatter and clamour quieted, and one of the matrons advanced and addressed the vampire.

“Welcome, son,” purred Matron Xanthira of House Faen Tlabbar. “As last time, Lolth has surely whispered favour into your sire’s ear. Our offering is indeed rich, and your cousin here would be happy to reunite with you.”

The vampire spawn’s gaze passed over her, unblinking.

“Favour is not the same as worth,” he replied, his voice the stillness between executions. “Lolth’s will is unknowable. My lord’s will is... clearer, Mother.” The last word was spoken almost in disdain.

Mistress Xulvira, regal on her bone-spined chair near the altar, offered a smile like silk over steel.

“Be cautious with your boasting, Xanthira,” she said, sipping from a goblet of glowing ichor. “Your son is elevated—true. But do not pretend he is foul enough to betray his sacred duty to select who would receive Lolth’s Kiss. He will not love you when he drinks from my great-uncle’s hand. If you wish him back at your beck and call, why not pay the tribute for his return?”

A hush settled. The third noble Matron—Valmyra of House Hunzrin—scoffed.

“With all due respect, we believe our offer was accepted earlier. He will choose Alrune. Everyone knows it. It’s already done.”

The vampire didn’t answer. He moved slowly through the kneeling boys, eyes steady, steps silent. When he reached Alrune, he placed two fingers on the boy’s brow.

Alrune bowed—perfect and hollow.

Then another boy rose. Still from House Hunzrin, but lower born by braid. His robe was too short. His face was a little too proud.

“No, Mistress Mother—why not me! You said you would consider it,” he rasped. “I earned it. Not just him.”

The room froze.

The vampire’s head turned.

No expression. No pause.

He moved.

In a blink, his mouth was on the boy’s throat. The feed was brutal—punitive. The boy didn’t scream. His body simply crumpled as his chest gave out with a wet, hollow crack. Not a drop of blood escaped.

The vampire stood. Calm. He turned to face a woman near the altar—his own Matron, his mother from before he was turned.

She stood with another girl beside her. Probably her heir. Regal in spider-threaded silks, chin lifted in perfect poise. Without a word, the vampire backhanded the girl across the face. The sound was wet and sharp—skin on skin, skin on fang. She collapsed in a swirl of crimson fabric, head striking the dais edge hard enough to leave a smear.

A monstrous snicker set deeply in the vampire’s face. Lips peeled back. Fangs on full display, like it pleased him to be so obvious.

No one reacted. Not a gasp, not a breath caught in scandal. The nobles barely even shifted, even though a male had just so utterly disrespected a female heir—likely the future Matron of House Faen Tlabbar.

The girl behind the pillar watched. Confused, at first. Males were barely above slaves and servants in noble houses. In her world, a male—no matter how powerful or whose blood or blade he carried—did not strike a noble daughter without consequence. Especially not one standing by her mother’s side, all but crowned already.

So why did no one move? Why did no priestess intervene? Why did Matron Xanthira simply stand there, hands loose at her sides, face blank?

Then her eyes slid back to the vampire.

And she saw it.

Saw it in the way his lips twitched. In the slight tremor of his shoulders, as if a laugh was clawing its way up. In the way his eyes burned—deep, dark, bottomless. Not with hunger. Not even with lust. But with hatred. A hatred so raw it left splinters in the air.

It struck her like a blade to the ribs—familiar. Too familiar.

She had seen that look in slave pens, when the whip finally broke someone so completely they learned to smile as they hurt the next in line. She had seen it in priestesses who enjoyed inflicting pain not out of piety but because cruelty was the only shape they could still make sense of. She had felt it bloom in her own throat, once or twice, when the wrong memory surfaced, and she wanted someone—anyone—to pay for it.

This vampire. This creature, wearing House Faen Tlabbar’s face, wearing his old family’s spider signet on one hand, still bearing their rings—

He hated them. Hated his own mother. Hated the line that had birthed him and crushed him beneath their matriarchal heel.

His sister, perhaps, once held that leash. Possibly once beat him bloody and called it training. Perhaps once threatened him with a fate worse than driderhood—forced him to beg for scraps of power. Until the day he was chosen. Until the day the fangs came. Until the day he could raise his hand and no one would stop him.

Now he was not a male. Not a lesser. He was something else. Something they all feared and needed in equal measure.

The girl behind the pillar shivered. Not from pity for the fallen heir. But because she understood that expression on a marrow-deep level.

It was the look of someone who had lived under domination so long he learned to crave the reversal—learned to taste revenge even when it was only petty, only symbolic, only the strike of a hand against a girl who couldn’t strike back.

And here, in this hall, with these spider-sainted nobles watching—

It was permitted.

No. Worse. It was expected.

She pressed further into the silk shadows, heart thrumming a painful rhythm. This was the real purpose behind the Kiss. The transformation did not just hollow them out for Lolth—it remade old hierarchies, too. Let hatred bloom. Let old chains be snapped, only to forge new ones. She wondered if any of them truly saw it. Or if they all preferred this beautiful lie.

Either way, she would remember that hatred. Remember the way his hand trembled after striking. Remember the savage delight that twisted through him like a second spine.

It was not power he craved. It was the freedom to hate. And to hurt. And to never again kneel.

“Discipline,” murmured one of the Z’ress priestesses, voice smooth as spider silk, cold as the stone beneath her bare feet. “Lolth’s web does not tolerate weaklings.”

The vampire stepped over the girl—his sister—like she was a shattered doll someone else would sweep up later. Her body lay half-curled, blood already welling beneath her cheek. The hall did not gasp. It did not hush. Instead, a low ripple of sound spread across the nobles, a rising hiss of appreciation.

“To be hollowed and filled with her will...”

“No fear. Only purpose.”

They didn’t fear him. They exalted him.

Their eyes gleamed with delight, sick hunger, and envy because he was something new, something sharp, and something unleashed. And they craved that edge, that blessed violence, even as they flinched from it.

Then his gaze slid. Slow. Unhurried. Like a blade tracing a throat.

And settled on Sedlan.

Her heart clenched so hard it felt like her ribs might crack around it.

He stepped forward. Deliberate. Measured. Not a hunter now, but a priest, approaching an altar.

A single drop of sweat ran down her back, soaking into the fine cloth tied around her waist, chilling her spine. Her hands tightened around the pillar. She didn’t dare breathe.

The vampire’s hand caught Sedlan’s jaw almost tenderly. His thumb brushed just below the boy’s bottom lip, smearing the faint remnants of nervous sweat. He tilted Sedlan’s face this way and that, studying him the way one might inspect a cut of meat—no, something more fragile—a delicate figurine, waiting to be cracked.

Sedlan held still. Too still. His throat worked once, a small, broken swallow. His eyes were wide, dark, and unblinking. The way prey sometimes went still, hoping the shadow would pass by.

Something odd took root in her stomach—cold and twisting, like a worm burrowing into soft fruit. It was terror. But it was also recognition.

Because there was a softness in the vampire’s face, just for a heartbeat. Something like nostalgia. Or pity, poisoned and sour.

And then that small, unsettling smile spread across his lips.

He leaned closer, close enough that the folds of his cloak brushed Sedlan’s chest. Close enough that Sedlan’s trembling became visible, a faint shiver running from shoulder to shoulder.

Bone-deep fear gripped her core. Her feet shuffled back in accord, pressing her deeper into the shadows behind the pillar. Her breath was a fragile thing, brittle as spun sugar.

Then the vampire spoke, voice almost gentle, almost amused—like the delicate snip of shears through silk.

“This one is yours, Lady Xulvira.”

Mistress Xulvira inclined her head slightly. Her lips curled into something between approval and disdain.

“My nephew,” she said, each syllable slow, perfectly weighted. “Unremarkable and most unworthy amongst my kin. Useless for breeding and even more so for business. His mother hoped he would take the test of Lolth. But I loathe the thought of my house birthing a drider.”

Why was she sad? That question flared sharp and bright through her mind—too bright. It scorched everything else.

“After some thought,” Xulvira continued, lazily twirling the stem of her goblet, “your dear sibling—my consort—suggested we might send him to dear Val’Zaroth. We hoped my great-uncle’s tutelage might mould something of value from the rotten clay.”

The vampire’s smile sharpened into something cruel, something hungry. His hand slid from Sedlan’s jaw to rest lightly on the boy’s shoulder. A promise. A claim.

“Then he is ours for the breaking.”

“Fully yours, if Uncle wishes it,” Mistress Xulvira replied, taking another sip. Her eyes didn’t even flicker toward Sedlan. “The Kiss of Lolth is already more honour than he deserves.”

She bit the inside of her mouth so hard she tasted iron. Her nails dug into the pillar, hard enough to bruise through the thin silk wrappings at her wrists. She stayed small, silent, and hidden in the folds of black.

But at that moment, something deep inside her twisted and broke.

A pressure, sharp as a swallowed shard of glass.

A knowing, hollow and ringing, echoing through every fragile piece of her.

A grief too familiar for her to carry. A grief she had worn before, tucked under her ribs, behind her eyes, in the quiet sobs she smothered against stone floors when no one was listening.

Because she understood, with a clarity that stole her breath, that Sedlan’s fate was already sealed.

It didn’t matter that he was quiet. That he was gentle. That he liked to read in the fungal gardens and once gave her a crust of bread when she hadn’t eaten in days.

None of that mattered here. In this room, under these spider-clad gods, kindness was weakness, mercy was rot, and the only currency was how beautifully one could be broken.

She watched the vampire tighten his grip on Sedlan’s shoulder, feeling its echo in her bones.

She had no name for it then.

But it was the moment she realized—

Even monsters bowed to something worse. Even cruelty had a crown.

They didn’t see death. They saw ascension.

They didn’t see pain. They saw favour.

The Kiss of Lolth wasn’t punishment. It was a privilege.

And Sedlan—quiet, frightened Sedlan—was granted the privilege of becoming a monster against his will.

She saw him stand, bow deeply to the gathered nobles, and say, in a voice so empty it barely sounded like him at all:

“You honour me, Mistress.”

Her stomach twisted again. Her throat locked tight.

Because it was a lie.

Because it was survival.

Because it was precisely the sort of lie she knew too well.

---

She blinked back into the present, the silence of the crypt heavier now, not quieter.

The memory settled like dust in her chest.

A vampire.

Of all things, this was what she was sent to find.

Not the starving boy she’d passed outside the city gate.
Not the old woman bruised by the Flaming Fists for begging too close to a merchant’s stall.

But this.

A predator.

She exhaled slowly.

It should feel like betrayal—being led to help something that could kill her before it could speak. She should be calculating the risk.

Preparing to strike.

Instead, she looked down at the thing in the coffin.

Not a dark god-touched creature of hunger and death.

Just a man.

Thin.

Dry.

Hurt.

The vampire in her memory had glided like a vision. This one twitched when he breathed. His fingers were cracked from trying to crawl out of his own grave. His body was still in it. Just dirt. Cracked lips. Ruined hands. Not divine. Not fearsome.

Just broken and forgotten. That too was familiar.

Someone had meant for him to survive down there—not to die, just to suffer. That was all she needed to know. That low, cold thread of anger behind her ribs whispered: This was why she was sent. He was still in pain.

And pain was enough for her.

She didn’t heal him.

Not yet.

Because healing wasn’t just magic, it was touch. It was pain. And he was not ready for that. She could feel it—his body might live, but his soul was still underwater.

Right now, he needed something smaller.

Something he could choose.

She unstoppered her waterskin and leaned in—not soft, not cruel.

“You awake in there?”

His throat twitched.

“Try drinking. Just water. You can handle that, can’t you?”

She offered the flask. One hand steady. The other near her thigh—ready, not defensive.

He drank.

Not well. Not cleanly. But enough.

She nodded. “Good.”

Then she uncorked a squat vial. The scent hit her first—bitter roots, bloodmetal, crushed tendon. She grimaced and downed it in one tilt.

A thick ochre potion—Hill Giant Strength. No glow. No glamour. Just heat and weight, a bloom of borrowed power rooted deep in her muscles like fire laced through stone.

“You’re about to hate this,” she muttered, more to herself than to him.

She climbed down into the grave again—slow, measured. The walls of the crypt creaked with old weight, and the earth shifted under her boots. Cold dust clung to her breath.

“I’m going to lift you. Try not to twitch.”

He didn’t move. Couldn’t. But his red, raw eyes found hers. Dull, yes—but still aware. Still fighting to stay in that hollow, lightless body.

She hooked her arms under his and felt it: the full weight of suffering. Not just physical—existential. His bones shifted under her grip like broken glass wrapped in silk. Every inch of him felt fragile, ruined, burned from the inside.

Her spine screamed. Her balance wavered—but the potion held. Her grip stayed true.

She climbed.

The crypt mouth narrowed like a wound trying to close. Dirt rained in light showers from above as her shoulders pushed through the lip. For one terrifying moment, her foot slipped—but she drove forward, propelled by the pressure still echoing in her skull, that relentless whisper: pain is purpose.

She emerged with him slung across her shoulder, bloodless and motionless. The grave yawned behind them, open and uneven, like the city had tried to swallow this secret whole.

His head lolled against her shoulder. His eyes—open, reddened—flicked once toward the crypt behind them, as if trying to look back at what had held him for so long.

She followed his gaze for a heartbeat.

“Don’t,” she whispered, voice low and grim. “Whatever you left in there—leave it.”

She adjusted his weight. Her arms trembled under the strain, but she didn’t let him fall.

“You’re doing great,” she muttered, breath shallow. “For a corpse.”

She stepped onto the grass beyond the crypt wall. The graveyard held its breath.

The lanterns in Grave Wash had long since guttered out. The alleys and mausoleums offered no light. Just fog. Just silence. The kind of silence that seemed to watch.

The city didn’t care. No one would stop her. But still—something old beneath her boots noticed.

“Almost there,” she said to herself. To him. To the pull that had led her here.

He twitched.

Just a fraction of a flinch. But it was enough.

Still with her.

She gritted her teeth and kept walking. Past the rusted iron gate. Past rows of the forgotten and the named. Past graves that had never been opened, and one that had.

The night swallowed them.

And so she vanished into the fog, bruised and burdened, carrying something broken the world had tried to forget—

—But Ilmater, the one who watches her, would not.

Nor would Elenya.

Notes:

Hi!
Thank you so much for reading.

This is my first fanfiction and also a deeply personal project. It began as a quiet “what if” in the back of my head while playing the game—what if someone found Astarion before the game began?

The events are very similiar to pre-canon events but some minor changes and unconsistencies have been implemented to further the story.

What if someone broken by cruelty, but devoted to compassion, was sent to save someone like him? What if healing wasn’t easy or clean or romantic—but hard, slow, and built on shared pain?

This fic explores trauma, mercy, rage, and redemption—but through the lens of dark fantasy. Expect moral ambiguity, slow-burning emotional intensity, divine manipulation, and characters who carry heavy histories.

I’ve also expanded a lot on forgotten ralms lore, to ground the event in a canon-adjacent way that explores the intersection of power, worship, and cruelty.

I’m still learning how to pace, write in third person, and tell this story in a way that honors what I feel about these characters. Your support means the world.

If you made it this far:
thank you.
I hope you’ll stick around for what comes next.

— 💜

Chapter 2: First Light

Summary:

Buried, starved, and all but lost to madness, Astarion is unearthed by a stranger who heals him without fear or judgment—forcing him to confront what remains of himself beyond hunger and chains.

Notes:

This story explores an Astarion who’s just been unearthed and rewrites his exhumation forty years before BG3, emphasising the fact he spent nearly a year buried— leaving him more feral, fragmented, and starved than canon.
He is far more broken and than in the game.

Expect heavy psychological themes, body horror (starvation, feeding), and a slow struggle with identity and worth.

(Astarion’s POV)  

---

They say time heals.

How quaint.

How tragically optimistic.

Time doesn’t heal. Time stretches. It thins and pulls your agony into something like fine wine diluted with sewage—bitter, lingering, fouled beyond salvage. It makes every second drip slower, heavier, until even the air turns to rot in your lungs.

Assuming you have lungs.

Assuming you’re still real.

I stopped being real sometime in the sixth month. Or maybe the fourth.

Does it matter?

There was a beginning. I remember that. I remember clawing—tearing at the lid with nails that split and peeled back until my fingers bled, the flesh beneath raw enough to feel new again. The stone never gave. But I kept digging, kept scoring grooves into that tomb ceiling, hoping pain meant something. Hoping it proved I still existed.

When the digging failed, I screamed.

How poetic. How useless.

The screaming stopped when my throat gave out—shredded into nothing but raw gasps. After that came the silence—the stillness. The unbearable weight of time pressing inward, folding over me like damp soil.

Cazador hadn’t killed me.

That would’ve been too kind. Too final.

No. He sealed me in the dark. Starving. Dreamless. Alone.

That was the punishment.

Not death.

Oblivion.

And oblivion isn’t silence. It’s a chorus of nothing, echoing forever inside a skull that refuses to crack. It’s remembering hunger even when you’re too empty to feel it. It’s waiting for madness, only to discover madness is merciful—and you are not permitted mercy.

I stopped keeping count.

Because there was nothing left to count.

Then memory turned on me.

Little things at first. Faces. Places. The scent of candlewax in Cazador’s study, thick with old paper and perfumed rot. The sound of my own laughter—my real laughter, not the polished thing he taught me to wield. The feel of silk sheets pulled tight beneath my palms when I still believed seduction was power.

Gone.

Then larger things.

My family name. My sister’s face. Did I even have a sister? Sometimes there was a girl with dark hair, telling me to hush in a library so bright it hurt. Sometimes there was no one at all. Just rooms that blurred at the edges, dissolving if I tried to focus.

I tried. Gods, I tried. I clawed at those memories as I clawed at the lid. Held them so tight they shattered.

Sometimes I’d pretend Cazador would open the lid—not to end it, but to command. Because that was real. That was certain. To obey was at least something.

Or worse—I imagined I’d please him. I’d step into the light, gaunt and trembling, and he’d smile that cold, mirthless smile and say: There you are, boy. Always so eager to scream for me. Your screams sound the sweetest.

And I would. I would’ve done anything just to have someone say my name again. To remind me, I had one.

But even that hope turned sour.

I stopped dreaming of him.

Stopped dreaming of anything.

Stopped existing outside the tomb walls. The dark became my skin. The hunger became my marrow. And in the thick, endless murk, there was no me. Only need.

Need without shape. Without language.
A black pit yawning open forever, swallowing every scrap of thought before it could become a memory.

So I begged.

I begged every god whose name still clawed its way up through the ruin of my thoughts—and the ones I could no longer name at all—to kill me.

I called on Corellon Larethian, father of art and war, who blessed and shaped the first elves from tears and laughter.
On Sehanine Moonbow, goddess of death and illusions, to guide me gently into whatever waited beyond this.
On Hanali Celanil, mistress of beauty and longing, to pity something so shattered it could no longer even weep.
On Labelas Enoreth, keeper of time’s endless coil, to let my thread break.
On Solonor Thelandira, on Aerdrie Faenya, on every name ever whispered beneath ancient moonlight by elven lips.

I even tried Lolth—hissed her titles through broken teeth, dared her to take me as a trophy for her webs, if only she’d finish it.

Then I begged Shar, because perhaps she would cradle me in her perfect void.
Selûne, because maybe her cold light could wash me clean.

But most of all—gods help me—I begged Ilmater.
The one I had always mocked.
The one whose soft-eyed mercy I’d scorned as weakness, whose priests I’d taunted, whose temples I’d fled like plague.

I whispered to him in words that fell apart on my tongue.
I poured out what was left of me—these torn, soiled scraps of soul—offered them up not for rescue, not for forgiveness.
Just for an end.

For a final kindness.
For his hand to gently reach down and smother me, like a parent snuffing a candle to protect it from the wind.

But none of them answered.
Not the proud gods of my people, not the dark seductress below, not the lady of loss, nor the lady of light.
Not even Ilmater, patron of suffering, who should have looked upon my ruin and wept.

Their silence was a cruelty deeper than Cazador’s chains.
It meant I was alone.
This agony was mine to wear forever—without witness, purpose, or end.

So I lay there, mouth parted in pleas that had long since stopped being words, throat raw, prayers rotting into nothing.
Waiting for a mercy that would never come.

I don’t know how long I was gone.

I only know that by the end—if it was an end—there was nothing left of the clever spawn who once charmed marks with a wicked smile under moonlight.
Nothing left of the trembling young elf torn from the streets of Baldur’s Gate, shackled in chains of blood and command.

Just a hollow shape in the dark. Mouth open. Waiting.

Not hoping. Hope is for the living. Hope is for the sane.

And I was neither.

I was hungry.

There’s something that happens to the mind when hunger goes beyond want.
When thirst becomes identity.
When pain stops being an intrusion and becomes the only proof that you still exist.

I forgot language first. Words unravelled, sentences scattered into half-formed pulses that never quite reached thought.
Then memory dissolved. Faces blurred. Names curdled into sound without meaning. Even Cazador’s voice—once thunder in my veins—faded to nothing but an itch I couldn’t reach.

But the taste of blood never left.

That was the marrow of me—the last bright shard.
Blood.
Blood.
Blood.

It haunted me. Painted itself on the insides of my eyelids. Spoke to me in the dark.
It promised relief—not from suffering, but from emptiness. From being hollow.

I don’t know how long I lay there, gnawing at my tongue for scraps of the copper tang.
How long I lay still, letting phantom knives open me again and again just so that I could remember what it felt like to leak.
Sometimes I thought I smelled it, warm and bright, just outside the lid.
And I’d tear at the stone again, splinter my fingers to the bone, laugh and weep and whisper half-prayers to gods I couldn’t name.

Time didn’t pass. It expanded.
It became a vast cathedral of silence where every echo was my own voice begging.
And slowly, begging became breathing. Breathing became silence. Silence became—

Hunger.

It was no longer inside me. It was me.

When the last of my thoughts rotted away, I stopped being me. Who was I before the darkness?
Stopped being a spawn. Stopped being an elf.

I was only thirst.

A dream of red. A mouth full of knives. A creature of endless, exquisite need.

And I ceased to wait for rescue in that dark, sweetly endless nowhere.
Because I had forgotten there was anything else to wait for.
Anything but the next heartbeat.
Anything but the promise of something warm and wet to fill the cavern inside my ribs.

I didn’t remember who I was.

Only what I needed.

Blood.

I waited for it forever.

Until the scratching.

Soft. Rhythmic.

At first, I thought it was just another illusion.

My mind loved its tricks. It conjured music sometimes, or footsteps I couldn’t trace. But this—this wasn’t trickery.

This was pressure. Movement. Weight shifting against the lid.

Someone was digging.

I didn’t move.

Couldn’t.

Fear? Perhaps. Or caution. Or the deep-rooted certainty that the master was clever enough to invent hope as a method of cruelty.

Then came the scent.

The world above had been nothing but a distant weight until suddenly it cracked open, and air flooded in—sharp, brutal. And with it came something impossible: cold cavern stone after rain, burnt myrrh clinging to torn velvet, mint crushed under desperate fingers. Beneath it all, the faintest ghost of bellflowers, whispering of a life I didn’t believe could exist.

It was sacred and savage at once, sorrow-soaked and stubbornly alive. In that first staggering inhale, I thought—it might be salvation.

Or the bait of some crueller snare.

Gods.

BLOOD.

Warm. Alive. Thinking.

Not just life—presence.

Gods—blood.

It hits me like a storm. I thought I was hunger itself, but this—this is a cathedral of scent, vast and echoing, swallowing every thought I have left. It’s shockingly sweet, layered with wild mint and dark lilac, threaded through with cold moss. Beneath it all, something older: sun-warmed iron, rain on cracked stones, sharp and rich, whispering of newly broken earth.

It coils through me, hot and alive. I want to bury my face in that throat, taste it where it’s freshest, drink until I forget what silence felt like in that grave.

It’s dizzying. Maddening. Every breath fills me with it, sweet as crushed berries, raw as a wolf’s first tear into flesh.

I’ve never wanted anything more.

My fangs ache—my body hums with need. I would tear through gods for a single mouthful—because in that scent is everything: warmth and cold, sorrow and hope, tangled together in a way that feels painfully, ferociously alive.

It claws at me from beneath my own skin. Hunger snarls, desperate to tear upward and drink until I’m whole. Every starving fragment of me screams to reach—to bite, feed, and feel.

I twitch.

I should lunge. I should have already. There’s nothing else—no plan, no thought, only the blood.

So why—

Why am I still here? Still caged by flesh that won’t move? By jaws that won’t close?

The confusion cuts sharp, almost bright. My instincts surge toward her—

And my body refuses. I strain. I rage inside my own skin.

Nothing.

The master’s law.

“Thou shalt not drink of the blood of thinking creatures.”

It isn’t a memory. It simply is, etched deeper into me than the dirt pressing in on all sides—a chain with no lock to pick.

I want her blood more than I’ve ever wanted anything.

And still—my hands lie slack. My throat burns, but does not open.

I will remain starving.

And gods, it is agony.

The scent seeps into me like heat into cracked stone. It fills the brittle spaces where breath used to live. My tongue curls against my teeth, dry, aching for a taste. My fangs throb with a pulse that doesn’t belong to me—each phantom beat promises ecstasy, relief, life.

I want to tear her open. I want to drown in her, to rip and drink until this emptiness is silenced.

But I can’t.

My body obeys the master’s command even now, when nothing is left of me but need.

So the scent becomes torture.

It floods my mouth, thick and lush, a promise that never arrives. It sinks into my bones until I could swear I tasted it—salt, iron, and sorrow. Each shallow breath brands it deeper into what’s left of my mind.

I shudder. My back arches helplessly. My mouth parts, desperate to pull that perfume of blood straight into my marrow.

Nothing answers.

There is no bite. No rush of warmth down my throat. No end.

Only that keening spiral of want without fulfillment, a hunger so sharp it cuts, hollowing me until I am nothing but open mouth and empty ache.

It’s worse than the dark. Worse than the crypt.

Because at least then, I only dreamed of blood.

Now, it’s here. So close. So cruel.

And still, my jaws do not close.

So I suffer, drunk on the scent of life I cannot claim, lost in a torment all the more exquisite for being forever just out of reach.

---

The lid opened.

The earth breathed.

And light—real, flickering light—split the darkness.

I opened my eyes.

Slow. Sticky.

And there she was.

A short human woman with tan skin and a small, sturdy frame. Dirt and blood streaked her hands. Her long, dark brown hair was tangled from wind and neglect, half-matted against her cheek. Her eyes weren’t soft—they were steady. Practical. She didn’t look at me like prey. She didn’t look at me like anything.

She looked at me like I was a task.

And gods, the scent.

It poured over me in a wave, unfiltered now—hot and lush, biting at the hollow spaces inside me. Blood. Sweat. Skin still warm from effort. A thousand tiny living scents braided together, sharp and vivid, crowding out thought.

It was so much stronger with the tomb open. No stone to mute it. No dirt to choke it.

It filled my mouth and clung to my tongue. Slid down my throat like molten glass.

I shuddered.

Because she was so close. So alive.

And for one exquisite, excruciating moment—I almost forgot I couldn’t move. Almost forgot the master’s leash wrapped tight around my bones. Almost forgot the law that held my jaws slack and my hands useless.

Because the hunger roared louder than reason.

And she smelled like salvation.

I wanted to feed.
Drain.
Drain.
Until there was nothing left but silence and warm red sleep.

I can’t feed.

I can’t.

The hunger gnawed through me, raw and gaping, a wound that would never close. It scraped its claws along the inside of my ribs, howling for her—her heat, pulse, and fragile, perfect veins. Every part of me burned to close the space between us, to tear through skin and muscle until I drowned in her.

But I couldn’t.

I lay there, limp and trembling, mouth parted around a moan that never found breath. My body refused to obey me. The master’s edict shackled me deeper than bone, deeper than marrow, deeper even than the starvation that had hollowed me out.

So close. So alive.

And I couldn’t take it. Couldn’t have it. Could only feel it wash over me, saturate me, until my thoughts blurred and the world shrank to the single, exquisite torture of her blood scent.

I would have wept if I could remember how.

Instead, I just prayed. In the silence of my skull. In the language of pain.

Kill me.

Please.

End it.

Don’t make me keep wanting. Don’t make me lie here with my mouth watering,  mind splitting, and heart pounding at a feast I can never taste.

Let it stop.

Let me die.

Because this—this was worse than any coffin, any lash, any chain the master ever wrapped around my throat.

This was hope, twisted into a blade.

And it cut me apart.

---

She leaned closer.

The light shifted across her face, cutting shadows across her mouth, her eyes—and then it happened. That quiet, devastating shift.

She saw me.

Not just the ruin. Not the ribs caged tight against starving skin or the blood-cracked lips. She saw through that—saw the glint of fangs, the ruin in my eyes. The truth of me.

The monster.

That breathless moment when knowing sinks into someone’s bones.

“Vampire.”

She said it like she might talk about the weather. Or a neutral chore. 

I felt it like a brand against raw flesh.

"Of course it’s a fucking vampire," she rasped out—almost a lament, nearly a joke ripped out of old scars.

My fingers twitched—shattered things, useless, shaking. Every part of me shrieked for her blood. Not a polite hunger. Not survival. A beast’s scream. A rupture in thought. Her scent was everything. The warm salt of her sweat, the bright throb of her pulse, the shiver of her breath. It swarmed me, clogged my throat, made my eyes burn.

Gods—I wanted her. I wanted to gorge on her until there was nothing left. Not taste. Not sip. Devour.

Not so I could live.

So I could stop.

Let her see me for what I was—watch my jaw unhinge and the ruin pour out—and end it. Put her blade through my heart. Let me die drinking.

Anything but this. This clawing ache. This cage of empty ribs.

Because I wasn’t a person.

I wasn’t even the echo of the spawn.

I was a vessel. A ragged husk knotted tight around the master’s laws. I wasn’t a he anymore—I was just his. His tool. His rule. His hunger.

And if she had any sense—any mercy—she would kill me.

For a heartbeat, I believed she might. Her eyes flicked down. Her hand drifted near her weapon. And gods—something in me howled up through the hollow of my chest.

Do it.
Strike. Now. Please. Please gods, please just—

But she didn’t.

There was no pity in her eyes. No horror. No curled-lip disgust. Not even the glittering thrill some get from putting down a monster.

She just... moved. Offered me a flask of water, like I was a starved hound with burrs in its coat. Like she’d found me chained to a gate and decided I needed a drink before I died.

My mind couldn’t hold it. It cracked sideways. This was a trick. Had to be. The master—he was clever enough to dream this up. Spin a woman out of fog and guilt, have her kneel so soft, alive, and close. Let me taste her with every ragged breath. Let me want, hope, maybe believe in grace—and then tear it all out again.

Because that’s what this felt like.

A stage.
A snare.
A grin waiting behind her calm eyes.

No one helped a vampire.

Not even in hallucinations.

But gods—her scent. It battered me. Sank into my hollow lungs. Drenched my tongue. My jaw throbbed. My throat convulsed. Every muscle inside me flexed, tried to break free, tried to reach. My body was twisted under skin that wasn’t listening, my ribs arched, and my mouth opened. Instinct clawed up—bite, bite, bite, tear it open, drink until there’s nothing left but red and quiet.

But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t.

The master’s rule was a nail driven through my spine. Deeper than thought. Deeper than blood. I could starve here for eternity, rot down to rattling bone, and still—I could not take her.

So I just lay there. Shuddering. Eyes wide, lips split on a whisper that wasn’t even words. Wanting her like I’d never wanted anything. Like the hunger itself was weeping through my veins.

And she just stayed. Kneeling, watching me shake. Like this was ordinary. Like monsters didn’t bite.

Not afraid.

Not even a flicker.

And that did something jagged inside me. Tore a new wound open. Because it meant she wasn’t going to end me. She was going to lift me out.

Why? Why gods, why can’t I just die?

The thought didn’t come clean. It was a snarl, a sob, a feral whine rattling my chest.

Because I didn’t understand. Couldn’t. This wasn’t how the story went. I was supposed to be the horror in the crypt. The end of the blade. The stain on her hands.

Instead, her scent filled me. Her warmth knifed through the cold. Her pulse sounded like a promise I could never touch.

And I stayed broken beneath her hands.

Not dead.

Not fed.

Just ruined.

And for the first time in countless hungry eternities, I didn’t know what to want more—her throat or her mercy.

So I wanted both. Wanted everything. And nothing.

And stayed caged inside myself, throat full of a scream that couldn’t claw its way out.

---

She moved with purpose.  

Not reverence. Not fear.  

She stepped inside the tomb like another ditch to be cleaned out.  

I wanted to flinch. I tried to recoil. But my limbs stayed slack. I could barely feel them, but nothing was left in them. They hung from me like a damp cloth.  

And when her arms slipped beneath mine and began to lift—  

Gods.  

It hurt.  

Bone-deep, blazing and worse than that.  

It was humiliating.  

I, who had once glided through moonlit streets, who could disarm a man with a smile and slit his throat with the same hand—I was being hauled like a sack of spoiled meat. Limp, pathetic, twitching only when my muscles spasmed from starvation and pain.  

I groaned. Not to resist. Just… to make a sound.  

To remind myself, I still could.  

She didn’t react.  

Just adjusted her grip and kept moving.  

No apology. No inquiry. No soft murmurs like I was something delicate.  

She lifted.  

I felt every shift of her body. The power in her legs, the tension in her shoulders. She was stronger than she looked—or maybe she drank something. I caught the whiff of something alchemical on her breath and realized she’d used a potion.  

So she’d come prepared.  

Was that comforting?  

No.  

It was terrifying.  

Prepared meant intention.  

Prepared meant she planned to find something like me. 

---

We rose together—up through the mouth of the crypt, into the cold night.  

The air hit me like frost.  

Real air.  

Real sky.  

It didn’t free me.  

It didn’t heal me.  

But it changed something.  

I was no longer buried.  

And that, after everything, felt almost violent.  

I sagged against her as she carried me, my head lolling against her back. I could feel her breath near my arm—steady, practical, unfazed.  

Like she did this sort of thing all the time.  

Dig up vampires. Offer them water. Carry them through the dark.  

I didn’t know what she was.    

But I knew one thing, with bitter certainty:  

She wasn’t afraid of me.   

And I didn’t know what that meant yet.   

But I feared it more than anything. 

---

The world moved.   

I didn’t.   

Or rather, I moved, but not by choice.  

Her arms around me were steady, patient, and professional. I wasn’t draped across her shoulder like a sack—I was balanced, like a burden she was used to bearing.  

That was almost worse.  

I expected to be dropped. Mishandled. Reviled. Or at the very least, noticed as a threat.  

Instead, I was transported.  

Carried.  

Gently.  

The shift from dirt to stone to cobble was disorienting. My ears rang with the quiet—the way only cities can ring when they're too still to be trusted. The graveyard faded behind us, but my body didn’t recognize it as an escape.  

Because this didn’t feel like a rescue.  

It felt like another box.  

Different shape. Same silence. 

---

I tried to speak.    

My lips parted. The air tasted like rust. My tongue moved, slow and dry as parchment.    

But nothing came out.    

She didn’t comment. Didn’t encourage me. Just kept walking.   

Down winding paths that smelled of mildew and soot. Past broken fences and sagging stairwells. Every step away from the grave should have felt like defiance, but all I could feel was... guilt?   

No.  

Not guilt.   

Violation.   

Cazador’s rule still whispered through my bones.  

“Thou shalt not leave my side unless directed.”  

I hadn’t been given leave.  

I had been removed.  

Dragged like a corpse.  

My body may have left the crypt, but my soul hadn’t caught up. It still clung to the bars of that invisible cage, waiting for the backlash. Waiting for the pain. The punishment. The voice in my head was telling me I’d failed again.

Any moment now, I expected my heart to stop. My skin to burn. My spine to snap from some forgotten failsafe.  

But the silence held.  

The leash didn’t yank.  

And that, somehow, was more terrifying than any pain. 

---

Eventually, she stopped.  

A door creaked.  

Old wood. Reinforced from the inside. She nudged it open with her shoulder, still carrying me, and stepped into the shadows.  

The smell hit me first: dust, oil, old stone. No incense. No blood. No mildew. Just the stale quiet of a place abandoned and reclaimed in equal measure.  

A den, maybe. Or a hole.  

She laid me down—not on stone, not on dirt. On fabric. A cot. Worn but intact.  

It was soft.   

Soft.    

That nearly broke me.  

I hadn’t felt softness in… gods, how long?   

My head rolled to the side, too weak to lift, but I watched her.  

She moved around the room with the precision of someone used to surviving. Checking windows, lighting a lantern, and pulling off her gloves without ceremony.   

Not once did she look at me like I was special.  

Or sacred.  

Or damned.   

And for some reason…  

I couldn’t stand it.  

---

She didn’t speak. Not at first.  

Just knelt beside me and began unpacking her kit—vials, thread, cloth, a scalpel. Her hands moved with surgical precision, not haste. She worked like someone who had done this before. Many times. On worse things. 

She touched my shoulder.  

I flinched.   

Not from pain—there wasn’t enough feeling left in me for that—but from instinct. My whole body tensed at the contact, expecting pain, fire, or a spell etched in holy spite.  

But her hand was steady. Cool. Human. There was no voice. No smiles. No reassurances. Only motion.  

She rolled back my pant legs, found the worst of the tearing and breaking, and took out a narrow bottle. The liquid inside shimmered—not with light, but with density, as though it resisted the world around it. She uncorked the vial—something mild, medicinal—and brushed it along the torn skin of my leg. I hissed, partly from the sting, mostly from disbelief.  

The cleanliness of it. The method.  

Her hand didn’t waver.   

And then, the spell.  

Her fingers brushed the air above my skin—quick, clipped movements more akin to glyph-cutting than a flourish. Her lips moved in precise syllables. This wasn’t a cleric's chant or a showman's charm.  

It was structured ritualistic magic. Born of people. Looking closer to that of a tavern hedge mage.

Bardic,

Yes—but different.

Arcane words muttered in different languages. Her casting was strange, not dramatic but slightly graceful.

Magic used like a scalpel, not a wand. Sharpened by years of silence and necessity. She lulled and convinced my wound to closure.   

I felt it take hold.  

Not warm. Not gentle. It felt clinical. Not cold, exactly. Just… practiced  

Corrective.  

Flesh aligning. Muscles and bones reconnecting.  

A soft patchwork of restoration.  

She didn’t look at me while she worked. She looked through me.

Past me.

Toward some invisible point, she’d long since accepted as more real than people.  

And then—she reached for a lyre.

Not with ceremony. Not with flourish. Just steady hands, work-rough, lifting the instrument like a tool pulled from a pack.

She played.

Not a song, exactly. More like… she structured vibration. A current of sound wound through the stale air, haunting and unadorned. No charming verses. No clever trills to show off skill. Just notes laid bare—bone and string, stripped of finery until only the raw shape of sorrow remained.

It hurt.

Not physically. Not quite. But something inside me flinched away.

Because the music was mournful, it didn’t shine or lift or promise tomorrow’s sweetness. It bled—quietly, beautifully—over old wounds I didn’t realize still gaped open.

Images cracked across my mind, jagged and half-formed:

A lavish room in the Upper City, laughter echoing off marble.
An office lined with books whose titles had long rotted from memory.
A ballroom drenched in candlelight and perfume. 
A dark-haired elven girl—running across sunlit grass, clutching a letter, eyes bright with secrets she couldn’t wait to spill.

Purple lilac eyes looking at me.
Who was she?

A red house made of clay worked in the landscape. 
A crow chick follows around in a valley covered by Blueleaf trees sculpted by magic.

An Elven man's back with long dark blue hair riding off into a grouping of flat farmlands 

Where was this? 
Who was he?

The inside of a finely decorated carriage moving through the basilisk gate with a small pale hand pressing the window. 
Who was I?

The music didn’t care. It wrapped around those phantom fragments like a thread winding tight around a spindle. A low, aching whisper that almost urged me to let go.

To let the memories slip through my fingers, float back to whatever darkness they’d clawed out of.

And gods—it worked.

As I listened, I felt… something. A slow seep of strength curling back into my starved limbs. The hollow cage of my ribs loosened, like I’d been holding my breath for a century and was just now remembering how to pull air into my lungs.

Ah.

A Song of Rest.

Bards used them in taverns, along blood-streaked roads, in makeshift war camps where there wasn’t enough magic to go around. A bit of melody to help wounds knit, to soothe bruised minds and weary bodies.

But I’d never heard one like this.

It didn’t sparkle with false hope. Didn’t dance with the promise of better days.

It simply grieved.

Grieved for lost yesterdays. For hours I couldn’t recall, faces already dissolving to ash. For me, maybe. Or perhaps just alongside me.

I was the one crumbling.
I didn’t want it.

Not from her hands.

Not when it pulled at the raw edges of me and made me feel—gods, feel—when I was buried beneath hunger and the master’s laws.

She played for what felt like hours. Never once looking at me, not expecting thanks or awe, never softening her gaze with pity.

She didn’t sing or sway. She didn’t try to soothe me.

She did it because it worked.

Like a tired mother tucking a stubborn child into bed, unmoved by tears or tantrums—simply doing what had to be done.

And still, something inside me twisted. A knot of pressure coiled behind my sternum, tight and mean. My throat clenched as if I might sob, though nothing came.

This is suspicious.

Has anyone ever done this for me? Stayed—truly stayed—while I rested?

Why am I being healed? What is she going to do with me?

No one does this without a price. Not for the likes of me. Not for the monster on their floor.

And yet—

She kept playing. Fingers deft on the strings, crafting sorrow into something almost tender. Binding up pieces of me I hadn’t realized were still scattered.

Until, at last, the final note faded.

It left behind a hush so profound, it felt sacrilegious to breathe.

She didn’t wait for applause. Didn’t look to see if I was weeping or grateful. Just packed the lyre away with the same utilitarian care as someone folding linens.

She moved on.

And I was left there—aching, bewildered, the echo of her melody circling my ribs like ghost hands.

Not knowing if I wanted to drag her close and bite out the confusion—
Or just let the last note take me under and never wake again.

---

But when the final note faded, the hush that followed wasn’t peace.

It was a hollow—wide, echoing, like ribs left empty too long.

And into that hollow, the hunger came roaring back.

Not politely. Not dimmed by rest or by the careful stitches of quiet magic tugging my torn flesh together.
It surged like black water, flooding every tender place that song had tried to mend. It scraped my marrow raw, gnawed at the fragile seams where my body had only just begun to remember itself.

It reminded me, brutally, of precisely what I was beneath all the fleeting illusions of recovery.

A starving thing.

A monster.

No melody could drown that out. No careful hands or mournful strings could fill the cavern inside me where blood was meant to run hot.

Even now—full of borrowed strength, my bones thrumming with patched-up life—I felt the truth gnash inside me. A jaw that would never close. A throat that would never stop aching.

It didn’t matter that she’d eased the pain. It didn’t matter that, for a fragile breath, I’d remembered what it felt like to be more than gnawing need.

Because the moment the softness ended, the monster stirred. Snarling. Ferocious. Always hungry.

It would always be there.

Underneath the healing. Beneath the music. Behind every fragile hope that ever dared to call me whole.

As I lay there, breath ragged, body trembling on the cot she’d so carefully placed me on, I realized with a cold, pitiless certainty:

She could bandage my wounds. Give me a hundred more songs to grieve what I’d lost.

But she could never drive this out.

Nothing could.

Because even when the pain faded, the hunger stayed.

And it would stay long after everything else rotted away.

She moved again—toward the door this time. My eyes tried to track her, but I felt so tired, so hollow.

I heard her whisper at the threshold—not prayer. A string of syllables in Sylvan, low and fluid, shaped like secrets.

Her palm lifted at the edge of my vision, fingers splayed with ritualized restraint. Not graceful—memorized. The precise, economical motion of someone who’d done this countless times.

She waited. Didn’t glance back.

Kept whispering.

It took time. The silence stretched taut, buzzing in my ears. Then, finally—I heard them.

The soft patter of hooves. Claws on stone. One, then two, then more, delicate and uncertain.

I tried to lift my head.

Couldn’t.

But the smell hit me. Gods—the smell.

It rolled over me like heat from a forge. Fur, sweat, musk. And beneath it—blood.

Fresh. Alive.

So many pulses.

Every starving nerve inside me lit up like wildfire. My jaw spasmed. My tongue twisted against my teeth, dry and desperate.

Feed.

My body twitched, my shoulders giving a shuddering jerk.

FEED.

She whispered again. A deft flick of her wrist sent something from her sleeve into the lantern’s light. Powder? Herb? A flicker of scent—bitter, woody—and then—

They slumped.

Breathing.

Unharmed.

She had cast Sleep. And I didn’t know why that made it worse. Maybe because it meant she thought to spare them pain.

DRAIN. BLOOD. FEED.

Then she turned to me. Still silent. Still unreadable. She gestured to the pile of sleeping bodies.

No chains. No commands. Just an offer.

And then she stepped back.

Not far.

Just far enough to watch—close enough to witness, far enough not to intrude.

NOW.

Something inside me lunged, and my body followed. I was on my knees before I knew it, claws scraping stone, breath tearing out in ragged, hungry whines. I crawled, snarled, dragged by instinct more ancient than thought. I reached the first body—a young deer, breath still feathering out its nostrils—and bit.

And gods.

The taste.

Not wine. Not delicate spice on a lover’s tongue. Not even pleasure.

EVERYTHING.

It exploded through me like light through a window smashed by storm. I drank, mouth flooded, slick with heat, body arching as the frenzy seized me. My throat convulsed, swallowing greedily. Blood pulsed against my tongue, bright and metallic, carrying the terrified echo of a heartbeat.

A low, broken moan tore from my chest.

One wasn’t enough.

I fell on the next creature. And the next. Tearing, drinking, gasping, drowning. The blood was a tide, lifting me, filling the hollow places, soaking into the brittle edges of who I was. I could have sobbed.

Not from gratitude. Not even from relief.

From the shocking, unbearable absence of hunger.

My body was no longer a grave. That’s what it felt like—that something inside me, something tight and howling and ancient, had finally uncoiled, slumping in repletion.

My limbs burned, not with agony but with use. With life. Every nerve crackled, electric and immediate. My hands were wet and trembling, heavy with reality. My lungs dragged in air without resistance. My throat opened without protest.

I hadn’t realized how hard it had been to breathe. Not until it was suddenly easy.

And the silence.

The scream that had lived inside me—raw, constant, like a violin string pulled too tight—was gone.

No hunger clawing at my belly. No jaws of fire snapping behind my eyes. No ghosts whispering promises of warmth. Just quiet.

And fullness.

Not bloated. Not glutted. Just… whole.

I could feel my mind aligning, slow as frost forming on glass. Thoughts clicked into place like shards of a shattered mirror, finding each other again. My body stitched itself together from the inside out.

It had been with me for so long—the hollow, the ache—I didn’t know who I was without it.

And then I did.

I AM ASTARION.

---

I drank until my body stopped shaking. Until the silence inside me dimmed. Until I remembered what it felt like not to ache in every cell.  

When it ended, I was on the ground.  

Breathless.   

Stained.  

Alive.  

Still. Blood-drenched.

Breathing.  

Astarion.

The animals were silent now. All of them.  

Their heat lingered on my skin, inside my chest, behind my eyes. For a few blessed seconds, there was nothing but quiet. No howling nerves. No clawing instinct. Just… fullness.  

I blinked slowly, staring at the ceiling—wooden beams, cracked stone, dust caught in the lantern light. Everything looked too sharp. Too real.

There had been nothing in me for so long. And now—suddenly, terribly—I was back. I gasped like I’d been plunged into cold water. Reality had weight again.  

The blood on my lips was still warm. The fur stuck to my chin. My hands were slick, trembling, sticky with what I’d torn open. I’d fed like a beast, like a starving dog, with no dignity left in my bones.  

The shame came creeping in like fog under a door. I could taste it—metallic and old. My spine locked. My throat tightened.  

I had fed like a thing. A monster. A broken, ravenous beast. And I had not been alone. She had seen everything.   

I turned my head, expecting scorn. Or judgment. Or finally—finally—the disgust I deserved.  

But she was just sitting there.  

Calm.  

Expression unreadable.  

Not repulsed.  

Not fascinated.  

Just… there.  

Her hands were folded in her lap. Her eyes met mine without flinching.  

Still there.  

Still watching.  

The way I had fallen on those animals like a wolf. The blood-slick mouth, the trembling limbs, the raw need. All of it.  

Witnessed.  

Not imagined.  

Seen.  

And she’d watched it happen.   

I didn’t understand it.  

Didn’t trust it.  

No one watched you feed like that and stayed silent. No one helped a vampire through a frenzy and just sat there like it was a chore.

Unless—  

Unless this was part of it.  

Another layer of Cazador’s punishment. Let him taste freedom, and let him choke on the kindness that never existed.  

My throat tightened.  

Say something, I wanted to hiss.  

Spit on me. Tell me I’m disgusting. Give me something real.

But she didn’t.  

She just watched.  

Like I was something in the middle of becoming. 

---

I forced myself upright.  

It hurt. But I moved. That was what mattered.  

I sat there, shivering slightly, blood drying on my skin, and looked at her—really looked.  

And 160 years of survival unspooled inside me like a blade drawn in silence.  

I watched her like  I had watched nobles, victims, hunters, and would-be saviours. I watched her with all the practiced poise of a courtesan and all the ruthless precision of a killer.  

What did she want?  

She wasn’t fidgeting. No performance. No smugness.  

Her shoulders were loose. Her breathing was steady.  

Not proud.  

Not horrified.  

Not even curious.  

She just… was.  

My senses had never been sharper. Every flicker of breath, every minute shift in her posture—my mind catalogued it all. I searched for deception. Pity. That subtle smile the self-righteous wear. The distant edge of fear in a heartbeat.  

Nothing.  

She wasn’t hiding what she felt.  

She simply wasn’t feeling.

And that…  

That was terrifying.

Then I saw it.  

Not boldly displayed. Not flaunted.  

A necklace. Simple. Tucked beneath her shirt.  

A symbol, barely visible behind the lace where the fabric shifted near her collarbone.  

Two hands bound at the wrist.  

Ilmater.  

The Broken God.  

The patron saint of suffering. 

I went still.  

Of all the gods… of all the orders… why him?  

Why would a servant of Ilmater be digging up a vampire?  

Why heal me? Why feed me? Why let me live?  

This wasn’t charity. This wasn’t guilt.  

This was intentional.  

And I did not understand it.  

I stared at that symbol like it might strike me down, or unlock the meaning of all of this.  

It did neither.  

It just sat there.  

Quiet.  

Like her.  

And the silence between us grew heavy.  

Pregnant.  

Fragile.  

It wrapped around us like smoke—comfortable for her, suffocating for me. I couldn't bear it anymore.  

So I reached for the one weapon I still had.  

Not claws. Not magic.  

Charm or kill.

My voice cracked on the first attempt. Dry. Ragged. 

Pathetic.  

I cleared my throat, tasted old blood, and forced a thin smile across my lips.  

“Darling,” I rasped, “I do appreciate the dinner. Truly. But next time, I prefer my meals conscious.”  

She blinked once.  

Unimpressed.  

I kept going. I was good at this. I had survived centuries on this.  

“Though I suppose I shouldn’t complain. You did drag me out of my little stone bed. How very considerate of you.” I adjusted my posture, just enough to bear a bit more throat, to roll my shoulders under the drying blood. My voice gained strength—like a blade finding its edge.  

“I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced. Though it feels rather one-sided, doesn’t it?” I tilted my head, eyes narrowing. “You—mysterious, silent, ever-so-stoic. Me—collapsed, starving, and very nearly feral. Not quite the grand entrance I’m used to.”  

Still nothing from her.  

No blush. No recoil. No little flutter of fear.  

She just watched.  

Listened 

A challenge.  

Good.  

“I’m guessing you’re not one of the Flaming Fist,” I mused, voice going silk-thin and cool. “Or if you are, they’ve seriously upped their standards.”  

My fingers curled in my lap. They were still trembling. Damn them.  

“I have to admit,” I said, letting a hint of menace bleed through, “this is all terribly suspicious. A holy symbol tucked away like a guilty secret. A private little hideaway. A fresh meal delivered with such reverent silence…”  

I met her eyes and smiled with all my teeth.  

“Tell me, sweet thing… are you saving me?”  

Or are you preparing the pyre at the altar?”  

That got something.  

A flicker—barely visible. A twitch in the jaw. A narrowing of the eyes.  

I pressed.  

“I can’t decide whether I should be flattered or terrified. You see, most people who pull me from a grave do so with considerably less... grace.”  

I leaned forward slightly, just enough to close the space between us without rising.  

“So why don’t you tell me what comes next?”  

...

The silence stretched.  

My smile held.

---

 She didn’t flinch.  

Didn’t smirk. Didn’t lean in with intrigue.  

She let the silence hold just long enough for my words to hang—empty and echoing like a thrown dagger missing its mark.  

Then she answered.  

Flat. Calm.  

“No altar. Just a floor.”  

Her voice wasn’t soft. It was practical. Like linen bandages. Like road dust. Like hands that had buried people before and didn’t cry about it after.  

“I wasn’t looking for you specifically,  yet I was,” she added, eyes flicking once to my blood-slick hands. “But I felt you.”  

I stiffened. “Felt me?”  

“A pull,” she said. “Pain. That’s how it works.”  

She stood slowly, brushing her hands on her thighs. No pose. No threat. Just weariness with posture.  

“I don’t know what you are. Beyond the obvious.” Her eyes dropped to my mouth—to the drying blood. “But I know what I pulled you out of.”  

A pause. Then—  

“And I don’t leave people in graves. So rest easy. No fire, no plan. You just needed help.”  

That was it.  

No sermon. No accusation. No threats or negotiations

No trembling, awe, or interest in the vampire on her floor. 

She turned her back to me like I wasn’t dangerous. Like I wasn’t even interesting enough to hold her gaze.  

And I realized, in that moment—  

She really didn't seem to fear or care for me. I was here because she didn’t care what I was.  

Only that I had suffered?? 

Bullshit!

That, somehow, was more unbearable than hatred.  

My breath caught.  

From the word.  

Pain

She said it like it mattered. Like it was a compass. Like it was something worth following.  

And somewhere in the back of my skull, something twisted.  

Because I remembered.  

I remembered praying.  

Not eloquently. Desperately.  repeatedly.  

Over and over again, in the dark, when I’d scratched my fingers raw, when the hunger made me weep without sound, when I couldn’t remember my own face—I begged.  

I had no pride left, so I begged all of them. But often… I prayed to Ilmater.  

The Broken God. The one who was supposed to understand. The god of chained wrists and silent suffering. 

I asked him to kill me.  

I asked him to finish it.  

And nothing happened.  

No warmth. No voice. No end.  

Just stone, silence and the ache of existence.  

And now—this woman.  

With a holy symbol hidden like a scar.  

With silence like a ritual.  

With hands that didn’t flinch from filth.  

She dug me out.

Not because I deserved it.  

Because I was hurting?

That made no sense.  

I wasn’t a victim. I was a whore. A killer. A liar. I had smiled while leading lambs to the slaughter and whispered comfort into ears that would bleed dry hours later.  

I had spent a century and a half as the monster people like her were supposed to stop.

And yet she’d pulled me out.  

Fed me.  

Healed me.  

And now she says she doesn't want a single thing in return.  

I couldn’t look at her.  

Not for long.  

So I looked down at my hands instead.  

Covered in blood.  

Still shaking.  

Still mine.

I Am Astarion 

Notes:

If you’ve made it this far—thank you for sitting with the rawness of this chapter.
Thank you all for your kudo as well!
Astarion’s unraveling (and piecing back together) is only beginning, and it means a lot to share this darker, more fractured version of him with you. Onward.
--💜

Chapter 3: The Weight of Mercy

Summary:

Elenya drags a starving vampire from his grave, tending to wounds that run deeper than flesh. In the hush of an abandoned house, survival blurs into something intimate and unsettling — two broken creatures circling each other, wary, watchful, and nowhere near trust.

What do you do with something half-dead and still trying to seduce you?

She doesn’t ask questions.

(Elenya’s POV)

---

She kicked the door open with her heel.

The hinges groaned, wood splintering at the edge, but the frame held. One of the few things in this house that still did. Dust bloomed in the moonlight like ash in water as she stepped inside, carrying the vampire like a broken branch over her shoulder.

It had taken her two nights to find this place.
Far enough from town that no one would stumble in.
Close enough to drag a body to.

She hadn’t planned to use it this soon.
She hadn’t planned to find him.

---

She laid him on the cot as gently as she could. Still, his head lolled to the side like a dying animal. His limbs had no weight. No resistance. Just loose, bloodless silence.

Elenya didn’t look at his face.
She looked at his throat. His ribs. His fingers. His legs.

Alive.

But barely.

Even now, every instinct whispered—wrong, wrong, dangerous.

She should have felt disgust, fear. Should have walked away the moment she saw the fangs.

He should remind her of him, THEM. Last time she saw him, he looked hurt, too.

Maybe not so— not physically.

But his eyes screamed of pain as well. The same crimson hue that this new charge has.

They should overlay in her mind. Instead, he reminded her of...

NO!

That was a dangerous thought.

It would threaten the fog. 

She needs to focus!

DO YOU HEAR ME? FOCUS ON THE THREAD.

She stopped the thoughts invading her and pushed all away. Beyond the fog surrounding her mind.

All to say—a part of her mind whispered— she should fucking hate this.

But she didn’t.

Why? 

She simply didn’t fear or hate him. What was within the fog did not see him as a threat. 

It saw him as same. 

The second and lesser reason was that the pull was still there. It saw him as thread.

He was in pain.

That’s what she hunts.

That's what she hates. 

In her core, she knew that she would have done the same even if she had stumbled on that tomb by accident. 

On her own. 

With no pull. 

But the pull was here. 

His pain echoed like a cord looped around her spine, just reminding her of what she could see.

He was still suffering.

That was just someone in pain.

She hated that her brain was looking for a reason to ignore what her eyes could see.

What her heart knew with certainty. What he was, what he may have done, had no bearing on her role.

Nothing could outweigh, justify, or minimize what was done to him.

He was one of hers, and she felt dirty for having a tiny part of her trying to deny it.

Telling her she should see the monster while she clearly saw her.

She didn’t believe it either. 

Not really.

She just knew that those thoughts came from fear.

Not fear of him hurting her.

But fear of this mission conjuring a storm in her mind strong enough to lift the fog she lived in.

Relied on.

Maybe that's why he sent me here. 

She took a couple of breaths.

Deep and focused. Grounding herself in the fog. And when her eyes opened, the man was gone.

Only the wounds remained.

Only the pull of the thread.

Only Pain to hunt. 

---

She set her pack down, knelt beside him, and got to work.

No hesitation. Just motion. Just the fog.

She cleaned his wounds—all were still open. Strange, no closure after this long.

Different biology, possibly. 

She would need to research vampire biology.

His body wasn’t rotting, no infection, no fever, but it was torn, cracked like leather left too long in the sun.

Had a pulse, about 15 to 20 times slower than the living range. If there is a pulse, there is circulation.

Probably too slow. Topical application would probably yield faster results. reduce the pain quicker. 

She needed to focus on the pain first. 

She poured potion between the bruised lines, gashes and stabbing wounds of his chest and watched the skin ripple, knitting with sluggish reluctance.

Good, potions work. 

She whispered as she worked— starting her spellwork. Arcane, first her own magic clawed from every scrap of discarded lore, folktales and stories she found, rippled and blended with the healing light bestowed upon her from ilmaters, her healing was more precise, more clinical. Allowed for smaller realignment before Ilmater's light could be used to close the wound. Both intermingled, powered by will and her promise to Ilmater.

---

When she touched his legs, he twitched.

Barely.

Enough.

Still aware.

Still in there.

He needed strong painkillers for this. 
This is going to hurt. 

She mixed in a small bowl some Prialt, derived from sea snail venom and Curare vine and ground the mixture into a paste. Both poisonous, the prilat blocked pain signal while the curare forced paralysis and muscle relaxation. Once in the system, they would lead to death in less than ten minutes. However, the slower circulation would probably extend the time as the body required less blood circulation and less requirement for air, so maybe lung collapse wouldn't be as problematic. 
In all cases, she could finish healing the legs in less than ten minutes, then detoxify. 

She applied the resulting gel on the first leg wound, and in less than a minute, the twitching stopped. 
Perfect.
She started working, 

broke some bones and realigned them. Everything needed to be prepared to heal properly. When most of the bending and misalignment was done. She started pouring Ilametr's light. Then, she watched muscle and sinew and bones cracking, realigning, fusing before finally mending.

As soon as it was done,  she quickly detoxified the body. 

Next leg now. 

The more she worked, the less anything mattered. She felt the pull decreasing, no longer clouding her mind nor gripping her body.

When the last of her healing potions, antidote, painkiller and tinctures were expended. She simply looked at the body.

Mostly mended.

Weak.

She reached for her lyre.

A few notes. Nothing grand. No melody meant for performance—just the function of healing.

Astul'ran suõr was an old slave's tune, something simple to help the body remember what it meant to be at rest. No lies, promises of safety or a better tomorrow. Just a manual to survive. It went on for an hour or so, and near the last three chord progressions, the tune wavered. It happened only when she looked at the task’s face and saw the dried blood on the lips.

The stiffness in the jaw.

He was people.

Food.

People need food, she reminded herself.

---

When the last note faded, she contemplated giving hers for food.

But decided against it.

Some things are better left untouched. For the fog’s sake.

She needed the fog.

So, where to get food then?

Blood.

She needed blood.

Someone or something else.

It’s the middle of the night.

After a moment, she simply sighed, slowly stood and walked to the back door. Called out melodically into the small cliffside woods. In the beast tongue, Ilmater gave her.

Then she waited. She knew some would come. Too curious and inexperienced.

One minute.
Two.
Five.

A rustle.

She turned.

Through the low brush and broken fencing, they came one after the other—slow, cautious, curious. A fox. A young deer. A few rabbits. She held out her hand, and they stepped closer.

She didn't smile.

Life needs death to flourish 

She cast Sleep.

Life required death, but pain wasn't a necessity.

She hoped he could finish quickly enough.

One by one, they dropped, dream-wrapped and still. No terror. No pain.

She turned back to the vampire.

He should be able to move now. 

The curare was fully detoxified now. 

He was watching her.

Why isn't he eating?

She didn’t speak.

She pointed toward the animals.

Your turn.

FEED.

---

He moved like a drowning man surfacing for air.

One moment still, skeletal and silent.
The next—on his hands and knees, dragging himself toward the bodies like something half-born from the grave.

She didn’t flinch.

Not when he reached the deer. Not when she heard the crunch of fangs in flesh. Not when she heard the neck break. Not when blood began to soak the floor at his knees.

He fed like something starved. No grace. No calculation. Just a raw, gnawing need that made her stomach tighten—and yet she didn’t look away.

She’d seen worse.
She’d done worse.
This was not cruelty.

This was survival.

Survival is absolute. 
Survival is endurance.

---

Still, part of her wanted to turn her head.

Because this was beautiful. Akin to the way storms, volcanoes and wildfires were beautiful. Sacred and cathartic. She was witnessing—intruding on, really—a rebirth in blood. He reached for the fox next, broke its neck and sank his fangs as swiftly as possible. His spine arched. His throat opened with a low, guttural moan as blood hit his tongue. His hands curled into the fur of the now dead animal like he couldn’t bear to let go.

It was awful.

It was necessary.

It was real.

She took a breath through her nose. Not too deep.

The scent of blood was thick in the air now, copper-sweet and warm with the edge of death. But it didn’t bother her.

Blood was just blood.

---

He lunged again.

Another kill.

More silence.

He didn’t stop until the last rabbit was empty, and then he just lay there. Fell on his back and stayed.

Chest rising.
Hands shaking.
Wounds mending slowly.

Interesting. Why was he regenerating so quickly? Why only now?

He looked victorious, covered in blood and gore and the awful stillness of someone who had come back from the edge of dying—and remembered who he was on the way back.

She watched him breathe for a long time.

Then she folded her hands in her lap, sat on the floor, leaned against the door, and waited for the monster to rise. Or the man.
Whichever had survived the crypt.

He didn’t react right away. And when he did, it was not with words. Neither with gesture, really. A slight shift in his pleasure-induced ragged breathing. A stillness followed by an imperceptible shiver that ran through him.

Clarity.

But Elenya saw it.

Then the stiffness seized him. Spread over his body like a tidal wave. It took her a moment to identify it.

She recognized it eventually.

The shame.

It clung to him heavier than the blood on his skin. The way his fingers twitched, but he didn’t wipe his mouth. The way his chest rose too fast, like breathing was something that had to be remembered, not granted. The way he looked not at her—at the ceiling mainly. Then past her, like he wasn’t sure how he would be seen.

She knew then that it was the man who survived the grave.

She’d seen that kind of shame before. 

In many of those she helped—but mostly,

In herself.

Without the fog. 

She recognized that stiff breath, the hollow that comes after—the vacuum left behind when desperate need finally loosens its claws. The way he didn’t quite know where to put his hands, fingers twitching, curling into empty air as though looking for purchase, for penance, for something to anchor him back into his own skin.

She’d worn that before, too.

Fed like that.

Not on blood, but on whatever scraps were tossed her way. Crusts of bread soaked in stale wine. Bruised fruit smuggled in by softer-hearted servants who never met her eyes. Sometimes not even food—just the promise of it, a taste left on her tongue to keep her obedient for another day.

And she’d done worse. Gods, she’d done so much worse for the thin assurance of another dawn.

She had partaken in her fair share of feeding frenzies—clawing at half-rotten meat with a dozen other starving bodies, elbows bruising ribs, teeth splitting skin, just to fill the emptiness before someone stronger decided it was their turn. Her mouth still remembered the taste of mould and iron in earthroot, or in the pit where her throat burned from swallowing too fast, because if she didn’t, something would tear it from her hands or decide to make her the next meal.

And that wasn’t the worst of it.

No, the worst was before, when she learned how to make herself valuable enough to be fed without violence. How to angle her chin just so, lower her gaze, and laugh at the right cruel joke. How to take a servant's hand and press it to her throat with practiced reverence, whisper sweet filth to keep their interest, because interested men gave gifts. Interested men liked to play with the master's toys but feared the masters. So they could keep the toy fed. So the toy kept silent.

Unspeakable things, done with a hollow warm smile, for the privilege of not starving. For the simple mercy of staying alive.

So she knew that breath he took. The one that didn’t ease. The way his hands hovered, then clenched, then fell useless to his sides, as if ashamed of their own existence.

She knew what it was to feel monstrous, relieved, dirty and grateful in the same trembling heartbeat.

And in that quiet, blood-scented room, watching him shudder beneath the weight of his own returned life, she almost envied him.

Because he hadn’t needed to pretend to want it.

He simply needed.

And the world—through her hands—had given.

He turned and looked at her. Face wearing a false nonchalance that failed to mask the gripping fear shown in his eyes.

This task is going to be hard. 

She knew it too well when she saw him studying her. 
Measuring the silence between them. Little did he know he would never see. Could never see beyond the fog. 

No one will ever see beyond the fog again.

She could almost feel the shift—the moment he decided to try something.

---

He moved—not much, but enough to lift his shoulders, shift his posture, square his chin.

In search of dignity.

She braced herself, intrigued by what would be his first instinct when cornered. It says a lot about someone—what survives their breaking.

“Darling,” he rasped, the word like honey over gravel, “I do appreciate the dinner. Truly. But next time, I prefer my meals conscious.”

Nonchalance. Odd choice.

But it stank of fear.

She pondered it, then she recognized the smell.

Ah, she thought.

There it is.

Silken bravado.

The pose.

The performance.

The one that lived in the courtesans she’d once cleaned blood off of. In the noble-born slaves who wore perfume to mask the stench of rot.

In herself, when she was younger, trying to look useful enough to keep, charming enough not to break.

He held himself like them.

Mimicking a black widow.

Tantalizing and lethal.

---

He kept going.

Polishing each word.

Crafting a mask out of syllables.

“Though I suppose, I shouldn’t complain. You did drag me out of my little dirt bed. How very considerate of you.”

He shifted—tilted his head just so, let the blood dry in a pattern that made him look tragic.

Desired.

Throat bare.

Is he trying to be seductive? 

Certainly not. Right?

It was well done.

Maybe he was a black widow, and suffering hadn’t unmade that.

But those types don't use charm when cornered—they fake helplessness.

They don’t portray control. They portray victimhood.

This was too well done.

Which is how she knew it wasn’t real.

“I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced,” he said. “Though it feels rather one-sided, doesn’t it? You—mysterious, silent, ever-so-humble. Me—collapsed, starving, and very nearly feral. Not quite the grand entrance I’m used to.”

She stared at him.

He was trying to be charming. 

But she ...

Saw the cracks.

The tension in his jaw. The flicker in his eyes between every sentence, like he was watching for a flinch. For approval. For permission to keep talking.

Also, he was still in a state of severe shock. 

Plenty of psychomotor reflexes give that away. 

He was drowning in the performance.

Not because it worked.

Because it was all he could think of.

She wasn't convinced he could properly think at all. 

Yet to perform this well.

He knows that mask. 

knows it too well, she suspects. 

---

“I’m guessing you’re not one of the Flaming Fist,” he went on. “Or if you are, they’ve seriously upped their standards.”

His smile was all teeth.

She didn’t return it.

She didn’t need to.

His voice sharpened. Shifted from charm to something colder.

Let's see. 

Show us your fangs. 

“I have to admit,” he said, a thread of menace coiled under the velvet, “this is all terribly suspicious. A holy symbol tucked away like a guilty secret. A private little hideaway. A fresh meal delivered with such reverent silence…”

And then, like a blade drawn slowly for effect:

“Tell me, sweet thing… are you saving me? Or are you preparing a pyre at an altar?”

---

Elenya didn’t react.

Not to the threat.
Not to the question.

But gods, she saw him now.

Not the vampire.

Not the predator.

The person.

Hollowed out by pretending not to be afraid.

Trying to control the scene while barely cognizant, because it was the only way he knew how to stay upright.

She answered, flat and clear:

“No altar. Just a floor.”

He blinked.
The first honest thing he’d done.

“I wasn’t looking for you, yet I was,” she added, tone matter-of-fact. “But I felt you. The pain. This is how it works.”

She met his eyes, steady and still.

“I don’t know what you are. Beyond the obvious.” Her gaze dropped once, to his mouth, his throat, the blood drying in lines where skin still hadn’t healed.

“But I know what I pulled you out of.”

A breath. A beat.

“And I don’t leave people in graves.”

---

She turned before he could answer. Just motion. To give space.

She crouched by the sleeping animals, still lined up where she had placed them. Her fingers moved quickly—clean cuts, salvageable muscle, a deftness that spoke to experience.

The vampire was silent behind her.

Good.

Let him think.

She’d clean the blood later.
She always did.

But for now, she worked in silence. The kind she liked. The kind that made the world feel small enough to manage.

The blood had dried on the floorboards, sticky and dark. She moved quickly, salvaging what she could from the carcasses: strips of thigh, flank, backstrap. It wasn't elegant, but it would smoke well.

She tossed the remains out the back door, into the brush.

With efficiency.

They’d served their purpose.

That was mercy, too.

---

She wiped her hands on a cloth she’d long since stopped trying to keep clean and stepped back inside. The door thudded shut behind her.

A wave of her hand. A whispered phrase. Her fingers flicked along the air like a weaver plucking threads.

Prestidigitation.

The blood on the floor curled in on itself, darkening, vanishing as if it had never been there. The scent thinned. The grime lifted from her palms and sleeves.

She cleaned the cot, too—though only the part he hadn’t touched. Not for his sake.

For hers.

The fire lit with a single spark. A cantrip. She hung a pot above it, dropped in some salted roots and dried mushrooms, and let them bloom in the warmth.

While it simmered, she set to work on the meat. Stripped and salted what she’d taken, wrapped it in cloth, and sealed it with wax for later. She wasn’t sure how long they’d be in this house, but there was no reason to waste good protein. She couldn’t survive on potions and gods alone.

And now—finally—there was time to think.

She kept one eye on him as she moved. Still slouched on the cot. Still watching her. But quiet.

He didn’t speak. Not again. Which suited her.

Because now came the part that mattered:

What the hell was she going to do with him?

She didn’t know what he was—not really. He was a vampire, sure. But what kind? Spawn? Free? Cursed? Who had buried him? What leash still curled around his spine?

She didn’t know how he fed. Or if he could feed safely.

She didn’t know if he was a victim, or just someone who’d outlasted other people’s punishment.

But she had seen the shame. The practiced charm. The eyes that tracked every movement like a survivor counting exits.

He wasn’t dangerous because he was a vampire.

He was dangerous because he was hurt.

And she’d been tasked with healing him.

She needed to ask questions. But carefully. In the right order. When he was stronger.

How long had he been down there?
Who buried him?
Why didn’t he fight back?

And—more pressingly—

Why had Ilmater led her to him?

Because she had followed the pull. All the way from the amn, through half the godsdamned Gate, past refugees and wounded and need, right to him.

A vampire buried like garbage.

And still alive.

Still screaming.

What was she supposed to do with that?

She didn’t realize she was frowning until his voice broke through the quiet:

“You don’t ask many questions.”

It wasn’t flirty.
It wasn’t bitter.
Just—curious.

And that stopped her hands.

She turned her head. Met his gaze.

She blinked once.
Not in surprise—just to buy a breath.

She hadn’t expected him to speak again so soon.
Not like that.

No games. No seduction.
Just a question.

“You don’t ask many questions,” he said.

It wasn’t an accusation.
It wasn’t even particularly invested.

But it pierced straight through the quiet like a splinter.

Elenya sat back on her heels.

She didn’t answer right away.
Didn’t offer a smile or a retort.

She studied him.

The blood on his skin had dried. His voice was steadier, but his posture hadn’t changed. He was still slouched—not lounging, but waiting. Not like someone recovering.

Like someone observing.
To see what people wanted, and give it back to them, shaped like a smile.

“I don’t ask questions,” she said eventually, “when the answers don’t matter yet.”

She turned back to the fire. Stirred the pot. Watched steam curl from the lid.

“When a person’s bleeding out, you don’t ask their name. The strain of answering could deepen a wound or reopen it. You just stop the bleeding.”

A pause.

Then: “We’re still at that part. But feel free to volunteer any answer that you would want known.”

---

She heard him shift behind her. The cot creaked softly.

Good.

“As for me, I’ll ask what I need to when I know what to listen for, or ask for without hurting you,” she added.

Then glanced over her shoulder.

Met his eyes.

“And when you’re strong enough to lie to me properly.”

That landed.

She didn’t need to hear a response. She saw it in his face—the flicker of something defensive, then wry, then flat. The edge of a smirk that never fully formed.

He understood.

She turned back to the fire. Pulled the pot off the heat. Poured the stew into two tin cups. Set one beside him on a crate. Not close enough to touch. Not far enough to dismiss.

Then sat across from him. Cross-legged. Quiet.

And ate.

Not because she was hungry.

But because it grounded her.

Because this—food, silence, breath—was motion. Something real.

But the air between them had shifted.

The watching was mutual now.

Not predator and prey.
Not healer and wounded.

Both.

Wary.
Tired.
Alive.

Notes:

This chapter was a slow exhale—a study in restraint, in holding space for a person who doesn’t know how to be seen. Elenya doesn’t heal with warmth, and Astarion doesn’t beg with honesty. But there’s something raw growing between them now, something neither of them can name yet.

Chapter 4: Raptured

Summary:

Astarion struggles to make sense of quiet rooms, warm baths, and a woman who neither pities nor punishes him — only watches. With no chains to guide him, he scrambles for control the only way he knows how.

Notes:

⚠ Content warnings: lingering trauma, vivid memories of torture, psychological unraveling, self-loathing.

Astarion’s POV

---

“When you’re strong enough to lie to me properly.”

The words circled like carrion birds, slow and deliberate, their wings whispering over open wounds I hadn’t realized were still raw.

Not cruel. Not scathing. Just... true to her.

That was the worst part.
It wasn’t a dagger aimed at my throat — it was a mirror thrust beneath my chin.
Cold, unflinching, reflecting every hairline crack I’d be gilding over with charm.

I wasn’t able to sell it. 

She wasn’t offended by the lie.

Only by how poorly it had been told.

It should have been a relief.
A kindness, even — to be seen so precisely.

Instead, it gutted me.

I have spent lifetimes honing myself into something seamless.
Believable.
Beautiful enough to distract, terrifying enough to be left alone.
I’ve bent under countless hands, bled under countless blades, but never shattered.
The hunger hadn’t cracked me.
The punishment hadn’t broken me.

I was supposed to be impervious.

But that sentence?

That simple, indifferent observation didn’t strike. It didn’t carve me open with the sharp edge of a blade.

It peeled — slow, merciless — stripping me of every careful veneer until I stood there in that tiny dim room, naked in ways flesh could never show.

And everything inside was showing.

I wasn’t able to sell it. 

The trembling thing I kept gagged in the hollow of my ribs.The broken self twisted by torture, isolation and hunger. The part that still believed survival depended on how well I performed. The desperate, bruised hope that maybe this time — if I was clever enough, pretty enough, pitiful enough — it would be enough to not be burried again.

She saw it all.

Because I couldn’t sell it.

she saw

Not with disgust.
Not with pity.
Just that steady, cool measure — weighing my lie, finding it wanting, then discarding it like rotten fruit.

I was not enough.

It left me ice-cold, my pulse stuttering in my throat.
A shame so sharp it was almost electric.

I wanted to laugh. Or scream. Or throw myself into the fire just to put an end to the spectacle.

Because gods — I had worked so hard to become unknowable. 

But that was before. Before I was nothing but a gaping hole of hunger. 

And with a handful of careless words, she had known me.

Worse — she found me unimpressive.

I used to sell it so good.

---

A spoon scraped the inside of a pot.

I flinched so violently pain sliced through my neck and shoulders. My hands spasmed, nails biting into my palms.

The sound wasn’t just metal on metal — it was stone dragged across a coffin lid. It was the rasp of chains pulled tight. It was teeth sinking into flesh that couldn’t scream fast enough.

Everything is so loud.

My breath caught, sharp and useless. The room closed in, pressing cold against my temples.

Too bright. 

My gaze snapped to her — muscles locking, every nerve ready to bolt or bow. Expecting the blow. The demand. The new rule I hadn’t been taught.

Too strong.

But she wasn’t even looking at me.

Just stirring. Calm. Her shoulders loose, her head tilted in thought.

She’s not watching me.

That should have helped. Should have poured cool water over the fever-hot panic tearing through my chest. Should have made me feel safe.

Instead, it made my skin crawl.

Too much!

Because if she wasn’t watching me — then there were no eyes on me at all. No voice to tell me what to be, what to fear, how to move.

It was the void again. That same blank, breathless silence. No commands. No expectations. Just me — weightless, purposeless, floating in a black sea where monsters always came.

Suffocation by stillness.

The only difference is that the world is too loud.

My ears strained for any meaningful noise — a boot scuffing on stone, a breath sucked in between teeth, a faint incantation. Anything to give this moment shape.

Nothing.

Only the sounds of the city, the woods. Her breathing. Her stable heartbeat. The noises of her cooking. The fabric shifting as she moved. The critters beyond the walls. The fire crackling in the hhearth. The humming as she cooked.

A sound-filled silence.

And so my mind filled the silence for me with half-memories, half-nightmares.

The breathing turned to screams. 

The cooking was gody’s whip and cane and mace and blades on me. 

The fabric turned into a thousand bedsheets with twice more hands roaming, taking, gripping, holding.

The critters became the rewards, live rats squealing as I dug my fangs in their furred necks.

The hearth turned to the master gripping the back of my neck, forcing my face into the brazier, searing as it stuck to my skin.

The humming became the soft murmur of a spell before agony spiked bright behind my eyes.

The way the air would change right before — heavy, tasting of ash, copper, violets and rot.

Was that scent here now? Was it in her hair, her hands, the shadows by the hearth?

My pulse skittered.

My mouth flooded with the ghost of bile.

I wanted to bolt — but my legs wouldn’t listen. Wanted to drop to my knees and beg — but my throat locked up, teeth grinding silent, desperate prayers into dust.

So I just sat there.

Shaking.

Feeling every heartbeat like a hammer against a cracked bell.

And wondering how long it would be until this stillness broke — and what fresh ruin would come with it.

---

This is a trick.
This is a test.
This is new conditioning.

It had to be.

Why am not in pain? 

Why was I fed? 

No one feeds a vampire because they’re kind. No one stitches up a monster’s wounds and sets it gently by the fire without wanting something festering in return.

Goes through all that trouble — the potions, the spells, the blood like some gentler world — for what?

Not mercy.

No matter the pain, there was always a purpose. Always a price.

No plan, not going to kill me, she said.

But then — what was the fucking plan?

My thoughts jackknifed. Tangled. A thousand threads snarling in my skull.

Kill her.
Kill her before she does.

Kill before the pain.
Get ahead of it.

Because no one offers warmth without purpose.

This is how the master tricked you. 

An offer too good to be true. 

You thought he was saving you.

She’s here to extract something. To unravel me in way the master never did — with softness instead of spikes. To drag my confession from me, bleed out secrets I didn’t even know I still had.

And the worst part —

The crypt had rules.

Gods, yes, it was pain. But it was predictable pain. It was iron and stone and the master voice, curling like smoke around my neck, telling me exactly how long it would hurt, exactly when it would stop.

Meaning, never.

This?

This was chaos dressed up in the robes of mercy.

She hadn’t lied — I detected no deception. Which only made it worse. Because that meant I couldn’t read her enough to see it. She is a better liar than me then. I can’t find the seam, couldn’t tug at the thread, couldn’t make the illusion collapse under its own weight.

There had to be more to this.

Someone sent her.

Someone wanted me.

Who? Why? For how long?

What if it was the master?

I should run.

The thought lashed through me so violently I almost lurched from the chair. Muscles locked, every tendon screaming now.

But run where?

Back to the master... to him?

Back to the crypt?

The memory of stone over my chest — heavy, unyielding — crushed the breath from my lungs.

NO.

My body twitched like it had forgotten where the skin ended. Tiny muscle spasms jolting along my arms, legs, throat. As if something was crawling just beneath the surface, trying to get out.

Shivers raked up my spine — cold, hungry things.

Dirt under my fingernails. Stone biting into my cheek. The pressure of it. The weight that had kept me pinned so long I’d stopped knowing where I ended and the coffin began.

Teeth marks on my sanity. Little divots left by master smile.

I wanted to run.

I wanted to kneel.

I wanted to claw her eyes out for looking at me — to rip that soft regard to shreds before it turned sharp, before it cut me open and exposed everything inside.

Kill her.

Better to be the monster. Better to bite first.

Because then at least I would know why it hurt.

Because then I would be back on familiar ground — drowning, yes, but in blood of my own choosing.

---

GO!

Get ahead of it.

That’s what survival was. Control. Perception. Always stay two steps ahead of the pain — predict it, prepare for it, maybe even shape it into something bearable.

So I straightened.

Slow. Deliberate.Vertebrae stacking one by one like fragile dice that could tumble at any breath.

Tilted my face just right in the firelight. Felt the crusted blood crack across my skin, flake down my throat. Let it glisten. A tableau — tragic, dangerous, tempting.

A lover carved by grief and old, mean magic.

Something too beautiful to discard right away.

Be desirable. So they hesitate to destroy you.
Be pitied. So they keep you.
Be dangerous. So they fear to try.

My thoughts rattled through these lines like dice in a cup — clacking, colliding, never settling.

Figure out what this is about.
Who sent her.
Who’s watching.
Or — gods — kill her before … before…

The thought never finished. Split in two. Fragmented like so many of my memories.

Because the mask — oh, the mask was still there. Waiting. Begging to be worn.

But the face wearing it was ruined. Cracked, broken, it wasn’t fitting anymore.

No, I can do it.

I could still be him. The beautiful horror. The haunted mirth. The creature that made men weep and women swoon — or vice versa, he’d long stopped caring which.

Even if it dug into my skin like broken glass. Even if I felt every jagged edge slicing beneath the surface, trying to reach bone.

I flexed my jaw.

It didn’t want to move. Muscles stiff, rebelling like they’d forgotten this shape. But habit won. It always did.

So I forced it.

Stretched my lips into that practiced curve.

Felt it tremble at the corners, twitch — almost collapse into a snarl, almost crack into sobs.

But it held.

A smile.

It tasted like grave dirt.

Bitter. Clammy. Rotten with old secrets.

Like me.

Broken.

And somewhere underneath, buried under that charnel tang, was a scream. Thin, reedy, quivering. A voice that had never stopped echoing through the crypt — clawing at stone, clawing at my skull.

Not yet.

Not now.

Wear the mask.

Or there will be nothing left to wear at all.

---

Maybe this was the master latest invention.
A performance test.
Some new cruelty to measure my devotion — not by obedience, but by how convincingly I hoped.

Maybe she wasn’t really a follower of Ilmater. The master would never use those. He despised them, called them “parasites who breed more agony to gorge on the taste of their own righteousness.”

But anyone could wear a necklace. Anyone could carve a holy symbol. Anyone could slip it over their throat just to make the deception taste sweeter.

She would smile as she opened my veins. Laugh when I wept.
And somewhere in the dark, he would be there.

Watching.

Smiling.

Maybe she is the new overseer.

The new gody.

I have failed before. I can’t do it again.

Should I try to capture her? Bind her hands, drag her back through the city’s throat, present her at the master’s feet like a slaughtered stag?
Should I beg — mouth pressed to his cold boots, voice soaked in shame, calling him master with every ruined breath? Let him hurt me. Use me.

Maybe then I could escape the tomb. If I was good.

I would do anything to escape the tomb.

Or maybe this was another game. Maybe I needed to play along. Be obedient. Let her lay hands on me if she must. Don’t fight. Don’t flinch. Don’t fail.

Because the last time I hoped —

— gods —

The memory slammed into me like a boot to the ribs.

---

The master’s study.
Silk drapes damp with storm. Candles leaned like melting spines. The air was thick with myrrh and iron.

And him.
Reclining on that high-backed chair, one leg draped over the other, fingers idly swirling a goblet of blood that caught every twitch of the candlelight.

“You understand your task, don’t you, sweet boy?”

His voice was oil. Slick, heavy, clinging to my bones.

I nodded. Smiled. Let my lips part just so, teeth flashing white against the dark.
“Yes, master. You want the magistrate brought to you.”

“Alive,” he purred, swirling his wine. “Untouched — until I have him.”
Then his eyes sharpened.
“But leave your mark on him. Subtle. I want him confused. I want him trembling when he arrives at my door, half-thinking he came by choice.”

I bowed. Lower than needed. The floor cold on my bare knees.
“Of course, master.”

---

The magistrate was easy.
Lonely men always were.
A few careful glances, laughter like spun sugar, a hand that lingered at his sleeve. A dance in a private hall, pressed too close, whispering filth that left him shivering.

He was drunk on me before the second night was over.
Drunk enough that when I took his hand and led him down the wet streets toward the manor gates, he followed.

I remember feeling — gods, what a fool — a little thrill.

The master would be pleased.

I had done it perfectly. He promised a reward. I brought this one without touching him. he has been refusing him forever. He’d maybe let me rest in the favoured spawn room for a few days, serve Violet right, that wretch kept mocking me the whole decade since my turning.

He said he would let me feed.

Maybe even —

---

When we entered the hall, The master was waiting.
And smiling.

No—
Not smiling.

This was teeth. All teeth, sharp and white and hungry, stretched too wide across his perfect face. A promise of ruin dressed as delight.

“Leave him there,” he said, waving a languid hand toward the magistrate.
The man swayed in place, sweat breaking through expensive perfume, eyes dazed with the aftertaste of my laughter and the promise of my mouth.

I did as I was told.
Stepped back. Hands at my sides. Head lowered.

The master circled me once. Twice. His steps were silent on the marble, predatory, his breath ghosting over my ear like ice.

“Did you hope I’d be pleased, little wretch?”

My throat worked around nothing. I didn’t answer fast enough.

His hand tangled in my hair, sharp claws biting into my scalp. Then—
A savage yank. My head snapped back so hard I heard something in my neck pop. My throat was bared, trembling.

“Answer me.”

“Yes, master,” I rasped. The words scraped raw out of my throat, as automatic as breathing.

“Were you hoping for a reward?”

His nails pierced skin. I flinched, felt the pinpricks of blood bloom under his hand.
“Yes, master.”

A sigh. Almost gentle. Almost sad.
It made me hate myself more than any slap could have.

“Oh, Astarion. Treachery is a flaw.”

Then his mouth was on me—
Teeth sank into my neck, cruel and deep. Not the sweet puncture of feeding. This was punishment. A shred, a tear, the hot slide of blood running in rivulets down my collarbone. I shuddered, a strangled sound clawing its way up my throat. My hands curled into fists at my sides.

When he pulled back, blood slicked his lips. His eyes glittered with a cruel, intimate joy.

“Your flaw,” he breathed, voice a purr of molten knives, “is thinking there’s a reward for serving me. You serve me because you are mine. Because I tore you from mortality, remade you in my image. Gave you eternity.”

His thumb brushed my lower lip. Smearing blood there. My blood. I didn’t dare pull away.

“You should be on your knees every dusk, weeping with gratitude. Because I let you exist. Because I allow you to breathe.”

He leaned closer, mouth grazing my ear. His voice sank to a dark hush.
“Win or lose, my lovely little wretch, you bleed all the same. You will bleed for me until you remember that.”

---

He left me chained in the wine cellar.

Iron cuffs bit into my wrists, arms stretched just high enough to keep me off balance, toes barely scraping the cold stone. The smell of mildew and old oak casks pressed in on me, thick and sour.

Above—
The magistrate’s screams bled through the floorboards.
Ragged at first, tearing into desperate pleas. Then just raw, choking sobs. Then—

Silence.

A silence so deep it crawled inside my ears and nested there, vibrating through my ribs.

I don’t know how long I hung there. Minutes. Hours. My shoulders burned. My fingers went numb. Each breath felt like it scraped along shattered glass.

And then—

Footsteps.

Soft. Deliberate. A predator’s grace.

The cellar door opened, spilling torchlight across damp stone.

And there he was.

Smiling.

Not with joy. Not with satisfaction. With possession.

I tried to stand straighter, to look composed, dignified—anything but terrified.

It didn’t matter.

Because he stepped close. Fingers traced the blood drying on my neck, trailing down to the bruised hollow of my throat.

And I did bleed for him.

Not just in the crimson that slicked his hands when he tore the old wound open again.
But in the way my breath caught—betraying me.
In the way my body shuddered, trying so hard to stay still, to endure.
In the way my eyes fluttered shut, not in pleasure, but in surrender.

Because this was what I was made for.
To bleed.
To suffer.
To give him proof that I still feared and belonged to him in equal measure.

And when he leaned in, lips brushing my ear, whispering,
“Good boy,”

—I sobbed.

---

I blinked.

The room spun back into focus — dim firelight, the scrape of her foot on the floorboards. My skin crawled with the memory of chains that weren’t there. My throat felt bruised under phantom hands.

Play along.
Don’t hope.
Don’t want.
Because win or lose, I bleed all the same.

So I let the mask settle.
Smiled with teeth still stained by yesterday’s terror.
And waited.

Because if this was another of his games, I was determined not to lose —
Even if it meant losing myself first.

---

Unless...

Unless this was real.

Then someone else wanted me.

Which was worse.

Because if it wasn’t the master, I had no script.

No metrics for pain. No limits to the experiment.

What if I was heading for worse than the crypt? Another suffering with no end.

I was clawing at my arms.

Just dust. Just hunger.

Cold.

The marble was always cold in the palace.

Even under spilled blood.
I remember how it pressed into my cheek — slick, freezing, grounding.

A cruel reminder, like the world was trying to say: yes, you exist, you still suffer, this is real.

The master stood above me, silhouette blurred by tears I wouldn’t dare let fall.
His breath ghosted down, sweet with spiced wine and something darker. Blood.

Fingers combed through my hair in tender strokes, curling at the ends. Like a lover.

Then his grip snapped shut.

My neck twisted, a pop of strained vertebrae, pain bursting down my spine.

I couldn’t even cry out—he held me too tight. My breath stuttered, teeth clenched so hard I tasted blood.

And his voice poured into my ear—thick, molten, full of delighted malice.

“Do you know why I keep you, little wretch?
Because nothing is quite so exquisite
as pain delivered
to something that still hopes.”

I remember how his thumb stroked my throat as he said it.
How I almost leaned into it—anything to keep that hand from crushing down. How my cheeks burned with shame and disgust. 
How my chest heaved with the pathetic, traitorous need to be spared, for it to be done. 

Because even in that moment—shattered, trembling—I hoped.
And he savored it.

That was the lesson.

Reality was the leash.
Hope was the blade.

So what was I doing now—sitting here, thinking this might be real, this might be mercy?

It made me sick.

My stomach lurched. My skin crawled. My breath caught and wouldn’t release.

I pressed my palms flat to the floor, felt the grit, the splinters. Anything to anchor me back here. To this room. To now.

But his words still coiled around my ribs.
Still squeezed.
Still whispered that none of this was mine to survive.

---

My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

Clawing, tearing at my own arms as if maybe there was something deeper under the skin—some bone, some anchor I could grip before everything inside me poured out onto the floor.

Every scrape burned. Nails skipping over too-new flesh, dragging up scraps of memory that thrashed and kicked to stay buried.

My body was locking up. Muscles tightening one after another, breath catching behind my teeth like it might simply give up and refuse to leave my chest. A coiling heat bloomed under my ribs, sickly and sour, because it wasn’t pain. Wasn’t punishment. Wasn’t earned.

About to snap.

Because of warmth.

Because the air was wrong—thick with woodsmoke and pine resin, settling over my shoulders like a blanket I hadn’t asked for, hadn’t bled enough for.
Because the fire crackled low and soft, speaking in tender little pops, as if it didn’t know that mercy was meant to be laced with barbs.
Because the room was clean, quiet, gentle.

It was obscene.

It felt like being dressed for slaughter—like someone had laid out this perfect little tableau so that when the knife finally slipped under my ribs, it would be all the more poetic.

Where was the hook?
Where was the chain to hoist me up by the wrists?
Where were the nails under my chin, tilting my head just right for inspection—exposing my throat, waiting for teeth or steel?
Where was the echo of footsteps circling me, the audience of cold eyes drinking in my shame?

The worst part?

There was none of it.

Only me.

---

She handed me food.

I blinked at it.

Didn’t dare to move.

Is it poisoned? Is this the test? What happens if I drop it? What happens if I don't eat? Why give a stew after blood? I can't process it nor taste it.

I reached slowly. Touched the tin cup.

My fingers felt too loud.

I tried a sip.

Ash.

All ash.

---

In the quiet, my mind whispered:

Bring her back. Offer her to him. There is no escape. No running. No winning.

You could survive another decade.

All I had to do was bind her wrists. Stab enough to weaken, not kill. March her down through the sewer-throat of the city and kneel like the obedient spawn he wants me to be. Present her with grace. Offer her with eloquence.

“A gift, Master. One who dared touch what was yours.”

Would that earn me another chance?

Would that buy me a floor to sleep on?

Would it hurt less than the tomb?

But even as I imagined it, bile rose in my throat.

No.

No, not again.

I can't go back. Not because of pride. Not even pain.

Because this time, if the master decided to have me finish my punishment. Serve the rest of my time for good measure. I will collapse for good. I can't go back there.

He would know I was hoping to be let out. To be kept in the palace. 

He would send me back on principle alone.

Worse, he would know I wanted to run. He always knew. He would kill whatever was left of me.

Seal me shut for good. Leave nothing to scream.

---

She stirred the pot. I watched her like a wolf watches a stranger.

She hadn’t said what she wanted.

She hadn’t asked anything of me.

That was more dangerous than chains.

I needed a contingency.

If this kindness soured—if this was a prelude, not a mercy—I had to be ready.

I looked at her hands. Her throat. Her stance.

She looked weak. But casters always did. She seemed capable with healing, but that doesn't always translate in combat magic.

A blow to the temple.
A pan from the stove.
Water in the eyes. A snapped neck. Kitchen knife to the artery.

The map meant safety. The plan meant power.

And power, even imagined, kept the dark from swallowing me whole.

---

I hated her for making me feel like this.

I hated that she hadn’t done anything at all.

I hated that I wanted her to—to break the illusion. To lean over me with cold hands and cruel purpose, to bare a blade, to hiss some command that would snap the world back into known lines. To make me the monster again, because at least then, I’d know the rules.

But she just… hummed.

Didn’t even look up at me. Didn’t seem to notice how I jolted at every shift of her weight, how my breath hitched like a body waiting for the lash. She only cleaned the pot cups, humming something old and tuneless—notes that didn’t carry hope or sorrow, just drifted through the room like smoke.

I hated that sound.

Because it reminded me—gods, it reminded me—of what it felt like to almost sleep.

My mind split. The room slipped sideways, dark edges curling in.

And I was somewhere else.

The silver needle.

Cold as moonlight, almost delicate as it hovered by my eye.

My breath rattled, shallow, as if maybe stillness would spare me. Then it pressed—just a whisper at first, a tease—before it sank deeper. Slow. Exquisitely slow.

Until the world burst into red.

I screamed.

The master leaned in, his hair brushing my cheek. His breath was warm and heavy with blood, sweet enough to gag. His voice was velvet poison.

“Keep at it, little songbird.”

The needle twisted. My back arched so violently the chains rattled.

“Your screams always sound the sweetest.”

I would’ve clawed my own face off, torn the eye straight out, if my hands weren’t bound. The links dug deep, kissed raw bone. All I could do was writhe, blind on that table, as his smile hovered above me—the last shape I saw before pain swallowed everything whole.

---

Eventually, she left.

I tracked her every step. Eyes darting. Muscles coiled.

Not that I could fight—I was no threat right now. Not against a caster. Exhausted, hollowed and WEAK.

But if she turned. If she revealed the blade. The sigil. The collar.

I would run.

I would try.

---

Wood creaked.

Water splashed.

A spell—not sharp, not binding. Something… heating?

I gritted my teeth.

She’s preparing something.

Maybe the real ritual starts now.

She kept gathering things from her pack. Grabbing water.

Not looking.

---

She returned.

Calm.

Unbothered.

Smelling of pine resin and Cedar.

“Do you need help?”

For a moment I swore she meant mentally. Like she’d seen inside.

"With?"

“Bathing.”

---

My brain short-circuited.

“You want to help me bathe?”

“No,” she replied. “I’m asking if you need help bathing.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Are you physically able to bathe right now without being further in pain—or do you require assistance?”

She’s asking if I’ll fall apart.

Just... if I am capable.

That level of detachment was worse than pity.

It was normalcy.

And I didn’t know how to be that.

I defaulted.

“If you want me to join you when you are wet and naked, you only need to ask, darling. No need for pretense.”

She didn’t roll her eyes. Didn’t blush. Just answered.

“I’m not bathing right now. This one is for you.”

I scrambled.

“You certainly should. You may need a bath as desperately as I do and you don’t even have the whole buried alive excuse.”

She shrugged.

“I can go after. I am less tired than you.”

“So? Do you need help?”

“No,” I lied.

She nodded.

“Warm water’s in the basin and two extra buckets are by the door. Knock twice if you change your mind or need something.”

---

She left the room through a latch to a basement.

I almost collapsed.

---

The walk was a battlefield.

Each step a truce broken with pain.

I made it to the bathroom.

Simple wooden basin tub on stone tile floor. Handmade soap and a cream on the side, a single sponge, wooden comb. A single old towel. And ill-fitting modest travel clothes. Smelled like her.

Water steamed in the basin. Not scalding. Just kind.

Clothes sat folded. Worn. Soft.

For me.

I almost laughed.

---

I stripped.

Or tried.

Tremors made the task slow, pathetic.

I peeled myself out of gore like rotted fruit from its skin.

The cold hit first. Then the shame.

What do you look like now? What has he made of you?

---

I entered the tub.

Warmth met filth.

Steam curled like ghosts around me.

I curled in on myself.

And cried.

Quiet. Shaking. No sound.

Just leaking grief.

Because there was no script for this.

No armor against water that didn’t burn.

---

I stayed in the bath until the water went cold.

My body had long since stopped registering the heat, anyway. Now the water was just weight—clinging to my skin like regret.

I had cried longer than I meant to.

Quietly.

Slumped low enough in the basin that only my knees and collarbone surfaced.

My ribs showed again. The blood hadn’t fixed that part.

Or maybe it had, and this was just my shape now.

Thin. Hollow. Stretched like old parchment.

---

Eventually, I scrubbed.

My fingers trembled as I reached for the sponge.

Soap lathered too quickly. It made me feel wasteful.

I cleaned in vicious circles, carving paths across my shoulders, chest, arms—until the skin turned red beneath the grime.

I scoured at my neck. Behind my ears. Between my toes.

And still—

Still I felt dirty.

Filthy beneath the skin, where no sponge could reach.

The places master’s voice had lived.

The place that buried hope.

---

My wounds were gone.

At some point—I didn’t remember when—I noticed the scabs were missing—all healed.

Not covered. Not scarred.

Gone.

Clean skin, smooth and silent. As if the flesh itself had forgotten.

I stared at it like it was someone else’s body.

This wasn’t recovery.

This was rewriting.

It felt obscene.

Like she’d touched something she shouldn’t have.

---

The water had turned brown.

I drained it. Refilled the basin with the last bucket she’d left.

It steamed faintly. Lukewarm by now.

I sank in with a hiss and reached for the comb.

My hair—gods, my hair—was a nightmare.

A matted nest of blood and rot and old, knotted curls.

I tugged. Winced. Tried again.

The roots screamed. My neck spasmed. My arms burned.

I twisted around, jaw clenched, and tried to do it anyway.

Three knots. Four. Then five—

Then nothing.

My fingers dropped the comb.

I slumped forward, dripping.

And cried again.

Not like before. This was quieter. Almost polite.

Just soft, exhausted weeping.

The kind that seeps out when there's nothing left to protect.

After long, my eyes caught a mirror.

Small. Bronze-framed. Propped up on a wooden table by the door.

And empty.

Of course.

No reflection.

No blur. No echo.

Just the room behind me.

As if I never entered it.

I stared. And stared.

Willing something to appear.

Not a face. Not a whole person.

Just… proof. That I was still real.

That I haven't drowned in the grave and hallucinated my way out.

That the bath and the blood and the strange woman weren’t just fever dreams stitched together by a desperate mind.

But there’s nothing there.
Because there’s nothing left of you.
You are whatever he says you are. You are empty. You are false.

I turned away before it shattered.

---

I dried myself slowly, half-afraid the towel would dissolve.

It didn’t. Just scratchy cotton. Thin, worn. But soft enough.
Warmed by the fire, or maybe just her hands.

The clothes she left were… plain.

Travel-worn. Simple linen and wool. Slightly too tight.

They smelled like pine soap and something herbal.

Warm. Alive.

Foreign.

I pulled them on anyway.

It felt like dressing in someone else’s skin.

---

I opened the bathroom door. The main room welcomed me with dim firelight and quiet crackles.

She was sitting by the window.

Cross-legged. Spine straight. Reading something by candlelight.

Her head tilted when I stepped in.

She looked at me.

Not long. Not too closely.

But her brow furrowed, just slightly.

“Need help with your hair?”

I blinked. Mouth half-open. Then shut again.

My voice didn’t know what to say.
My head just nodded.

---

She stood. No sigh. No smile. No comment.

Just moved with that same slow, deliberate economy.

She fetched a comb. A small glass jar. Dragged a chair toward the fire and gestured for me to sit.

I did. Because there was nothing else to do.
And I was too tired to resist.

---

She stood behind me.

Her fingers reached first.

Not tender. Not cruel.

Just practical.

Oil worked between my curls. A sharp, herbal scent filled my lungs—rosemary, maybe. And lavender.

She used her hands first. Teased out knots. Sectioned the hair. Applied oil where it was thickest.

Professional.

Like she was treating a burn victim. Or grooming a sick horse.

Not a man.
Not a person.

Which made it easier.

Maybe.

---

I didn’t speak.

She didn’t ask.

The fire cracked. Her fingers moved.

Sometimes a knot would tug and I would flinch.
She’d pause. Adjust. Never apologize.

Half an hour passed that way. Maybe more.

Then the comb slid through cleanly.

No resistance.

She set it down.

“Done,” she said. “I moved the cot to the basement while you were bathing. Figured it’d be safest from the sun. The latch leading down is next to the pantry.”

No praise. No reassurance.

Just information.

And then she left to clean the bathroom.

Like it was nothing.

---

What the fuck is going on?

---

The basement was quiet.
Too quiet.

A kind of stillness that didn’t come from caution or reverence—it came from absence. Of movement. Of threat. Of purpose.

Three days.

Three days since she dug me up.
Since she knelt over me like a priest without robes or pity, and fed me like a beast too pathetic to fight.

Since she spoke to me.

Really spoke to me.

Not commands. Not scolding. Just… facts. As though my existence were a problem she meant to solve.
As though I were a puzzle piece she hadn’t decided to keep or discard.

---

I pressed a palm to the wall, cool and cracked. Old mortar under newer repairs. She’d fortified this space. I could smell it—lime dust, scorched wood, dried herbs for vermin.

The sun was still up. I could feel it.
Pressing through the floor above like an unspoken threat.

I wasn’t weak anymore.

The healing, the feeding—small game now, but enough—had worked. My muscles no longer burned when I moved. I could stand. Walk. Think.

And gods, thinking was the worst part.

---

The silence wasn’t restful.

It was tactical.

She didn’t ask questions. Didn’t give me orders. Didn’t even linger long enough for small talk. She fed me, watched me, cleaned up after me, and left. Like I was some wild thing half-domesticated by routine.

And still—
She hadn’t told me her name.

That silence had teeth.

Because I knew if I asked, she would win.

---

I hated that.

I hated the waiting. The wondering. The careful way she never looked at me like prey—but never like a person either.

She was always watching me from a distance. Not measuring danger.
Measuring worth.

And I couldn’t tell what answer she was leaning toward.

---

I sat on the cot, elbows on my knees, fingers interlaced.

Three days.

No sign of the master.

No leash dragging me back.

No voice in my head. No command whispering in the dark.

Too peaceful.

He wouldn’t leave me this long.

Not willingly.

And certainly not with her.

---

Ilmater.

I’d seen the symbol when her shirt slipped once while she was cutting meat. Bound wrists. The god of suffering. The one the master hated most. His sermons about Ilmater’s hypocrisy still rang in my ears—“The god of martyrs who teaches you to endure your chains and calls it virtue.”

He would never use someone like her.

He’d flay someone like her.

Which meant…

This wasn’t one of his games.

Probably.

Maybe.

---

But if he didn’t send her…
Why hasn’t he come for me?

What is this?

Why does she help?

---

I glanced at the stairs. Heard the faint scrape of movement above.

Dinner prep, probably.

Or something worse.

But she didn’t call for me.

She never did.

If I wanted to speak, I’d have to go up.

Into her world.

And gods help me—I didn’t know if I was ready for that.

---

I didn’t go upstairs.

There wasn’t any point.

The sun was still out, bleeding through the floorboards like quiet poison. Even if I’d wanted to risk it—and I didn’t—there was no reward waiting for me up there.

She wouldn’t ask how I was feeling.

She wouldn’t offer conversation over tea and stew.

She wouldn’t even tell me her name.

So I stayed where I was. In the dark. On the cot.

Like a good boy.

---

Night fell eventually. I felt it when the sun finally stopped pressing on my skull, like a door had closed behind a predator. I stretched once. Slowly. Let the cool air of the basement curl around my skin.

Still, I didn’t move.

This had become a game now. A tug-of-war where neither of us pulled the rope—we just refused to let go.

She hadn’t asked anything.

I hadn’t offered anything.

And I wasn’t going to.
Not tonight.

She was clearly winning.
Which made it worse.

So I stayed in the basement.

Out of spite.

Like a sullen brat in a corner.

But I wanted her to notice.
To come looking.
To wonder why I hadn’t fed.

Of course, she didn’t.

Not until I heard the door creak open at the top of the stairs.

Notes:

If you’re still here, thank you for sitting with this ugly, tender mess of survival. Next chapter, expect the tension to twist tighter as silence gives way to questions neither of them truly wants answered.

Chapter 5: Pull#421 – What Isn’t Asked

(Elenya’s POV)

---

She didn’t go into the basement unless she had to.

Not out of fear. Not exactly.

She moved like always — deliberate, practiced. She would set the food down. Check for rot. Gauge if the blood still held any warmth. Then she would leave.

No questions.
No requests.
No watching.

It was a choice she made that very first night — after he descended below, drawn by the coming dawn like a creature half-afraid of its own deliverance.

Because right after the trapdoor shut behind him, she pulled out one of her thinner journals.

The spine cracked softly under her hands, the leather dry and fragile. Pages smelled faintly of mold and salt — ghosts of river crossings and damp archives long left behind.

She sat by the cold hearth for a long time, ink uncapped, the tip of her quill hovering over the emptiness.

Then, in small, sharp script, she wrote at the top of the first page:

Pull #421
Recovery Journal (initial).

A simple system.

A way to number the compulsions that had pulled her across half the world.
She did not believe they were tests. Or prophecies.

They were invitations to witness.

She underlined it twice.

Then began.

Male vampire — probable moon elven ancestry.
Apparent physical age under a century. No visible identifying marks — likely obscured by accelerated dermal regeneration. Probable scarring along dorsal plane.
Displays classical vampiric morphology: extreme pallor, elongated cuspids, crimson irises. Build strikingly lean, bordering on cachectic.

Situation on acquisition

Excavated from a crude subterranean crypt in the Grave Wash sector of Baldur’s Gate.
Exhumation required full manual effort; sarcophagus was sealed yet bore no protective glyphs or priestly sigils — secrecy over sanctification. Textile degradation and layered soil suggested entombment of at least eight to ten months. Yet no skeletal or dermal decomposition noted, consistent with necromantic stasis.

Upon exposure to open air, subject was conscious but profoundly debilitated. Severe muscle atrophy, jaw and hand tremors, delayed pupillary contraction. Tracked movement with sluggish vigilance yet offered no resistance — permitted extraction and transport without struggle.

Discovered via pull-response northwest of Baldur’s Gate — Grave Wash.
Pull intensity: severe.

Status upon extraction

• Buried: unknown duration.

• Severely malnourished.

• Multiple non-healing lacerations & contusions.

• No signs of active infection.

• Cognitive awareness present but fragmented.

Medical assessment upon initial exhumation 

General:
Presented in profound starvation, advanced cachexia. Body mass likely <60% baseline; musculature markedly wasted, especially quadriceps, deltoids, intercostals. Extremities cool to touch, skin turgor reduced — extended dehydration despite vampiric adaptations. No dermal desquamation or necrotic decay, supports necromantic stasis.

Dermal:
Skin near-translucent, pronounced venous tracing.
Multiple longitudinal abrasions, micro-lacerations — persistent low-level friction, likely from shifting against stone.
No localized edema despite extensive trauma — circulatory compensation compromised.

Craniofacial:
Cheeks hollow, zygomatic ridges and mandible stark.
Lips fissured with vertical splits — advanced dehydration.
Oral commissures caked with old blood and dirt; tongue bore lateral contusions and ulcers, consistent with self-inflicted biting.

Scalp / Hair:
Hair heavily matted with dried blood, sebum, soil. True color indeterminate — likely silver or white.
Patchy alopecia across parietal and occipital zones, probable traction injury or pressure necrosis.

Upper limbs:
Hands contracted in partial claw. Nails fragmented, some torn below the hyponychium.
Subungual beds dark with pooled blood; periungual skin split and crusted — repeated digging or self-excavation attempts.
Fine splinters and grit under nails.

Torso:
Thoracic cage sharp, ribs like splintered spars. Intercostal retractions even at rest — minimal respiratory reserve.
Chest and abdomen patterned with injuries:

• Numerous parallel lash scars, raised and keloidal across costal margins.

• Four deeper incisions with scalloped edges — deliberate flaying.

• Hundreds of minor cuts, many chemically aggravated to stall closure. Flesh inflamed yet sterile.

Lower limbs:
Bilateral trauma:

• Right leg: mid-tibial spiral fracture, grossly misaligned, skin stretched perilously near rupture.

• Left femoral shaft: distal oblique bend, massive bruising.
  Old shackling scars at right ankle — shallow furrows, partial epithelial overgrowth, stippling from prior low-grade infection.

Back & deeper torso:
Partial brandings over lumbar and scapula — sigils obscured, would require gentle cleaning.
Multiple punctures over sternum and flanks, most sealed with tough fibrin. Cluster over heart — likely designed to torment, not kill.

Neurological / Behavioral on site:
Partial fetal curl, left arm twisted under ribcage — defensive imprint before torpor.
Pupils sluggishly reactive.
Tracked movement intermittently — lucidity punctuated by probable dissociative lapses.
No immediate flight or combat response despite close tactile checks.

Clinical impression:
Markers of prolonged ritualized torture and deliberate nutritional starvation. Injury chronology suggests methodical prolonging of agony — enough to sustain consciousness, insufficient for vampiric regeneration.

No infection — either necromantic preservation or innate resilience. Yet tissue insult profound, systemic instability likely (possible marrow suppression, unstable hemodynamics).

Immediate priority: controlled feeding to avert metabolic collapse.
Secondary: gradual mobilization for contractures, vigilance for sepsis or embolic complications.

Post-rescue: pronounced hypervigilance, defensive charm patterns interspersed with stretches of near-catatonia.
Memory loss unclear — possible strategic evasion.

Notably: no overt aggression despite ample opportunity. Restraint appears deeply conditioned or intrinsic.

She paused, spine curving inward. Rolled her shoulders back until they cracked.

Then, in tighter, almost wary script, she added:

Note: This will remain a recovery journal unless subject stability and consent warrant escalation to a formal medical dossier. No invasive procedures. The pace of inquiry dictated solely by his state and willingness.

She set the quill down. Flexed her fingers, stained pads printing little ghosts of ink on her thigh.

It was only after she closed that thin ledger, slid it beneath a small drift of older maps and field notes, that she decided:

She would give him space.

Not as a strategy — but because the act of recording him had stripped something raw in her.
Had made it clear that if he was to have any hope of climbing out of that crypt, it would be by his own steps, not dragged by her hands.

So she did not go into the basement unless she had to.

She laid down meals. Checked for spoilage. Ensured the blood still carried warmth.

Then left.

No demands.
No small, well-meaning cruelties disguised as caretaking.
No watching.

It felt like the only kindness left to offer.

---

The cabin was quiet in the way a held breath was quiet — not restful, only waiting.

She sat at the scarred kitchen table, candle guttering low in a puddle of crimson wax. Ink pot open. Quill balanced lightly between her thumb and forefinger, the feather brushing her cheek each time she paused to think.

The leather-bound journal lay open before her, half-filled already with her tight, meticulous script. Pull #421. A number that felt almost obscene to give a person — but that was how she survived this work. How she kept each grief from bleeding into the next.

A vampire with too-bright eyes and a body so thin it looked like grief made flesh.

She exhaled through her nose, steadying her pulse. Then, dip the nib.

The scratch of the quill on paper broke the hush. Soothing, in its own small violence.

Observed symptoms

Neuromuscular:
Tremors worsening in the evening — more pronounced in hands, though still visible across shoulders and neck. Twice today dropped a tin cup before securing his grip. Flinched so hard at the hiss of the hearth-stone cracking that I thought he’d bolt for the door. Hands clenched repeatedly — a measure of either self-soothing or the suppression of some darker instinct. Possibly both.

Her wrist cramped; she set the pen down and flexed her fingers, watching the ink darken in the lantern light. She could almost feel him in the floorboards beneath her — not in any magical sense, simply in the way the house seemed to contract around him, like an old wound bracing for pressure.

Cognitive / Behavioral:
Language coherent, even precise, but always draped in performance. Defaults to seductive turns of phrase cut with barbs, as if prodding for a reaction. “Do you mean to keep me as a pet, or simply watch until I break?” When met with silence, shifts to theatrical displays — stretches languidly, bares throat or wrist. But stiffens immediately after, as if bracing for retaliation. Rarely holds eye contact beyond three breaths before glancing away — hypervigilant.

She remembered that moment clearly. He’d sprawled across the bench by the window in the faint dusk light, posed like a courtesan in a painted scandal. A smile that didn’t reach his eyes. But his hands had been twisted in the fabric of his trousers, knuckles bloodless.

She wrote it down. Because it mattered. Because sometimes even lies were symptoms.

Psychosomatic / Residual trauma:
Scratches at his forearms when the silence drags. Not grooming — more as if trying to scrub something away under the skin. Breathing shallow, uneven, as though body half-expecting pain.

Her stomach tightened. It wasn’t pity — not exactly. More the cold knowledge of recognition. How many times had she pressed her own nails into her wrists, just to feel something clearer than fog?

She shifted in her chair. Rolled her shoulders back until the joints popped.

Treatments and Feeding — Day 1

Hydration started slow. Juniper and willow bark in warm water. Hands shook so badly he spilled the first two attempts. Third time he managed — drank with a desperate greed that made her throat tighten. No vomiting. Encouraging.

Five lesser healing potions spaced over ninety minutes. Monitored for arcane backlash. Only the third caused a tremor in his left arm that resolved quickly. Skin took on a faint vitality after the fifth — less deathly white, more pearl-grey. Superficial wounds began knitting. Deeper fractures still unstable.

She paused, listening. The floor creaked somewhere in the basement. A faint shuffle, maybe the cot settling under new weight. She didn’t move. Didn’t call out. The last thing he needed was more eyes on him.

Magical interventions exhausted her reserves. Ilmater’s light drawn down to the last flicker — felt it gutter through her marrow like breath dying in a throat. Supplemented with arcane weaving: micro-mending vasculature, muscle sheath. Tibia and femur stabilized but will require daily minor transmutations.

Song of Rest lasted forty minutes. Chose a variant from old slave hymns — designed to resonate with necrotic tissue. By the end, his hand was no longer clenched under his ribcage. Chest rose deeper, steadier.

Her pen faltered. A spot of ink bloomed, soaking slowly outward like blood through cloth.

She sighed. Blotted it with the edge of her sleeve.

Feeding:
Three rabbits, one juvenile fox, slight-bodied deer. Initially rigid — shoulders bunched, jaw trembling — then gave in with a violence that startled her. Fed like starvation given form, consumed all in under ten minutes. Midway through, made a low moan that seemed to loosen every muscle at once. Afterward, hands relaxed, diaphragm no longer stuttered. By the second hour, was even making dark jests.

In the margin, she added almost as an afterthought:

Still breaks eye contact after three heartbeats. When he holds it longer, expressions shatter from seduction to caution to something hollow. No real anger. Only the ritual of defenses, repeated like prayer.

Her hand ached by then. She flexed it, feeling the ghost of each letter still printed into the tendons.

The candle was almost out. Wax pooled high on one side, sloped like a tiny molten hill.

She drew a final line under the day’s observations.

Marginal note (late night):
I document him like a ruin — cataloguing absences where stories should live. But he breathes. Watches with eyes still trying to decide if survival is worth it. This work is only righteous if it leads to healing. Anything less makes me complicit.

Additional margin scratches:

• Claws forearms when silence thickens. Not grooming — nor irritation. As though scrubbing away phantom bindings only he can feel.

• Breaks eye contact after three heartbeats. On the rare occasions he maintains it, expressions flutter from seduction to cautious warning to bewildered emptiness. No real anger — only a cycle of rehearsed defenses.

• Sits with legs tucked beneath, hands buried in fabric to disguise residual tremors. His voice turns almost melodic, too carefully pitched, when he lies.

She closed the journal and laid it on the table with almost reverent care.

Tomorrow she would begin minor orientation questions — gentle, harmless things. Just to test memory fractures, or find the edges of what he could still hold.

For now, she left the book where it was. Let the ink dry. Let the night settle into its old bones.

And simply waited.
Because sometimes the only mercy left was to give someone enough space that they might choose — finally — to step into it.

The silence wrapped around the cottage like smoke.
Still. Thick. Unsettled.

Sometimes she sat by the hearth and watched the embers shift in their own time. Other times, she stared out the window at the skeletal trees and thought about how easily a person could disappear between them.

She wondered if that was what he wanted.
To disappear again.
To return to the ground, where no one asked what he needed.

She wouldn’t make him surface.

Not yet.

---

The lyre sat untouched by the wall. Her hands had no music in them.

Instead, she cleaned. She chopped wood. She rewrote old notes by candlelight. She tanned a rabbit hide. Sorted her medicinal herbs by scent instead of use—just to keep her fingers moving.

And she waited.

Not for him.
For herself.

She waited for the moment when she’d know what to say—how to reach him without sounding like another kind of master. Another warden with soft edges and firm hands.

But it didn’t come.

---

The second night, she lit the candle in the far corner of the room. The wax was red, the wick already half-burned from the last time she needed to ask something impossible.

She didn’t kneel. She never did.
She sat cross-legged before the little shelf of tokens—pieces of cloth, a cracked mask, a bent pin.

Relics of pain she didn’t own. But carried.

A folded strip of silk from a boy who never made it past thirteen.
The chipped tooth of a woman who burned.
A thumb-sized jar of ash.
A length of leather collar she once wore herself, when she still had numbers carved in her skin.

Her fingers brushed the bound wrist symbol.
She closed her eyes.

“He’s afraid,” she whispered.
“I can’t ask him what he needs. And I don’t think he knows. But he’s still alive. That has to mean something.”

The candle didn’t flicker.
No warmth surged in her chest.
No vision. No voice.

Just that soft, aching pressure behind her sternum—the place where Ilmater usually touched her, quiet as gravity.

And this time, that weight was there again.

But not guiding.

Not nudging.

Just... watching.

---

Still, she reached.

She slid her fingers through the cooled wax and pressed it to her wrist.
A small act. A physical promise.

She would hurt nothing that hurt and did not ask to.

She whispered another prayer—not for salvation, but for autonomy.
Not for healing, but for space.

“I am trying,” she said into the silence.
“But I don’t know how to do this without causing more damage. I don’t want to bind him. I don’t want to break him. I just... want him to know he has the choice.”

The ache deepened. Then shifted.

Like a hand resting on the shoulder, not to press—but to let her know it was there.

And she understood.

He had heard her.

He always did.

And this time, his silence was not absence.

It was restraint.

Deliberate. Heavy. Trusting.

He would not intervene again.

What had been done—had been done. The pull. The path. The meeting in the graveyard.
That was enough.

She was not his blade.
Not his leash.
Not his will made manifest.

She was his witness.

And he trusted her to act like it.

---

Her throat felt tight. But she didn’t cry.

She never cried during prayer.

It would make it feel too much like asking for comfort. And she’d learned, long ago, that comfort came second to truth.

Still, she let the silence settle.

Let the ache between her ribs become something close to steadiness.

---

She opened her eyes again.

The candle was still burning.

The blood on her shirt had dried.

There were rabbits to catch. Bones to boil. A stranger in her basement who hadn’t yet asked for anything.

She would not make demands.

He would speak when he was ready.

And if he never did—

She would still feed him.

Because pain, to her, was not a debt to be paid back with obedience.

It was a call to be answered.

And not all calls wanted answers.

Some just needed someone to stay.

---

So she did.

She sat by the broad kitchen table, spine aligned, shoulders squared out of long habit. The lamp guttered low, throwing frail shadows across the parchment. Ink pooled in the crook of her wrist where she pressed too hard, then swept away as she lifted the quill.

Outside, wind whispered through the gaps in the shutters, carrying the scent of frostbitten pine. Inside, everything smelled faintly of copper and boiled herbs.

She dipped the pen again. Let it hover. Then began.

Recovery Journal — Day 2
(Location unchanged)

 

Subject update
Same individual. External presentation largely unchanged. Minor shifts visible: posture less hunched, tremors reduced. Vocal timbre steadier — probable early neurological compensation.

Observed symptoms

Neuromuscular:
Fine tremors persist, most pronounced when idle (holding a cup, pushing hair behind ear). Startle-induced cervical spasms diminished; still reacts subtly to abrupt temperature variances (steam from kettle, door drafts). Walk cautious yet balanced; continues to favor left leg — residual contracture likely.

Cognitive / Behavioral:
Speech retains ornate lilt, a deliberate composition threading between syrup and thorn. Not mere elven poetry, but a cultivated mask.
Continues to test personal thresholds — closes distance unnecessarily, pauses behind shoulder as though waiting for recoil.
When met with calm stillness, provocations escalate to small barbs, then taper into wary hush.

Psychosomatic / Residual trauma:
Still scratches forearms, though less compulsively.
Respiratory arrests decreasing; fewer moments of held breath.
Found before dawn in basement — posture collapsed, elbows braced on knees, head cradled between. Less rest than defensive withdrawal.

Feeding observations
Administered two hares and a brace of doves.
Approach slower today; movements deliberate, a study in restraint. No initial lunge.
Low moan on first swallow, shoulders shook once, then settled.
Post-feeding humor emerged — made an airy remark on my “quaint larder,” but abandoned it when I offered no reaction.

Additional anthropological overlays
Behavior continues to strengthen hypothesis of performative personhood.
Displays hybrid courtly habits — a mingling of high elven refinements and Baldurian decadence. Posture often adjusted to reveal throat, inner wrist — gestures less of invitation than trained vulnerability, brandished like a badge.
Gentle inquiry re: prior social engagements (“Ever attend the Uncloaked Balls?”) answered with playful dodge. Implies layered reticence: shame, memory fracture, or fear of consequence.

She paused here. Flexed her hand until her fingers cracked. The motion unspooled a sharp line of pain up her forearm, clean and grounding.

The candle flame guttered. She tilted the quill to catch it, watching the bristle tip glisten black.

Then carefully drew a two-column table beneath the neat script.

 

Behavioral trait	Likely origin
Ornate, layered speech	Defensive ritual; refined in predatory courts
Hypervigilant tracking	trauma — reading cues pre-emptively
Deflects direct questions	Conditioning by secrecy or survival calculus
Seductive overlay on all contact	Reflexive power-play, absent genuine desire

 

She set the pen aside for a moment, exhaled slow. Her gaze drifted to the staircase, dark beyond the latch. No sound came from below — no shuffling, no restless breath. Only the house settling around them like an old cat curling in on its own weight.

She picked up the quill once more.

Next planned steps
Maintain current feeding ratio, slightly increasing volume of smaller prey to reinforce moderation.
On Day 3, initiate light cognitive orientation — local governance, known landmarks — to test continuity of memory.
Continue withholding direct probes into siring or older trauma; anticipate defensive theater if cornered.
Observe closely for onset of aggression or psychotic fracture as somatic strength returns.

She lingered then, the ink bleeding faintly into the fibers. Finally, in the smallest script at the margin, she added:

His body knits itself faster than trust ever could.
I trace each brittle laugh, each involuntary shiver, as if hunting for the line where performance cracks into truth.
But I suspect he no longer knows where that line lies. If he ever did.

When she closed the journal, the leather whispered against itself. She placed it beneath the oil lamp, tucked under a stack of tax ledgers from another life — the weight of bureaucratic parchment enough to keep this truth pinned.

Her hand lingered on top of it, just long enough to steady her pulse.
Then she stood. Stoked the coals. Prepared another basin of water, should he wish it.

And settled back into the long watch of silence.
Not to guard. Not to intrude.
But simply to be present — in case some fragile thing inside him decided tonight was the night it might risk surfacing.

 

Chapter 6: Embers Under Ashes

---

Footsteps. Unhurried.

I didn’t look up. Not yet.

The scent hit me first—fur, blood, still-warm muscle. Familiar now. A rabbit. Maybe two. She must’ve hunted them herself.

The sound of boots on stone. A wrapped parcel thudding softly onto the crate near the cot.

Dinner.

Without a word.

As always.

---

And that’s when something snapped.

Not rage.

Not hunger.

Just... exhaustion.
Of this act.
Of her quiet.
Of how unbothered she seemed by any of it.

She never flinched. Never paused. Never met me where I wanted her to.

And now she was bringing me dead animals like a farmer feeding the barn cat, and walking away as if that was enough.

---

I moved.

Fast.

Too fast for her to register it.

One second, I was on the cot.
The next—in front of her.

She staggered back a step, instinctive.
But I was already there.

My arm braced against the stone wall beside her head. My other hand curled light as silk around her jaw—not squeezing, not hurting. Just there.

Her back was to the wall.

My face inches from hers.

Smile sharp. Eyes bright.

She didn’t cry out.

Didn’t even blink.

But her breath hitched—and that was enough.

---

“Oh, darling,” I purred. “I’m getting quite bored of this little arrangement.”

My voice was velvet and razor wire.

Danger dressed as seduction.

“You come down to me every night like a proud little cat, bringing me your woodland gifts. All wrapped and tender and still warm. And I eat them. Obediently.”

I tilted my head, watching her.

“And yet—you won’t even reward the good boy I am being. Tell me your name. Or even better, what you want from me.”

My fingers traced along her collarbone, slow and thoughtful. Not pressing. Just reminding her I was still there.
“Sorry to tell you, the novelty had worn off and I am bored out of my mind of the rabbit and this dance.”

“So tonight,” I whispered, “I thought I’d let you know…”

I leaned in, breath brushing her cheek.

“…that I’m feeling quite angsty and peckish. Ready to eat something else.”

The words hung there—low, deliberate, double-edged.

“I’d say you look delicious.”

I smiled wide.

“Both ways.”

Her breath hitched—just enough to feel.

Not fear.

Surprise.

And then… a flicker of something else. A flush. Barely there. Not a blush, but the kind of warmth that came with being seen a little too closely.

Good.

I leaned in just a hair closer. Enough to make her tilt her chin up by reflex. Her pulse beat steady under my fingers.

But before I could push further—before I could twist the knife and turn the tension into something I could control—her eyes glassed over. A thousand-yard stare, like she left this basement for a moment.

After a couple of beats, her breath started again, deep and controlled. Her gaze focused. She spoke.

Calm.

Steady.

Unimpressed.

“You never asked.”

I blinked.

She didn’t move.

“You said I don’t ask questions,” she continued, voice quiet. “But you’ve been down here for three days, sulking in the dark like a half-drowned cat. You didn’t ask my name. You didn’t offer yours. You didn’t ask for different food. You didn’t leave. Sorry for the boring dance.”

Her gaze flicked down to where my hand still held her jaw. Not fearful—just practical.

I let it fall. Slowly.

She didn’t flinch.

---

“There’s no agreement nor game here,” she added, brushing the front of her shirt where my coat had brushed it. “You weren’t a prisoner. You weren’t a guest. You were a patient. I didn’t keep you here. You stayed here. I was trying to help you recover.”

“And you thought silence was the best medicine?” I drawled.

“I thought silence was what you needed. Every time I engaged with you you looked ready to collapse. So I let you rest.”

She folded her arms across her chest. Her voice hadn’t risen, but it had cooled.

“I wasn’t keeping you here. I wasn’t testing you. I was giving you space. You’re the one who made it a game.”

That stung more than it should’ve.

I shifted slightly, stepping back—but not far.

“Space?” I echoed. “Oh, sweetheart. I’ve had enough space. A year of it. Sealed under six feet of stone.”

She didn’t react.

“Forgive me if I find the whole ‘benevolent silence’ approach a little stale.”

---

“Sorry then. I meant no harm. In retrospect I can see how that could be stressful. I just didn’t know what to talk about. Nor say. This is not a game,” she said.

I gave a grin, sharp and dazzling. “Isn’t it?”

“No,” she said flatly. “Sometimes people just mean what they do.”

I raised a brow. “And what exactly did you mean when you dragged a starving vampire out of a crypt, healed him, fed him, and then refused to speak to him like a person?”

She didn’t answer right away.

“I meant to keep him alive,” she said.

Then added, without missing a beat—

“And I didn’t refuse to talk to you. I just waited for you to be rested and ready to talk seriously, darling.”

The last word slid from her mouth like a knife tucked into silk—mocking, but almost fond in the way a stablehand speaks to a temperamental horse.

It landed sharper than any blade.

I let out a laugh—quiet, sharp, too dry to be real. “Is that what this has been, then? Rest and readiness?”

She raised a brow, unbothered. “You were bleeding, starving, paranoid, and a little delirious. What would you have preferred? A questionnaire?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said with a flourish of sarcasm, stepping away from her with exaggerated grace. “Perhaps a warm welcome. A conversation. A name?”

“You still haven’t offered yours.”

I paused.

Damn her.

She was right.

“Fair,” I said, dragging the word like a chain. I turned, bowing low with mock elegance. “Astarion. At your service.”

She inclined her head a fraction. Pondered long, and then just said: “Elenya.”

A moment passed. No lightning. No spell unraveled. Just names, finally spoken.

I hated how much it made something inside me loosen.

---

“So,” I said after a beat. “Now that the mystery is somewhat diminished… what now? Do I go back to pacing the shadows while you fetch woodland snacks and ignore me like an inconvenient pet?”

“If that’s how you want to spend your nights.”

I tilted my head. “And if I don’t?”

She shrugged. “Then you’ll have to start acting like someone who wants something else.”

Gods help me…

That was the most dangerous thing she’d said yet. She didn’t move. Didn’t raise her voice.

But her words landed like cold iron.

“You can literally do anything you want, as I said. I was just trying to help. There is no plan here. I don’t know what you require nor need. You would need to tell me.” she said. “Leave, if you don’t want to stay or if you don’t need my help. I never asked you to do anythingin particular.”

My first instinct was to scoff.

But I didn’t.

Because it was the way she said it. Not begging. Not baiting. Not even daring me to go.

Just... stating it.

Like she’d already made peace with whichever choice I picked.

“It’s the otherway arround actually. I stayed here for you,” she added. “Not because you asked. Because I saw what was done to you, and I don’t walk away from that.”

I blinked.

Something in my chest shifted. I shoved it down.

---

“I can’t plan anything,” she went on, “not food, not shelter, not what comes next—if I don’t know what you want or what you need. How long you would need me. If you need help, you have to say it.”

There it was again.

That impossible clarity.

No deals. No traps. Just... honesty.

And the worst part?

She believed it.

---

I leaned back on my heels, lips parted to retort—but nothing came out. Nothing clever, at least. Nothing that didn’t sound small.

“And as you just showcased,” she added, eyes flicking to the wall behind her, “pressing a vampire, as you’ve put it, to give up his secrets when he’s not ready is a foolish proposition. Even I know this much.”

That made something spark.

Something defensive.

So I smirked.

Of course I did.

When in doubt, pretend it’s all a game.

---

“Well,” I purred, giving her a little theatrical flourish, “at least we’re establishing expectations and boundaries. It’s almost domestic.”

Still no smile.

Not even a flicker.

She had the face of someone who had stopped flinching years ago.

“You really are something,” I said, pacing a half-circle around her, voice low and smooth. “Dig up a monster, patch him up, feed him scraps like a stray—and then let it simmer as if that’s... helpful. You didn’t even subdue me. Not a single threat, request, or coercion. No sermon or binding circle.”

I gave her a long look.

“You should have chained me up. It would have at least made the whole ordeal interesting, little saint.”

Her expression didn’t change but hardened a bit at the pet name. Like that was the most important thing right now.

Madness.
It had to be madness.

“That’s not kindness,” I added. “That’s stupidity.”

“No,” she said. “I am no saint, and that’s neither kindness nor stupidity. That’s choice. My choice to give you one, little cat.”

It hit like a slap I hadn’t seen coming.

I looked at her, searching for the lie. The trick. The motive. The thing under the skin I could pull on to unravel this calm.

But there was... nothing.

She says she wasn’t holding power over me.
She wasn’t playing any game.

---

“You expect me to believe this is all just... charity?” I drawled, desperate to find the angle. “You didn’t want anything at all?”

“I wanted you alive.”

I laughed. A short, sharp bark. “Oh, I’m sure Ilmater’s weeping in joy. His devout follower, feeding a little monster like me. Nursing them back to health so that they can create more victims to fall for his creed.”

“I don’t care what he is, nor what he thinks of this,” she said, calm as ever. “I care what I am and what I think of it. I do not walk from what I saw done to you. Not if i can help it. Period.”

That shut me up.

Dangerous.

She was dangerous in a way I wasn’t used to. Not because she meant harm—but because she didn’t seem to need or want anything from me. Not control. Not submission. Not even my gratitude.

She had already made her decision.
She didn’t need mine.

I hated the way that shook me.

So I pivoted.

---

“You know,” I said, voice slipping back into velvet, “you really should be careful. Mercy is a very inefficient trap. Most monsters don’t even recognize it until they’ve already chewed through it.”

That got something.

A smirk. Barely there.

Progress.

“Good thing you’re not a monster and I’m not trying to trap you,” she said.

“Oh? I wouldn't be so sure about me if I were you.” I tilted my head. “Then what are you doing if not traping me?”

“Letting you make a decision about whether or not you are a monster.”

And there it was.

The rope cut.
The reins handed over.

And it made me feel naked.

Because if I wasn’t being coerced... if this wasn’t manipulation... then every instinct I had—everything that had kept me alive for a hundred and sixty years—was suddenly useless.

No! Not everything.
There was still one thing.

That was all she said before turning and beginning to walk toward the stairs.

No grand exit.

No last word.

Just the soft thud of boots on stone as she ascended, leaving me alone in the dark again.

Or she would have—if I hadn’t moved.

“Wait.”

I hated how quickly I said it.

But I was already moving—across the floor, up the first few steps after her. Not running. Not snarling. Just... shadowing her.

She didn’t stop, but her stride slowed down.

Like she expected this.

Of course she did.

---

“You found me in a tomb,” I said, my voice lighter than it should’ve been, but tight behind the teeth. “Buried. Sealed. With no scent, no tracks, no one even knowing I was there.”

She said nothing.

My boots echoed up the stairwell behind hers.

“How?” I asked. “Tell me how you found me.”

“I told you, I felt the pull of something in pain.”

“That's no answer. Are you some sort of priestess? Do you have dreams? Visions? Or do you just dig up graves for fun and happened to find it?”

“I don’t dig up graves,” she said over her shoulder. “I just quite literally followed a pull.”

I frowned. “The... pull?”

She reached the top of the stairs and pushed the door open, the light from the lantern inside catching the edge of her cheek.

“Pain,” she said. “I follow suffering. It gets loud when it’s deep or close. I can sense it—he allows me to sense it. A bit like he does.”

She said it like that explained anything.

---

I stepped through after her, half-smiling, voice lilting with disbelief.

“Oh, well. Of course. Pain. Yes. Just follow the magical trail of excruciating agony and voilà—a perfectly aged vampire, half-dead and half-buried, ready for dinner.”

She moved past the table, wiping her hands on a cloth. Still not looking at me.

“You’re telling me you sensed me? Felt me out from under the dirt like some godsdamned beacon of tragedy?”

Her silence was answer enough.

I tilted my head.

“What are you?”

She paused—just slightly.

Then: “I don't know how to answer that. Don't look at me like that! I really don't. Can't I be just the one who opened your grave and got you out of it?”

A chill bloomed across my shoulders.

Because she hadn’t denied anything. And still hadn’t explained anything.
I said half incredulously, " No, you bloody can't! Then I am just the vampire you found in a grave and got out? Does that even make any godamnned sense?

She shrugged before answering nonchalantly, "That's exactly who you are to me though, but point taken. If you need to know something specific, please ask specifically. I tend to perform badly anserwring vague questions."

There were too many answers missing.
Too much quiet.

And too much of me still reeling from the fact that this isn’t how these stories go.

I wanted to shake her. Not out of anger. Out of disbelief.

I laughed, a sharp sound with no mirth.
“Perform badly with vague questions, do you? All right, let’s try something simpler.” I prowled a step closer, eyes narrowing as I scanned her, shoulders loose, hands folded in that maddeningly casual way.

“What are you? Truly. Are you a priestess? Some wandering saint who decided collecting half-broken monsters was the height of piety?”

Her brow ticked up a hair. “I’m a bard who travels around and tries to help when possible.”

“Oh, that’s adorable. An entertainer.” I gave a humourless smile. “So was I — in my way. You know what I learned? Storytellers are the best liars. Always know how to put the right lilt on a word, the right ache in a look.”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t even seem insulted. " I am not much of a entertainer, really! more like a story gatherer. But I am a very good liar, or so I think. Didn't lie to you so far, though. I really was just trying to help. If you are not interested in my help. If you can't trust my motives, which is fair, you are more than welcome to act accordingly."

“So you’re not a priestess,” I went on, circling her slightly, studying the way her weight balanced on her left leg, a faint hitch that told me something once broke there. “Not exactly. But you knew how to heal me. More than mere field stitches. More than common potions.”

“I am no priest, nor cleric. But I am a healer, a pretty decent one, I may add, considering how few studies I did on it. knowledge travels,” she said simply. “People trade stories for many things — herbcraft, surgery techniques, minor arcana. I also had a lot of practice healing.”

“That was not minor arcana you wove into my bones,” I snapped. “I felt it. You did more than splint me. You rewrote me from the marrow out.”

Her mouth twitched like she almost—almost wanted to smirk. “And you’re very welcome. I am particularly astonished at your recovery speed. I thought it may have been helped by the vampiric regeneration.”

“Don’t mock me.” My hand caught the back of a chair, gripping it hard enough that the wood creaked. “What else can you do? Compel minds? Curse with a glance? Set a circle blazing under my feet if I step wrong?”

“Yes, I can do some of that to varying degrees,” she said, with almost irritating patience. “But I don't intend to do any of it to you. You gave me no reason to be hostile. Why do you think I would do that? Did anything I said or did appear antagonizing or threatening to you? If so I appologize for the misunderstanding.”

I stared at her. Trying to catch the slip. The lie.
Nothing.

I simply said, "I don't know, general experience."

She looked at me pensively and then settled simply for "I can understand that. Well, I have no intent to bring any type of harm to you. Quite the opposite, but feel free to take any measure necessary to keep yourself safe if you do not feel that way already. Again, you are free to leave if you need help with funds for securing passage. I can help with that, too."

“Good to fucking know! Next question, where did you learn to track pain?” I demanded. “Who taught you that? It certainly isn’t bardic nonsense.”

Her face shifted — just slightly. A tiny muscle near her jaw tightened.

“I didn’t learn it. I kind of always could, but when I started having a relationship with Ilmater, it became stronger. He made it a pull. I was given it. Or burdened with it. Depending on the day.”

“And you chose to follow it here? Into a crypt to dig up a vampire who could’ve ripped your throat out the moment he woke?”

“You didn’t.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have,” she said, voice still calm — but there was something old under it now. Tired, maybe. Not weak. Just worn.

I leaned closer, lowering my voice until it was nearly a growl. “Who have you done this for before? How many monsters have you dug up? Or am I your first? Is that why you watch me like a scholar with a pinned insect — because you’re still trying to decide what sort of creature I am?”

Her eyes didn’t move from mine. “No. You’re not the first person I helped.”

That surprised me enough I actually stopped.

“Then what happened to the others?” I asked, voice dropping into something dark and intimate. “Did they turn on you? Did you put them down when they failed to heal neatly for your holy mission? Or did they die still broken, and you moved on to the next pretty corpse to fix?”

She exhaled, not angry, not defensive — just tired.

“They chose. Some left. Some didn’t make it. Some… stayed until they were strong enough to realize they were angry at me for witnessing what they couldn’t bear. Then left anyway. Many healed, though, and went on with their life.”

“And you’re still here doing it.” I shook my head. “Gods, what a masochist.”

“No, I am not. I do not enjoy pain. I hate it enough to make me wonder through the land trying to exorcise it. If that makes me a masochist, well, it's better than being a sadist. But I view myself as a helping hand.” Her expression didn’t shift. “Because that’s all anyone can be. I’m not anyone's miracle. I’m not a curse. I’m just someone who doesn’t walk past suffering when I feel it like a scream inside my ribs.”

For a heartbeat, I didn’t know what to say. The honesty of it — the lack of posturing — it threw me.

So I fell back on old instincts. Let my smile sharpen.

“And what if I decide to take advantage of your… generosity? What if I let you keep patching me up, keep pouring your patience over me, only to turn on you the second I’m bored? ”

She tilted her head.

“You are free to take advantage of my generosity, as you call it,” she said. “You can't steal something given.”

No flinch. No trembling.
Just that steady, godforsaken certainty.

“You’re infuriating,” I muttered.

“I’ve been told.”

“And you’re not afraid of what I might decide?”

Her eyes finally softened — which was somehow worse.

“No. Because you’re still asking.”

And that — gods damn her — that hit harder than any threat.

So I looked away. Because there was nothing in me left to bare without it being real. And real was the one thing I didn’t know how to be.

Because there was no leash around my throat.
No cell.
No commands.
No gloating.

Just this quiet woman with a lyre and a dagger and too much patience.

And she’d never even asked who I was.

I moved closer—just enough to see the edge of her mouth again.

“And what now, dear Elenya?” I asked, softly. “Do you just... wait? Feed the stray until it learns to trust the hand?”

She turned to me fully, eyes like wet flint in the lamplight.

“I told you,” she said. “You make the decision. Not me.”

Then she walked to the hearth, tending the flames like we were discussing the weather.

And I just stood there.

Still reeling.

Still searching for the part where I get to play the monster.

And wondering—very quietly—what the hell I was going to do next as she turned away again, crouching by the fire, stirring something in a tin pot with the same deliberate calm she’d shown since the moment I met her.

Like I hadn’t just backed her to a wall minutes ago.

Like I wasn’t a vampire standing behind her, half-fed and newly unburied.

Like I wasn’t dangerous.

I hated that.

I hated how calm she was.

So I tested her.

Of course, I did.

I took two slow steps forward.

Voice low. Sweet. Sharp.

“And what if I decided,” I said, “to rip your throat out?”

She didn’t move.

“What if I drained your pretty little neck right here on the floor?” My voice dipped, playful and cold. “Bit too much of the quiet servant routine. Thought I might like to feel something warm again.”

Still nothing.

So I pressed closer, baring just enough fang to make it real.

“Would you still call it my choice?”

She finally looked up.

No panic.

No sudden draw of a blade.

Just a long, level glance—like she was weighing what knife to use to clean a fish.

Then she stood slowly, meeting my eyes.

Her voice was light. Dry.

“I’d fight you for it. I would try to survive.”

A pause.

She shrugged.

“But that’s your call to make. I already made my choice at the crypt.”

My smile cracked.

Only for a second.

Because she meant it.

Not bravado. Not defiance. Just truth.

She’d fight me.

She knew she might lose.

But she wouldn’t hit first.

Not because she was weak.

Because she meant it when she said the choice was mine.

Gods, what was she?

Who walks unarmed into a beast’s hunger and says: Go ahead, darling. Just let me know when you’re done.

I stared at her, jaw tight.

She stood like stone—no stance, no blade drawn, just eyes watching me like I was wind she couldn’t stop but refused to fear.

I could have lunged.

I wanted to.

Just to see if she’d flinch.

But I didn’t.

Because deep down, I knew—

She wouldn’t.

Didn’t brace.

Just stood there, waiting.

You can kill me, her stance said, but you’ll have to choose it. I won’t help you make that mistake.

And gods help me, I hated her for it.

Because she didn’t look afraid.

Not of my fangs.

Not of my hunger.

Not even of my pain.

She looked like someone who had already bled dry and survived it.

---

So I shifted.

Pivoted.

If fear wouldn’t shake her—if threats were useless—then maybe something else would.

I stepped closer, slow and graceful. Let my shoulders loosen, the lines of my body soften. Let the tension slip into something else—something sinuous.

Not a predator. Not a monster.

Not yet.

Just... allure.

I dropped my voice, smoky and smooth, and each syllable poured like dark wine. “Well…”

I let it drag, tasting how the word shaped in the air between us. Watching her eyes for any ripple of want. Of anticipation.

“If you’re offering your throat either way…”

I reached out, brushing my fingers along a stray lock of hair near her temple—light, a whisper of touch that promised more.

“…you could at least make it interesting.”

Her eyes didn’t widen.

But they did flicker—once. Not with fear. With something closer to weary recognition. Like she’d watched this act before. Knew every scene by heart.

She simply arched a brow. “Really?” she said, voice flat and unimpressed. “We’re doing this now?”

I didn’t let it deter me. Slipped another step closer, close enough she could smell the cold on me, the faint iron that never left my breath. Let my gaze hood, lashes lowering just so. Let my smile pull slow and sharp.

“I’m just exploring my options.”

“Mm. You have so many,” she said, dry as old parchment. “A basement. A stew. A few rabbits. A woman too tired to be impressed. Truly, you must feel spoiled.”

Gods, that rankled. I huffed a laugh before I could stop it.

Because she didn’t just see through me—she walked around the act like it was cheap furniture.

But that didn’t mean I was done.

“You know,” I purred, circling behind her now. Letting my voice brush her ear as I leaned close, breath ghosting along her hairline. “I’ve been told I’m quite the experience.”

She didn’t even turn. “I’m sure,” she replied, cool as frostbite. “But I’m not here for one. And I can’t promise the same about me.”

That made me falter for half a heartbeat. Just enough for irritation to lick up my spine.

I moved around to face her again, let my hand drift to my own throat—lightly running nails over the pulse that didn’t beat. Let my smile go slow and sly, baring just a hint of fang. “Oh, I wouldn’t be so sure about that. From where I’m standing, you already seem to be quite an entertaining prospect.”

I dropped my voice to a near-growl. Let it vibrate between us, low and dirty. “Just imagining you on your back, disheveled and panting, begging for release—can’t be anything but delightful.”

Something did flicker in her—her jaw tightened, her breath caught, so small anyone else would’ve missed it. But I didn’t.

Progress.

Except the look she leveled at me next was like stepping into a cold lake. Eyes flat, almost amused.

“Would it really?!” she drawled. “You wound me, dear Astarion. I pride myself on looking as frigid as an ice storm. I wouldn’t want to be accused of false advertising.”

I barked a laugh despite myself. Gods, was she mocking me?

That should have infuriated me. Instead, I found myself prowling closer, almost delighted by the challenge.

“Oh darling, don’t threaten me with a good time,” I crooned. I let my fingers lightly graze her forearm—slow, deliberate, tracing the line of a vein as though pondering how it might taste. “There’s nothing better than conquering icy bedmates. Making them scream your name. Seeing the surprise in their eyes when you find what makes them sing.”

She regarded me like one might a misbehaving cat on the table. “Seems like a lot of work.”

“Work is only tiresome if the reward is ordinary,” I murmured. My hand drifted up her arm, palm ghosting her shoulder—just barely there, so she’d have to lean in or pull away. She did neither.

I tilted my head, lowered my mouth near her ear, let my breath spill warm and deliberate. “And you, little dove, are anything but ordinary.”

Nothing. Not even a shiver.

So I pressed closer still, voice lowering into something dark and velvet. “Or perhaps that’s it. Perhaps you want to be handled roughly. Perhaps you need someone to drag those tired sighs out of you, force them into gasps instead.”

Still nothing. Her lips merely twitched, the faintest amusement flickering in eyes otherwise cool and impenetrable.

It only goaded me on.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I purred. “To be reminded you’re alive. That this flesh still heats under the right hands. I could be generous enough to oblige you.”

I let my hand trail down—lower, toward the subtle curve of her waist. Testing. Watching for her to recoil, or flush, or breathe just a little faster.

She didn’t move.

Her voice was infuriatingly mild. “I could be. But I’m not.”

That startled a sharper laugh out of me. “Not? Really? Then what’s all this calm for, hmm? You stand there, letting me touch you like prey that doesn’t even twitch. It’s almost—” I let my eyes roam slowly over her face, down her throat, then back up to catch her gaze, hot and mocking “—invitation.”

“Only if you’re the sort who confuses stillness for surrender.”

My grin pulled wide, almost feral. “Ah, but you see—still waters are always the most delightful to stir. You never know how deep the bottom goes.”

“Careful,” she said, tone still light, almost bored, “you might find it disappointingly shallow.”

Gods. That bite. That lack of fear. It was delicious. I let out a breath that was half a growl, half a dark laugh.

“You’re making this very hard for me, you know,” I said, almost petulant. My fingers teased up to the hollow of her throat, hovering there, not quite pressing. “I’m offering you something most mortals only dream of—something dark, dangerous, absolutely unforgettable. And you stand there like I’m discussing the weather.”

“Maybe because you are,” she replied without blinking.

That hit sharper than any blade. I stiffened slightly, then let the tension roll off in another lazy, decadent smile.

“Ah. Playing unimpressed. Well.” I leaned in, breath hot along the shell of her ear. “Then perhaps I’ll make it very clear. I could have you gasping under me in moments. Have you undone and begging before your own gods for mercy they would never grant. I could make you forget your name—”

“Could you?” she interrupted softly, with just a tilt of her head. That ocean-storm gaze fixed on mine, so steady it stole every pulse of triumph right out of my throat.

I blinked. Actually blinked.

Then recovered, sneering a little. “So certain, are we? That I wouldn’t have you moaning my name into the mattress?”

She exhaled. Not a laugh. Not a shudder. Just a breath.

Then met my eyes directly.

“Well,” she said, quiet and unflinching, “if you truly wanted me like that, you wouldn’t have to work this hard to convince yourself you do.”

The words landed like stones.

My smirk faltered—just slightly. Enough for me to feel it crack at the corner.

Gods damn her.

Because she was right.

And we both knew it.

“You’re no fun at all,” I sighed with mock regret, letting my hand drop.

She didn’t even glance at me. “On the contrary, Astarion. I can be very fun. But alas, as just stated, you’re not trying to have fun right now.”

That made me pause. I blinked, then laughed quietly—an ugly little sound. “And what exactly am I doing, then, wise one? Enlighten me.”

“Playing. Testing. Seeing how far your teeth can sink before someone bleeds.”

I arched a brow. “That’s called fun where I come from.”

She just shook her head. “Not the way you’re doing it. Not when you will be the one bleeding the most.”

I stepped closer, mouth close to her ear again, voice dropping into a sultry rasp. “And what if I told you I was? Trying.”

“Then I’d tell you you’re very bad at it.”

A brittle laugh cracked out of me. I clutched my chest in false scandal. “How dare you. Now you wound me.”

“Do I?” she asked mildly. “Or is that part of the act, too?”

“Everything’s an act,” I breathed, letting my hand ghost down her arm, just shy of touching. “Until someone makes you forget your lines.”

"Why would you want that ?"

“Careful,” I whispered. “If you’re not careful, I might start thinking you want me. Want it to be real.”

“Shouldn’t it always be real?" she said, pensive again, before adding," But rest assured, 'darling', you’re not mine to want. Not mine to touch,” she said, voice low. “Only mine to heal.”

“Who decided that?” I rasped.

“You did, Astarion.”

That unshakable certainty — it did something cold and raw to me. Like plunging into water that stole the breath right from your chest.

“Well,” I tried, a smirk pulling at my mouth like a torn thread. “If I’m not yours to want, then whose am I?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to decide.”

So I sat.
One leg stretched out, the other bent, arm draped careless over my knee—a posture meant to look casual. Relaxed. Predator at ease.

But inside, something thrummed. Restless. Lost.

She didn’t watch me. Didn’t measure my distance or keep her hand on her dagger. Just stirred the pot, quiet as breath, like my presence changed nothing at all.

It was... intolerable.

And yet—I didn’t leave.

Didn’t sharpen my smile or slip a dagger between her ribs or whisper some filthy promise just to see her flinch.

I just… sat.

Listening to the fire pop. Feeling the raw edges inside me go strangely soft.

Stillness. Gods. What a cursed, fragile thing.

---

After a while, I spoke again.

Quieter this time.

“I meant what I said earlier.”

She looked over, one brow slightly raised.

I smiled faintly. “You’re not very fun.”

Her expression didn’t change.

“But,” I added, “you are... surprising.”

No answer.

Just that calm waiting.

So I went on.

“You don’t talk much,” I said. “You don’t ask questions. You barely blinked when I tried to frighten you or seduce you.”

Her lips twitched. The closest thing I’d seen to a smile.

“So I find myself wondering…”

I tilted my head.

“Who are you, really?”

She didn’t answer right away.

So I added, “And why Ilmater?”

She looked at the fire for a long time.

Then said, “That’s two questions.”

“Well, you’ve had three days to rest,” I said, stretching my legs. “Surely you’re up to the challenge.”

She stared into the fire for a moment longer.

Then, without looking at me, she answered:

“I’m no one particular, really. Just a travelling bard? Scholar? Trying to... I don’t know. Live. Work for many places and have no notable allegiances.”

Simple. Flat. Not evasive—just chosen.
Her lips twitched again. Progress.

“And before that?” I pressed. “You weren’t born with calluses on your fingers and spells on your breath.”

“No,” she said. “Before that, I was... someone else’s.”

That made me pause. How to understand that?

But her voice didn’t waver.

“For a long time. I was the one needing a helping hand.”

I watched her carefully.

Not because I wanted to be cruel.

Because I recognized that tone.

The way survivors package their histories into neat little boxes.

Fold the pain down tight. Leave no corners sticking out. 

"Let me guess, one of Ilmater's followers saved you, and you are paying it forward? " 

She chuckled, "Unfortunately not, no saviour in shining holy armour or priest robe. I just ran, I guess. never stopped running. learned a few tricks on the way."

She was running as well. A cruel lover or family member probably.

“And Ilmater?” I asked. “What, did the God of Suffering just show up one day and say, ‘You look sad. Join the club’?”

She glanced sideways at me.

“I was sixteen. Someone slipped a prayer into my hands when I was at my lowest. I didn’t know what it meant.”

A beat.

“I prayed it anyway.”

“And?” I asked.

Her voice was very quiet.

“I lived.”

That shut me up for a moment.

Because I didn’t know what to do with that kind of answer.

No grandeur. No miracles. Just survival had pushed her to martyrdom.

That maddening, grounded steadiness she carried in every word made her really difficult to read.

“And now?” I asked. “Is that what you do? Wander around fixing broken creatures? Feeding wild beasts and following trails of suffering like some barefoot martyr with a soft spot for predators?”

“No.”

I blinked. “No?”

“I don’t fix anyone,” she said. “That’s not what this is. I just... help them survive long enough to decide who they want to be after. I witness their pain and try to reduce it.”

---

I turned to her again, voice quieter now. Less teasing.

“Why me?”

This time she didn’t answer right away.

Then:

“You were screaming. Felt your pain halfway across the Sword Coast. It felt deep. Old. Familiar.”

“Why not before?”

“I came as fast as I could. I’m sorry.”

“Where did this pull come from?”

“Ilmater, I think.”

We sat in silence after that.

Not because there was nothing left to say.

But because—for the first time—I had no idea what I would say next that wouldn’t ruin the moment.

And she, mercifully, didn’t force me to.

---

“You’re very literal,” I said, trying to make the words light again. “I hope you’re not always like this with the people you rescue. All stoic and infuriating.”

“Only with the ones who keep trying to charm me like I’m stupid.”

I laughed, despite myself. “Gods, you’re impossible.”

“Not impossible. Just not blind.”

I winced. Not because it was cruel. Because it was true.

She wasn’t playing the game.

And I didn’t know what to do with that.

---

“You’re different from the other followers of Ilmater I’ve met,” I said, watching her carefully.

Her brow lifted slightly. “You’ve met many?”

“One. He tried to exorcise me.”

“Was it warranted?”

“Oh, absolutely.”

She snorted.

I stared at her for a moment, then looked back at the fire.

“Why didn’t you try?”

“To exorcise you?”

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a moment.

Then: “You didn’t need cleansing. You needed help. And to be honest, I don’t know how to do that.”

There was a strange, almost itchy sensation in my chest.

I shifted again, uncomfortable.

“You say that like it’s simple.”

“It is.”

“No,” I said. “No, it isn’t. People don’t help monsters. They put them down, or they use them. Or they run.”

“I’m not most people.”

“That’s becoming painfully clear.”

"Also, I have let it slip so far, but it needs saying." She turned and looked at me seriously. "You are not a monster."

---

A pause.

Then I asked, more carefully this time:

“I am a vampire"

" I am aware"

"Most would agree that vampires are monsters."

"Most would be wrong. Many vampires are monsters, I am sure. But you are not"

"I won't argue against me being exceptional but what lead you to beleive that ? Surely being hurt can happen to monsters as well"

"Yes it does, it’s often what turns them into monsters in the first place. But you aren’t a monster because…"

She paused, eyes narrowing just slightly, like she was choosing her words from a shelf of sharp blades.

“…because I’ve seen monsters. They delight in pain, Need it. Even their own. They wield it like a cudgel, or a trophy. You… you’re terrified of yours. Drowning in it. Monsters don’t suffer like that. Not really. They don’t ache for a reason to be anything else.”

Her gaze softened then — barely, but enough to make my throat feel tight.

“And you keep asking,” she added, voice low. “Monsters don’t ask. They take. They don’t look for proof that they are. You keep looking. you were ashamed after feeding the first time.”

She let out a quiet breath, shaking her head almost ruefully.

“You’re many things, Astarion. Wounded. Dangerous. Hungry in more ways than one. But not a monster.”

That — gods damn it — that settled in my chest like a blade, twisting somewhere far too close to where I still imagined a heart might beat.

"Are you not afraid of me at all?”

She tilted her head.

“I’m aware of the danger. That’s not the same thing.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She looked me in the eye.

“No. I’m not afraid of you.”

I didn’t know what to do with that.

So I did what I always did.

I smiled.

Teeth just visible.

“Careful, darling. That’s how people end up falling in love with me.”

She didn’t laugh.

Didn’t smile.

Just stirred the fire once and said:

“Then let’s be careful not to lie to each other about it.”

---

Then let’s be careful not to lie to each other, she’d said.

And it should’ve irritated me.

You should’ve pricked something sharp enough for me to push back—say something cutting, clever, or smug. That’s what I did when people tried to reach in.

But she hadn’t reached.

She had just… held the line.

Unmoving. Unyielding. Unbothered.

Like the truth wasn’t something to be traded—but something already known.

And that, somehow, was worse.

I looked at her fully then. Really looked.

She wasn’t beautiful in the way bards write about. Not in the way I was trained to notice.

Her features were subtle, not soft—deliberate lines carved by too little rest and too many nights on uneven ground. Her jaw was strong, her nose had a small crook like it had once been broken and never properly reset. Her hair—dark, thick, unevenly cut—looked like she’d done it herself with a dull blade. Not out of carelessness, but necessity.

But her eyes—

Gods, her eyes were merciless.

Not cruel. Never cruel. But they didn’t let anything past.

Grey-blue like ocean water under stormlight. The kind of gaze that didn’t judge—but noticed everything.

Eyes that had seen too much and stopped pretending it shocked them.

---

Chapter 7: Echoes From the Pit

Elenya’s POV

---

I was crawling again.

Flesh against stone—except the stone was soft, pulsing, slick like the inside of a throat.
Bone ground under my knees. Something warm and grainy stuck between my fingers—sand? Bone dust? Teeth?

The cave walls breathed.

In.

Out.

Every inhale sucked the air from my lungs. Every exhale left it tasting like rot. Like wet fur left in the sun. Like my own blood, clotted and sweet.

The tunnel undulated—ribs of stone flexing and relaxing, the ridges shifting in rhythm.
Sometimes the walls were smooth and slick. Sometimes they writhed with hair. Sometimes they opened to reveal small mouths. Gaping. Sucking.

And the spiders—

Gods.

They didn’t come.

They were already there.

They were the walls. The floor. The ceiling. Their bodies pressed so close together the cave was made of them.

Tiny ones—no larger than dust motes, twinkling like stars.

Huge ones—bulbous abdomens bloated with light, casting everything in nauseous halos.

Some were white as paper. Some black as holes. Some red, so red they bled when they twitched.

I pressed forward. My breath whistled out in shallow gasps. My chest felt too tight—no ribs, just knots of tangled silk.

Under my palms: fat, twitching bellies. Slipping beneath my skin. Moving like heartbeats I didn’t own.

They whispered.

“She comes.”

“She remembers.”

“Sister. Daughter. Filth.”

A thousand voices. A million legs. The words tangled together like hair in a drain.

Every breath tasted like copper. Like old silk. Like mushrooms growing in grave dirt.

I tried to scream.

My jaw cracked—but didn’t open.

Webs packed tight behind my teeth. My tongue was bound, heavy with silk. My throat was stuffed with it. I could feel it shifting when I swallowed.

I clawed at my face. Nails split. Blood welled. I pulled out threads—wet, tangled with spit. Vomited a tangle of web and bile.

Then something heavy fell on my tongue.

I bit down.

It popped—hot, bitter, laughing.

The tunnels narrowed.

Then widened.

Then blinked. Eyelids of stone sliding over everything, plunging me into red darkness. When they opened again, the walls were covered in tiny hands, grasping at me with nail-less fingers.

Then they blinked again—and it was just stone.

Then they blinked again—teeth, rows and rows, grinding together.

Then they opened—

And I was in a cavern so large it didn’t have a ceiling. Only vast canopies of webs arching overhead like cathedral vaults, stretching up into forever.

Moonlight poured down, bright and wrong. Each beam was filled with squirming shapes, wriggling like maggots.

That’s when I saw them.

The driders.

Perched on the walls, upside down, necks twisted the wrong way, jaws split wide in leering grins.

Their torsos were elven. Familiar.

Too familiar.

I saw my own face among them.

Thrice.

One smiling. One sobbing. One chewing on a strip of flesh that might have been my thigh.

“Look at you,” one cooed. Its mouth moved wrong—mandibles flexing around the words.

“Still crawling",  the sesond one added

" you still think you're not one of us.”

What was my face like again?

I ran.

Slipped. Fell.

Spiders cushioned me, hundreds of tiny legs embracing me like a cradle.

Soft. Gentle. Loving.

Then they bit.

Everywhere.

Tiny teeth. Tiny hooks. Tiny whispers of “welcome home.”

They sank into my thighs. My throat. Under my nails.

I tore them off by the fistful. My hands came away slick with blood.

My legs—

My legs bent the wrong way. Too many joints. Kneecaps on the backs. Ankles that twisted like ropes.

I stumbled into another cave.

Another.

Another.

Each tighter, wetter, twitching like intestines.
Each alive.

I pushed through veils of web like theater curtains. Faces were trapped inside.

Some screaming.

Some smiling.

All of them me.

My voice echoed back from somewhere behind my eyes.

“Run.”
“Hide.”
“Bite.”

Then I was in a chamber vast and echoing. My heart stopped.

There—at the center—squatted a spider the size of a house.

Its abdomen was translucent. I could see thousands of tiny shapes shifting inside—curled up, twitching. Waiting to hatch.

My face was stitched across its back. The lips moved, splitting open to whisper:

“I’ve always owned you.”
“I’ve always waited.”
“I’ve always been you.”

It lifted one claw—long, jointed, slick with sap—and slit its own belly open.

Eggs poured out.

Then spiders.

Thousands. Tens of thousands.

All chanting my name.

All chanting:

“No one. No one. No one.”

They crawled up my legs. Into my ears. My nose. My mouth.

I tried to scream—

My tongue was gone.
Replaced by a spinneret.

I gagged. Choked. Vomited thread. A tiny spider fell out, landed on my chest, blinked at me with human eyes.

Then crawled into my eye socket.

I ran blind.

Weeping webs. Mouth sewn shut from the inside.

The cave shrieked.

No.

I shrieked.

I had eight legs now.

I could feel them—

Clicking, clicking, clicking over the stone. Over bone. Over skulls with my old faces still screaming.

I skittered into a new chamber.

A shrine.

A cocoon.

A mirror.

It showed me—every me.

Every face I’d ever worn.

All of them had mandibles. All of them smiled.

“Who am I?” I whispered inside my own head.

They all answered together.

“No one.”

I clawed at my skin. Ripped it off in strips.

Underneath—nothing.

No blood. No muscle. Just web. Just chittering. Just dark.

Just rage.

And then—

The fog.
The sweet, smothering fog.

It took me down. Finally. Finally.

Then—

Silence.

A stillness so loud it screamed.

The cave sighed.

The spiders all turned to me, whispered, one last time:

“You’re awake.”

---

She woke biting her hand.

Flesh wedged between her teeth, jaw locked so hard her temples pulsed. Blood flooded her mouth—warm, bright, startling.

She didn’t even feel it at first.

Not the bite. Not the floor beneath her spine. Not the world slamming back around her like a closing coffin lid.

She was curled in a brutal knot around her pack, cloak wrapped so tight across her chest it bruised her ribs—but she didn’t dare loosen it. The pressure was the only thing keeping her inside her skin.

Her fingers were shaking. Wild. Chaotic. Not her own. So she dug them into her ribs instead—hard, deep, clawing for something bone-pain real. Anything that wasn’t legs. Anything that wasn’t thin bristled hairs sprouting across her stomach, twitching like spider feelers.

The fire had died. The darkness felt hungry—so complete it pressed into her eyes, filled them, showed her crawling shapes that danced just out of reach.

She didn’t scream.

She didn’t make a sound.

Her lungs tried to seize, fluttering against her ribs like trapped moths. Her pulse thudded high and frantic in her throat, hot enough she swore it would burst through the skin. She stared up at the ceiling, eyes wide, dry, burning, watching thin strands drift down like web—no. Not web. Dust. Just dust.

She clawed the inside of her thigh until she bled. Dragged her nails down in harsh grooves, broke vessels, burst skin. Warm trickle. Proof.

Still quiet.

Still calm.

Still quiet.

Her face pressed into the cold stone, cheek grinding into grit and dirt until it bit her skin open. She exhaled in tiny, broken hitches, air skipping and scraping out of her lungs like pebbles rattling in a glass jar.

Shaking.

Small.

Contained.

She didn’t sob.

She didn’t shake the walls.

She survived.

Just like always.

She bit down on her tongue—hard enough to break it if she let her jaw really clamp. Blood flooded her mouth again, sharp and metallic. Just to remind herself what kind of blood she had.

Still here. Still hers. Still real. Still human.

(…Maybe.)

The silence crawled over her skin, into her ears, filled her mouth, rang loud and shrill. It was the silence after a scream in a cathedral—echoes that wouldn’t stop.

Her jaw hurt. Her hand was slick and sticky. Her legs—

Her legs twitched.

No. Bent.

Too many joints, her mind told her. She almost saw it, her knees folding backward, ankles flowering into spider joints. Her skin stretched thin and translucent over impossible bone—

No.

Fog.
She pulled it up, desperate, like hauling a blanket over her eyes.

Fog.

Soft. Heavy. Dulling.

It wrapped around her thoughts, thick and merciful, smothering the shapes under a gray hush. Her legs were just legs again. Her hands just hands. Her breath just breath.

The ringing subsided.

She didn’t move. Not yet. Not until the last hint of twitching under her skin stopped.

She just stared forward, lungs rasping inside a ribcage that still felt two sizes too small.

Until—

She saw them.

Eyes.

Not a phantom. Not spiders. Not split red or a thousand pinpricks.

Two. Crimson. Watching. Patient.

She froze.

Everything stopped. The fear. The pain. Even the fog stilled, holding its breath.

Her whole body locked like a deer caught in the gleam of something older than hunger.

Astarion didn’t move.

Neither did she.

For a long, long moment—

She stared into that gaze like it was a blade to her throat. Felt seen.

Not in the good way.

Not in the healing way.

In the dangerous way.

And gods help her—it steadied her.

Because whatever he saw—

He didn’t flinch.

Didn’t pity.

Didn’t look away.

He just watched.

And in that terrible, silent watching, Elenya finally remembered how to breathe.

---

“Now, now, darling! Don’t pull back after getting me all hot and bothered with such a display.”
Astarion’s voice was silk pulled over knives, deceptively amused.
“Please, do tell—to what do I owe this delightful little spectacle? Seizure? Panic attack? Nightmare? Or was it good old-fashioned demonic possession?”

She slid the cloak into her pack. The floor creaked beneath her knees.
The air smelled like burnt sage and copper.

“Yes.”

“Yes, what?”

“All of the above.”

A pause.

“Tss. Don’t spoil my fun now. Come on, specifics. Aren’t you a bard?”

She stood, not meeting his eyes. Her breath clouded in the chill.
“Again, not that kind of bard. It was just a very bad nightmare.”

“One hell of a nightmare if it shook you like that. I’ve barely been able to illicit more than an eye roll from you so far.”

“It was.”

“So if it’s just a nightmare, why answer all of the above?”

She hesitated, the fog slipping thin for a breath.
“That’s what it felt like,” she said at last, voice low. “Seizure. Panic. Possession. A… layered sort of horror.”

He tilted his head, studying her. “Horror about what?”

“About being chased.” Her eyes flicked up—too sharp for a second, then slid away again.
“About nothing worth retelling.”

“Oh, come now. Now you’ve really piqued my curiosity. What was chasing you? A monster? A memory? Yourself?”

“Yes.”

A little tremor went through her hands. She quickly adjusted the strap of her pack again—ritual movements, reclaiming her shape.

“Gods,” he drawled. “Aren’t we cryptic. It’s almost charming. But I’d wager it’s not just evasive humility, is it? Is this your way of hiding? Putting distance between your thoughts and your tongue?”

She didn’t answer. Didn’t look at him.

The silence was brittle enough to crack.

He took a step closer, lowering his voice to a velvety murmur.
“You’re trembling. You realize that, don’t you?”

The fog frayed again—his voice, his eyes, too close, too now. The memory of legs and clicking jaws threatened to surge up.

She drew in a shallow breath. Pressed her hand to her ribs, anchoring.

His lips parted into a smile that was all canines.
“How intriguing, but I am feeling generous. I will allow you your hiding for now as I am nothing if not a gentleman. Perhaps I’ll pry it wider later. For now…”

His eyes roamed her face—then her small, careful posture, the faint tremor still alive in her shoulders.

“…for now, I’ll allow you the grace of delay.”

Her relief didn’t show. She couldn’t afford to.

But then he tilted his head, circling again.
“I’ll need to understand something else in the meantime.”

He prowled closer, voice tightening with a cruel little curl of amusement.

“Why were you on the floor?”

She picked up her pack. Adjusted the straps again—another little ritual, the fog thickening around her hands.

“Just catching up on sleep. I had to go out earlier. Supplies. Ingredients.”

“Why on the floor?”

“That’s where I sleep.”

“Why?”

“I only have one bedroll. And the house had one cot.”

He let out a laugh edged in something mean.
“Honestly—do you do this for everyone you drag out of the dirt? Or am I just special?”

No answer.

The sound of his tongue clicking broke the stale air.

“No protest? No grand declaration of altruism? You’re slipping, darling.”

Then softer, circling around her like he might lick the bruise:
“Sleeping on the floor now? My, how the mighty martyr has fallen. I’d offer to switch, but I’d hate to rob you of the chance to suffer nobly.”

She turned toward the door.

He didn’t follow—just let his voice hunt her down.

“Tell me—do you find it gratifying? Being so painfully generous it borders on self-destruction? Or is it just compulsion by now? Some old wound that keeps weeping because you never bother to stitch it up?”

Still no answer.

So the mockery slid in sharper.

“Let me guess—you gave me your bedroll because you couldn’t bear the thought of a poor, half-dead vampire catching cold in the night. How adorably deranged.”

“It’s a basement,” she said. Her voice was steady only because the fog had finally thickened, her own shelter wrapping tight around her. “It doesn’t hold heat. You needed it more.”

His breath caught—a dark, twisted laugh or something worse.

She didn’t flinch.

Not really.

Just walked toward the bathroom, each step a silent prayer that he wouldn’t keep following.

But of course he did.

“My hero. My savior. Come on—does it make you feel righteous? The cold? The pain? The silence? Is it a penance, or is it your only excuse to keep living?”

She was already inside. Didn’t bother to close the door.
The fog rose higher, coiling into every crack. It had to.

Behind her—his shadow. His smirk. His knives disguised as curiosity.

The cold water struck her hands.

Then her face.

Again. Again. Again.

Her skin stung.
Not enough.

Not nearly enough.

She pressed her palm over her sternum, leaning into the basin until the porcelain bit back. Her ribs ached. The mirror above her was nothing—a blank fog. No eyes. No mandibles. Nothing there to claim her.

His words chased after her like claws through silk.
And for a second, the fog slipped.

click click cli—

Her hand dug in harder. The bruise would be deep. That was good. That was hers.

The fog closed again—chasing off the smaller spiders, the slick whisper of a thousand legs.

She was Elenya.

Just Elenya.

Still here. Still small. Still real.

Maybe.

She didn’t answer.
Just kept washing her face with red-tinged water, dried it on her sleeve in slow, methodical strokes, and stepped back into the room like she hadn’t just bitten the inside of her cheek raw to keep from screaming.

“Stopped answering already?” Astarion drawled, voice curling around her like lazy smoke. “Come on now, don’t pull back. We were having so much fun.”

She didn’t look at him. Didn’t even blink as she crouched to tighten the straps on her pack, motions clean and distant, like winding down a marionette.
Then, after a beat, her voice drifted out, flat as ever:

“Happy to entertain.”

Her lips twitched — not quite a smile, but the ghost of one. A glint of gallows humor that was somehow worse than silence.

---

Later that evening, after she’d finished her rituals, the room felt hollow.
But she needed food.

Focus on that. Simple. Necessary.

Her pack sat by the table like an obedient dog. She crouched, pulled it closer — every motion careful, precise, rehearsed — and began to pull out her provisions. Bread. Cheese. Dried meat. Her hands barely shook.

Food. Fuel. Keep going.

Then her fingers brushed something cold.

Glass. Thick. Rounded edges.

She froze, pulse hiccupping once in her throat before it steadied again. It was just the jar.
The blood jar from the butcher.

Right. For him.

Her body still remembered, though. For a second, that chill had felt like the slick bellies of spiders under her palms.
She swallowed. The fog curled tighter. She drew a deliberate breath, then pulled it out.

Turned.

He was watching. Always. Red eyes sharp as needles, amusement already curling at the corners of his mouth.

“Thought you might need something different from the rabbits,” she said, voice flat, a breath steadier than she felt. “Cow’s blood. Got it a few hours ago. Added lungten to keep it from coagulating.”

He laughed. Loud. Almost bright. Unscrewed the lid and drank like he’d been offered fine wine instead of butcher runoff.

She let it wash past her. Sat down on the floor near the crate, laid out her own meal — the bread, the cheese — and chewed with mechanical indifference. The numbness was useful. The repetition was more so.

Eat. Swallow. Breathe. Keep moving.

Motion helped. Planning helped more.

When she finished, she emptied some of the bottomless pack content. Lined everything up in rows across the crate. Tiny bottles of tinctures. Needle kits. Wax paper rolls of dried herbs. The extra length of twine she used to tie bundles. Small, domestic, essential things. All of it precisely arranged.

The sight of it was a relief. Clean lines. Order.

Not a pit.
Not a nest.
Not a web.

Then she turned back to him and held out the bundle. New shirt. Trousers. Belt. Leather pack. Soap. Comb. Thread. Needle. Shoes.

A dagger.

He raised a brow. Dropped it. Raised it again.
Nothing ever simply stayed in place around him.

“What is this supposed to be?” he asked, sniffing the soap as though it might leap up and bite him. “You brought me toiletries?”

“You needed them.”

“Oh, and I suppose you just stumbled into a heroic outfitter’s shop on your pilgrimage to self-annihilation?”

“I bartered.”

“With what?”

“Potions. Meat. Leather. Fur. My stock was good.”

“Meaning you sold off everything actually useful to get me... soap.”

“Don’t you worry about my funds. I am not lacking enough to suffer from this.”

She heard the bloodlessness in her own voice and was grateful for it. Felt the fog gather more solidly around her thoughts, cushioning them. Softening the bite of the memory that threatened from the corners — silk, eyes, laughter in the dark.

He stared at her a long moment. Then slowly lifted the tunic like it might hiss at him.

“Oh gods. Is this... cotton? I haven’t suffered this much since the last time I died.”

She didn’t respond. There was no clever quip tucked inside her tonight. Just the dull edge of fatigue, polished by discipline.

“And a comb. You’re full of surprises. Is this your idea of foreplay? Because it’s tragically domestic.”

Then his eyes fell on the dagger. The humor went a little sideways. Darker.

“And a dagger?” he added.

“You didn’t have one.”

“You bought me a weapon?”

“I didn’t want you unarmed.”

She didn’t explain more. Didn’t say how it would be less frightening if he was armed — because then any violence would be his decision, not some twisted reaction to helplessness. Didn’t say how she couldn’t stand seeing him without at least the dignity of his own blade.
Didn’t say how it helped her sleep, knowing there were choices in this room other than hers.

He turned the blade in his hand, balanced it by the hilt. The weight seemed to satisfy something inside him.

“Well. How dreadfully thoughtful.”

Then his gaze cut back to hers — playful again, but with a sharpened edge.

“You are absolutely insane.”

“Noted.”

“So,” he drawled, stretching the syllable, leaning into the predator’s grin, “don’t expect any thanks. I didn’t ask for any of this junk.”

“No, you didn’t.” Her voice stayed level. Her hands started gathering stray scraps into a smaller pouch — small movements to keep the fog intact. “You did not ask for any of this.”

“What would you have asked for then?” she prompted, because logistics were safer. Logistics didn’t crawl.

He tilted his head. Ran a thumb along one fang, almost absently.

“Coin. Lockpicks. Oil. Vials. Chalk. Padding. Marbles. Some smut.”

“Marbles?”

“Don’t question my desire, darling.”

She pulled a scrap of parchment and began to write, ink biting into the paper with practiced scratches.
Coin, lockpicks, oil... marbles. Smut.
Mapping routes in her head, cataloguing suppliers, trade stock, fallback plans for if coin ran thin. The fog thickened around it all, made it beautifully impersonal.

Until he made a small, surprised sound.

“You actually wrote that down?”

She sighed, soft and dry. “You asked. Or was it one of your jokes, and you wouldn’t actually want any of it? I think I can get everything tomorrow. I just need to finish restocking potions, salves, healing supplies.”

A beat. Then she heard her voice, distant, clinical.
“To prepare though, I’d need to know what the plan is. Where are we going next? Are we leaving together or our separate ways? Have you decided? What do you need?”

Something in him twitched. A small, volatile shadow behind his eyes.

“Not yet,” he snapped.

She just shrugged, like his sudden bite hadn’t cut through her fog at all.
“Let me know when you do, then.”

And she moved on to the makeshift alchemy station.
Because there were tinctures that still needed finishing.
Because the fog was thicker here.
Because for now — that was enough

---

The makeshift alchemy station was humble — just a battered travel brazier set over a stack of flat stones, with a hinged grate to hold her crucible, a few nested clay bowls, and a squat glass alembic she’d picked up in Beregost for half its worth because of a hairline crack that hadn’t yet decided to betray her.

She unpacked her satchel methodically, laying each piece on a square of waxed canvas:

• A small mortar and pestle of white limestone, worn to near-silky smoothness.

• A thin-bladed penknife she used more often for roots than parchment.

• A set of tiny silvered tongs (the only splurge, to keep iron from corrupting certain compounds).

• Stoppered vials of powdered mandrake, hag’s fennel, whitecap spores.

• Wax paper twists of dried nettle, feverfew, and red sage.

• A roll of fine cheesecloth.

• And two small flasks of strong dwarven grain alcohol to act as both solvent and preservative.

The fog in her mind curled tighter, grateful for the familiarity of it. This was her fog, at its best — the precision of ingredient ratios, the delicate tension of color changes, the private reassurance of old routine.

She lit the brazier with a flick of flint, feeding it a twist of pitch-soaked pine to coax a bright blue flame. The smell was acrid but grounding.

Then she began.

First, the foundation decoction — water drawn from her own wineskin (clean, double-filtered through cheesecloth back in Elturel), poured into the crucible to warm. She added feverfew and crushed red sage, watching the steam take on a faint ruddy hue. Feverfew’s bitter tannins helped stabilize volatile extracts; red sage promoted circulation and reduced bruising. Basic. Necessary.

While that simmered, she worked on the more volatile layer:
Mandrake and hag’s fennel, ground together until they turned from two distinct powders into a pale, aromatic dust. A pinch of crushed whitecap spores — careful not to breathe them in, even though they were dry and dormant. Too much would slow the heart. Too little, and the tonic would be weak.

As she worked, her thoughts threatened to slip, to spiral back into the crypt’s dark, or the dream’s endless clicking. But she focused on the rasp of pestle against mortar, the gritty resistance, the faint sweet-rot smell of powdered mandrake. Her fog embraced these details, pushed everything else away.

She added the powder to the decoction slowly, stirring with a thin bone rod, counter-clockwise — an old habit, taught by a harried herbalist near the Cloakwood who swore the stirring direction mattered “for the flow of the Weave through liquids.” Elenya didn’t actually believe that. But the ritual was steadying.

Once the decoction thickened into something closer to a broth, she poured it through cheesecloth into a smaller bowl, straining out the fibrous sediment. The clear liquid glowed a dusky gold, catching the lamplight.

Last, she poured in a splash of dwarven alcohol — both to preserve and sharpen it. The smell turned sharp, medicinal, almost like spirit varnish. It would keep the tonic from spoiling for weeks.

She decanted it carefully into three small glass vials, corked them tightly, and sealed them with a sliver of beeswax. The heat from the flame softened the wax so she could smooth it with her thumb, ensuring a clean barrier.

Then she inscribed a tiny sigil on each cork in charcoal:

• One circle for basic healing.

• One triangle for clotting (if blood ran too freely). 

• One double line for pain dulling.

Simple. Efficient. The fog thickened, content. She was small again, inside herself — manageable.
Not unravelling.

The brazier burned lower now, coals glowing with a steady heart. The air above it shimmered with heat, wavy and distorted, hiding the room’s sharper edges.She unpacked her rarer vials and pouches with the same methodical hands that had just laid out a dozen simpler tonics. This — this needed more care.

The flight potions first. She set out three small ceramic bowls. In the first, a thumb-sized piece of dried griffon marrow, which she cracked open with her knife to reveal the porous ivory inside. Into it she sprinkled a dusting of powdered frostlace petals, traded from a caravan up from Sossal. The marrow would bind the lighter volatile oils to the heavier blood, keeping them from simply burning off.  In the second, a swirl of quicklime and wine vinegar, fizzing immediately. The reaction stung her nose. Good. Still fresh. This would help break down the griffon marrow enough to release what remained of its sky-touched nature. In the third bowl went a small dribble of will-o’-wisp ichor, ghostly and faintly phosphorescent, mixed with three drops of her own blood. A stabilizer. Risky, yes. But her own blood was keyed to her magic, her body. It made the potion’s matrix more likely to harmonize if she had to drink it later. The fog wrapped around that knowledge — clinical, calm, safe.

You know,” he said, swirling blood like wine, “for someone so relentlessly competent, you look like hell. And where did you learn to do that ?” She heard the sentences, but he mind was back in the fog. His taunts had sent her back to the pit earlier like a familiar embrace. Now she had a task. 

She scraped the marrow into the quicklime solution and watched it hiss. The fragments danced, floated, then sank again. She stirred carefully, clockwise, until it settled to a grey sludge. The fog pressed close around her as she strained this into her alembic. The thin, rising vapours shimmered faintly blue. She added the ichor-blood blend, drop by cautious drop, muttering a quiet binding rhyme — old, not divine, just one of the hedge-witch canticles she’d picked up in rural Amn. It coaxed the two liquids to merge, swirling into a luminous pale violet. 

He stepped closer.
“Back to ignoring me? What are you doing?”

She closed her eyes. Focused on the rhythm of her pulse. On the shape of the fog — layered, gentle, holding her steady. The potion settled into itself, colors smoothing to a soft, opalescent sheen.

Flight, she thought, with a kind of distant wryness. How novel. Who wouldn’t want to simply... leave the ground sometimes?

She decanted it into a slim vial, sealed it with beeswax, and marked the cork with a delicate swirl — her private sigil for ascent. When she finished, she laid the vials in a shallow wooden tray beside her and let out a slow breath

His cold hand brushed the back of her neck. She jumped.

He smirked.

“Ah. There she is.”

The invisibility draught needed a different sort of care. Finer, sharper. She set out a small polished silver bowl — silver didn’t disrupt the spectral tinctures the way copper did. Into it she poured a thin stream of ethereal distillate, bought for too much coin from a masked broker in Athkatla. It was clear, with just the faintest shimmer like light caught on water. 

She noticed him lingering around. " Do you need something else?"

“Oh no, Please don’t mind me dear,” he said. “The alchemist act is just too fascinating. All that stirring and grinding—it’s like watching someone perform a funeral for their own sanity.”

Still trying to get a rise of her then. Still no reply. 

Next, she ground up ghost orchid bulbs, dried and powdered. They smelled faintly sweet, almost cloying. She sifted them carefully into the bowl. The distillate paled immediately, adopting a pearly translucence. She stirred counterclockwise this time. Always counter for vanishing, always clock for empowering. An old alchemist’s rule, but superstition had teeth in alchemy.

He leaned against the wall, watching her hands. 

“It’s impressive, really. You move like you’ve done it a thousand times. Efficient. Quiet. Empty. But then again you do everything like that. I can see now why you called yourself frigid.”

The fog held her hands steady. She watched them like they weren’t hers—like tools laid out on the table. The trembling was minor now. Acceptable. No more than the rattle of glass after the cork pulled free. 

Last, she added a drop of chameleon oil, squeezed fresh from a green-flecked bladder she’d kept carefully wrapped in waxed linen. It rippled out across the mixture, forming slow, oily bands of shifting color — green to grey to brown to clear. The fog thickened with the familiar, faintly chemical scent. Her hands stilled, breath evening.

“You do realize how unsettling that is? To be in the company of a do-gooder empty doll. ”

She didn’t turn.

Stay here, she told herself. Here is hands, bowls, liquid. Here is safety. Here is yours.  She whispered a binding syllable, let the draught settle, then poured it off into a narrow vial tinted blue to protect it from bright light. A twin line scratched into the cork. Easy to know by touch, even in the dark.

“So methodical. Like a spider repairing its web after a storm. Spindly little legs just stitching away.”

That one hit. The fog was gone in a split second. Spiders everywhere. anger anger

The fog shattered.

Spiders everywhere.
Skittering over the benches, writhing beneath her nails. Soft bodies splitting under her palms. The smell of crushed meat — sweet, rot-heavy. Her tongue remembered silk packed thick behind her teeth, the taste of it slick and warm and alive.

anger anger anger
not again not again not again—

He must have seen the shaking.
The way her shoulders tightened, breath halted at the top of her throat, skin paling like blood retreating from a wound.

So he pushed.

“Ah. A twitch. Did I touch a nerve? Or is it just muscle memory, dear?”

Her fingers twitched around the slender silver stirrer, paused half a breath too long.

He smiled. The curve of it was sharp as broken bone.

“Tell me—how many of these tinctures are for actual healing, and how many just to make sure you feel useful enough not to disappear?”

But she didn’t hear it. Not really.

Because the word spider had already cracked something deep. The world sluiced away under her feet.

The pit returned.
Stone beneath her knees.
Warm. Wet. Breathing.
She looked down — no floor. Only soft heaving masses of segmented legs. Joints that bent wrong, wrong, wrong.

A pulse of black silk behind her eyes.
Her jaw locked. Teeth ground so hard her molars screamed.
Tiny chittering laughs coiled in her ears, slithering down her throat.
Her ribs felt hollow, stuffed with twitching things.

stop stop stop STOP

She tried to pull air. Nothing came. Her lungs refused to open.
Her hands flexed, scraping down her own arms hard enough to raise blood. That was hers. Hers. Not silk. Not venom.
The blackness roared back, louder, thicker. She was sinking again — eight legs unfolding from her hips, jaws splitting—

“Darling?”

His voice cut through like cold water.

Too close. Too soft.
Too real.

Her head snapped up, wide eyes staring but seeing only flickers of the workbench. The potion stand. The cracked alembic. The faint blue coals.

“Darling?”

She jolted like struck, the word ripping her out by the spine.
Her grip spasmed. The wooden spatula slipped from her slick fingers and clattered against the stone floor. The sound was painfully loud.

Sweat broke across her back like ice water, sliding down her spine in rivulets. Her breath came in shallow, choking pulls.
For a terrifying moment she couldn’t make her throat work. Her heart was a wild animal, scrabbling inside her chest.

“Bloody…” Her voice cracked, raw as an old wound. She sucked in another breath, tried again, sharper, more vicious because it had to be. “Bloody hell, Astarion. What the fuck do you want?”

It didn’t come out smooth. Didn’t even come out steady.
It rasped up from someplace lower than her belly, torn out by claws.

She didn’t look at him right away. Couldn’t.
Her gaze was locked on the scattered tools — the little silver tongs, the cheesecloth stained with feverfew, the faint shimmer of the flight draught still catching the brazier light. Safe, known things.

Her hands twitched toward them automatically. Picking them up. Straightening them. Lining them up in cold, neat rows.

Behind her, she felt more than saw him shift.
A shadow. A grin she didn’t have to look at to feel.

And for a heartbeat, she hated him. Hated that he was here, pulling at her fractures, finding delight in every fissure.

But more than that, she hated the spiders.
Hated the way they waited for a single breath to slip — to reclaim her ribs, her throat, her tongue.

So she forced her next breath deep. Let it out slow. Her fingers curled against the tabletop until her nails threatened to break.

Still here. Still hers.
Not a web.

He tilted his head. Studied her.

“Nothing really, was just enjoying the show. Someone’s a million miles away.” A beat. “Planning my murder, I hope?”

“Not yet.”

She turned back to her work.

He narrowed his eyes.

“An antidote, then? For the miserable feeling of being perpetually out of control?”

She didn’t look up. “haven't found one that works.”

He watched her work. She bottled. Corked. Moved to the next.

Only her hands shook when she reached for the salve she’d bottled yesterday.

He noticed.

His voice kept pressing. Mocking. Constant.

His silence was worse.

In silence, there was the pit.

Her hands moved.

Her mind slipped.

Just for a second.

Just a breath.

The cauldron gone.

The daylight gone.

The heat.

The stink.

The webbed walls.

Her skin crawling from the inside.

Who was she again?

She capped yesterday’s bottle.

Stood.

Packed.

Stared at the stone.

Move.

Move.

Move.

The fog curled tighter. Safe and false.

Then—warmth.

Between her shoulders.

A pressure.

Ilmater.

Not words.

Just presence.

Just breath.

She was not alone.

She was not a spider.

The spiders stayed in the pit.

The monster stayed in Menzoberranzan.

She was still brewing.

Still moving.

Still pretending the fog was enough to keep her upright. Keep her sane.

The clink of glass against wood. The low hiss of flame beneath the burner. The bitter scent of crushed herbs steeping in tincture. All of it layered over her like armour made of habit.

But he wasn’t letting go.

He was circling again—slow, deliberate. Sharp, persistent. Like a shark that had smelled blood beneath the silence.

Like he knew today she wasn’t quite unreachable.

Not as stone-faced. Not as dead-eyed.

Not as safe.

Just… off-balance.

Just cracked enough for something to seep through.

His eyes were bright — not cruel exactly, just hungry. For what, she couldn’t afford to guess.

---

She spent most of the rest of the night in motion — small, necessary motions that formed their own quiet litany.

She sorted her packs, laid out bandages by width and weave, refreshed her poultice jars. Refilled the potion belt she wore under her cloak. Made a second belt — slimmer, tighter — for Astarion, even though he hadn’t asked. It felt right. Practical. Something to do that would keep her hands from shaking.

Some potions were left on the brazier, low flame coaxing them to maturity. Slow brews. The kind that had to whisper themselves ready. She checked them again and again, even when she knew they needed hours still. The repetition helped.

She pulled out two books she’d found on the road — one in a dialect of Thorass so mangled it felt like teasing apart threadbare lace. She translated by lamplight, murmuring half-formed syllables under her breath. Wrote the clear forms in her small, neat script, then tucked them carefully into her traveling folio.

Her spellbook came last. A dark leather thing, edges warped by sea air, a slight scent of brine that never quite left. She copied an old arcane rite into its pages, careful with each rune, each bridging line. Magic had its own breath. Its own heartbeat. To write it was to listen for something older than them.

When that was done, she turned to her gear. Laid out tunics and trousers, checked seams, mended tears. Sorted what was too ruined to keep — old undershirts stiff with salt, a scarf that still smelled faintly of horses. She burned those in the brazier. Watched them curl into nothing.

Finally, she opened the recovery journal. The one she kept on him, though she hadn’t called it that, not out loud, not even to herself. Just records. Observations. Pages tracking diet, skin pallor, and temperament. Clipped, clinical lines that anchored her to something outside of herself.

Tonight, she wrote:

Day 4
He went hunting at the cliffs yesterday. Came back sharper than when he left. Eyes less sunken. Movement easier.
Still quick to mock. Still circling.
Improvement noted.

• Physical condition: improved skin coloration post-hunt; movement fluid, balance restored. Pupils reactive. Feeding reduced visible dehydration (note: slight tremor in left hand upon return, resolved within ~5 min).

• Behavioral: resumed typical patterns — intrusive proximity, rhetorical needling, use of amusement as deflection. No overt aggression.

• Appetite: consumed ~300 mL bovine blood treated with lungten. Tolerated well. No immediate adverse reaction.

• Cognitive: language intact, wit undiminished. Continues to probe for emotional responses (likely exploratory, opportunistic).

• Observed: periods of silent observation, ~2-3 min, at close range. No provocation, no physical encroachment beyond habitual orbiting.

• Additional note: Prepared secondary potion belt for subject use. Included basic regenerative, clotting, and minor arcane reserves (coded stoppers). No direct request. Offered as standard precaution for mobile recovery.

(margin:
admittedly scattered tonight — possible incomplete logging. clarity off after incident, mind unfocused. will reassess details tomorrow for consistency.)

When she finished, dawn was only a few hours off. The sky beyond the warped window was bruising from navy to grey.

She stood. Began packing away the alchemy kit — slow, deliberate. Each piece in its place. The fog around her was thinner now, but also steadier, more like a quiet companion than a shroud. That was a relief she couldn’t name.

The door creaked. A scent like wet pine and fresh blood followed it in. He stepped inside with all the lazy grace of someone who hadn’t just stalked the cliffside woods like a wraith. Not far, she noted distantly. He never went far.

She didn’t look up right away. Finished wrapping the small silver tongs, tying the leather cord around her mortar. Only then did she straighten.

He was watching her. Eyes bright, mouth tilted in that faint, amused half-smirk.

“Well,” he drawled, voice silk cut on rough edges. “How was the rest of your night, darling?”

She exhaled. Let her shoulders settle.

“Better,” she said honestly. Her voice was low but calm — anchored by the work, by the routine that had carried her from nightmare to morning.

Then she met his eyes, and after a small beat added, quietly:

“I’m sorry. For earlier. For… losing my composure.”

“So,” he said, voice a knife wrapped in silk, “you going to tell me what that little nightmare was about?”

She didn’t flinch. Just sealed the last vial with clinical precision.

“Bad dream.”

“That much was obvious. Try again.”

“I already did.”

He stepped closer. She didn’t turn, but she felt him—his presence like a drop in barometric pressure.

“What did you see?”

“Nothing worth retelling.”

“Humor me.”

She drew in a slow breath.

Slipped the memory under glass. Like a specimen. Dead and labelled.

He leaned in, close enough for her to feel the cold coil of his breath against her ear.

“Was it a person?” he murmured. “A monster? A former lover with a disappointing technique?”

She slid the vial into her pouch without looking up. “My tomb.”

Silence folded around them like velvet.

Then—

“Oh, how delightfully poetic,” he said, sneering. “And cryptic. Don’t think I didn’t notice how quickly you dodged that one.”

She moved on to the next station, hands steady. “Why do you care?”

That made him pause.

Only for a breath.

Then the smile returned—no warmth, no humanity. Just teeth.

“Curiosity. I enjoy watching people squirm. And you—well.”

He stepped closer again. The space between them shrank to a knife’s width.

“I came up here and found you on the floor,” he said, voice hushed but sharp. “Half-tangled in your own cloak. Heart beating fast enough I could hear it from across the room.”

He leaned forward.

“You were biting your hand in your sleep, love.”

His voice dropped an octave.

“I haven’t seen anything that interesting since you dragged me out of the ground.”

She didn’t react. Not with her face. But her fingers curled slightly against the table—grinding the pad of her thumb into the edge like a tether.

“You want to see me bleed?”

He was practically touching her now.

“I want to see everything bleed,” he murmured. “You included.”

His breath on her neck was like the promise of a blade.

She exhaled, long and even. Not shocked. Not afraid. Just—

“Mm,” she said. “I know the feeling.”

That caught him.

She felt the subtle shift in his posture. The tension curling in his chest.

He turned. Moved between her and the potion station. One hand braced the wood behind her, boxing her in.

The cold of his body met her heat like friction about to catch flame.

“Oh?” he said. One brow arched. Eyes gleaming. “Do tell.”

Then—

That smile.

Too wide. Too sharp. Feral beneath the charm.

It cracked through her like a faultline.

Because it wasn’t his face anymore.

Not entirely.

For a second—

There was someone else behind his eyes.

Seldan.

Younger. Crueler. That same smile stretched too far across too-white teeth.

That same slow tilt of the head. The look that always came just before pain.

Her hands trembled.

Only slightly.

Not him.

Not now.

Breathe.

“How do you know the feeling?” he said, slicing into the moment. “Does our little saint wants to see the world burn? I highly doubt that.”

Burn it all.

Burn them all.

The voice echoed in the back of her skull—half memory, half desire.

“I don’t want it,” she said, her voice hollow. “But I know the feeling.”

His eyes narrowed.

“That’s not really an answer.”

She didn’t blink. Didn’t look away.

“You didn’t really ask a question.”

He studied her for a moment—no longer circling, but focused. Like a beast that had just scented something deeper beneath the surface.

Then his voice sharpened.

“The nightmare, stop deflecting.”

She said nothing. Her hands resumed their cleaning. Slow. Precise.

He didn’t let her go.

Instead, he leaned in—lips brushing the space just beneath her ear.

“What was it, hm?”

He spoke like he was whispering a seduction.

“Some garden-variety domestic tragedy? Did daddy hit you with a belt, then lock you in the dark basement? Mum left for another man and left you to fend for yourself? One of those half-baked sob stories where I’m supposed to feel something?”

Her voice stayed steady. “Nothing quite as fiction-worthy.”

“Then what?”

She cleared the pot. Let the silence stretch just long enough to make a point.

“Just monsters in the dark.”

That did it. His hand snapped out. Grabbed her face. Harsh. Unforgiving. The angle forced her chin up. Her jaw throbbed immediately under the pressure.

“Don’t lie to me.”

His voice was low and tight. Like it came from somewhere deeper than his throat.

“We both know you’re not afraid of monsters in the dark.”

He wasn’t talking about the dream anymore.

He wasn’t talking about anything except himself.

That was almost funny.

She smiled—barely. It cut like glass.

“I am.”

His fingers dug in harder.

“Are you now?”

His face was inches from hers. Eyes bright and vicious like dying stars.

“Could’ve fooled me.”

She breathed through the sting. Kept her spine straight.

“There’s light in the room,” she said softly. “And no monster, as far as I can see.”

Her eyes met his. Still calm. Still unbroken.

“Just a prick.”

He blinked—

And barked a laugh.

Chapter 8: A Prick on a Deadline

(Astarion’s POV)

---

She called me a prick.

Calmly. Flatly. Like she was naming the weather.

“Just a prick.”

And for a heartbeat — I forgot how to breathe.

Then I laughed.

Gods, I laughed.

Because if I didn’t, I might have—

No. Best not to finish that thought.

She still had claws, then. Not many, perhaps. But sharp enough.

After days of enduring and brushing off my flirtations, my jabs, my threats and little cruelties with nothing more than an arched brow, something landed. Slid right under the ribs, where I still pretended there was a heart to pierce.

And I liked it.

Of course I did.

I’ve been needling her since the moment she dug me out of that grave. Velvet threats. Silk-wrapped barbs. Cold curiosity twisted like a knife.

Barbed words. Cruelty in silk. Jagged curiosity. Not to break her. Not really.

To see her.

To scrape away the martyr’s mask and uncover whatever awful little truth was buried underneath.

Because people like her—“merciful” ones—always crack. And I wanted to know what spilled out when they did.

But that was only half the truth, wasn’t it?

The other half was uglier. Simpler.

As long as I kept us dancing in this sick little game — saint and monster, savior and beast — I didn’t have to move. Didn’t have to choose. As long as I keep us tangled in this push and pull—this game of saint versus beast—I don’t have to move.

Not forward.

Not toward her.

Not toward anything that might feel like freedom.

Because the truth is—

I don’t want to go back.

But I don’t know how to go anywhere else.

So I stand here. Frozen. Half-dead.

Flicking knives made of words.

---

The whole scene kept replaying in my mind.

She hadn’t flinched when I moved closer.

Not even when my hand rose, slow, deliberate, to catch her face.

It wasn’t meant to be gentle. Wasn’t meant to be cruel, either. Just… necessary. A pressure point. A test.

Her skin was warm under my palm. Too warm. Her pulse stubbornly calm under my thumb.

“Don't lie to me,” I purred. “We both know you are not afraid of monsters in the dark.”

She met my eyes, steady. I expected defiance. Fear. Even disgust.

Instead, I got something infinitely worse.

Pity.

“There’s light in the room,” she said softly. “And no monster, as far as I can see.”

Then her mouth twitched — the ghost of a smile. Not mocking. Just tired.

“Just a prick.”

And that was it.

The dam broke.

Laughter tore out of me, raw and wild. Almost desperate.

I might have—What? Fallen to my knees? Sunk my newly purchased dagger into her throat just to prove I still had power?

Or worse — pressed my forehead to hers and let the hollow inside me show. 

She’d already told me, hadn’t she?

Two nights ago, in that hushed, infuriatingly gentle voice.

“You’re not a monster.”

Just like that. Simple. Certain. As if her judgment could rewrite the truth.

Gods, what a naïve little fool.

Because she doesn’t see me.

Not really.

She doesn’t see the whore who spent centuries with his mouth on strangers’ skin, selling charm and laying on his back for his master. Doesn’t see the monster who led lovers to bed so his master could gut them open as soon as they left the silken sheets. The monster who watched them get drained dry with cries still caught in their throats, while it dined on dead, putrid rats. 

She doesn’t see the beast. nor how I refuse to feel guilty for it all.

Not even once.

Guilt is for choices. I had none.

Disgust, though? That I can stomach. That sits fine in my gut — like rot recognizes rot.

Because I’d do it again. Gods, I’d do worse. I’d condemn the whole Sword Coast if it meant I could stand in the sun without blistering. I’d trade every mewling peasant, every weeping mother, every lovesick bard whoever sang me sonnets — just to feel my true heartbeat again. I would watch the whole world burn to be rid of him.

And her?

Her most of all.

If delivering her soft throat and quiet prayers to the worst creature I know bought me one less lash across the soul — I’d do it.

I’d do it. No compulsion would be needed. I would do it with a kiss on her brow, whispering apologies she’d never accept.

Because that’s who I am.

Because I like to hurt. I like the hunt, the kills, the blood. The sharp tear of flesh. The way the heart flutters beneath my hand before it stops.

I like the fear.

I like the power. The safety of cruelty.

I like it too much to ever be saved.

So she’s wrong.

She only thinks of me as a person because I am weak. 

She is laughably, pathetically wrong.

I’m not not a monster.

I am just a weak one.

I’m exactly what she should fear most.

And yet — she stood there. Cleaned her potions. Packed her little kit. Looked at me with those cool, steady eyes that tried to call me anything else.

That called me a person.

Gods, what a fool.

What a glorious, doomed little idiot.

When I finally let go of her jaw, it wasn’t with a flourish. There was no grand withdrawal, no predator’s graceful retreat.

My hand just fell away. Like I’d touched a stove.

Because she’d burned me.

Not with fury. Not with spells.

With that unbearable, unflinching calm.

It left me reeling. Off-balance in a way that felt far too close to fragile.

So I stepped back. Mask slipping on a grin, sharp and bloody.

“Careful, darling. Keep talking like that, and I might actually grow fond of you. Calling me a person and whatnot, you really know how to get the undead blood of a fella to start pumping.”

She only arched a brow. Picked up her little bone-handled knife and resumed scraping the edge of the table — removing wax, smoothing grooves, reasserting her order over the world one tiny ritual at a time.

As if I hadn’t just tried to twist something ugly out of her.

As if I didn’t matter enough to leave a mark.

And gods help me — I wanted to matter.

Even if it meant hurting her.

Even if it meant dragging her down into the dark with me, just so I wouldn’t be alone there.

What if I showed her? 

When I found her, she collapsed on the floor, half-curled in her cloak, packed for a pillow—like some broken soldier who didn’t make it to the bed. Her breath was ragged. Her body twitched, spasming from the inside. She didn’t scream. That would’ve made it easier.

No—she just shook.

And the smell.

Oh, gods—the smell.

Sweat. Blood. Panic. Something old and buried and wrong. Her soul was close to breaking.

And something in me lit up. Not lust. Not hunger. Something worse. The thrill of a rabbit’s heartbeat just before the pounce. She was real then. No saviour, no saint. It's just a girl having a quiet breakdown on Cold Stone. And I haven’t stopped thinking about it. But I wanted to see it again. That fraying. That flash of teeth behind the kindness. 

Just a prick, she said? Ha!

We will see about that.

So I leaned in, slow and deliberate, while she cleaned.

---

“Monsters in the dark,” I mused. 

She didn’t answer.

Still.

Perfect.

Wiping the rim of a bottle like it might bless her back into silence.

---

Good.

If serenity was her armor, then I’d rust it from the inside.

I stepped closer.

My hand snapped out, fast enough to whistle against the air.

Caught her wrist.

Not a threat. Not yet. A question. A test.

She flinched — barely.

But I felt it. A twitch in the muscle. A hitch in the breath. That tiny, exquisite shiver that said alive.

It sent something slick and ugly twisting up my spine. My fangs ached behind my lips, almost pierced through. I could smell her — the salt of sweat, the faint ghost of copper in her veins, the musky tang of old panic clinging to her skin.

I squeezed tighter.

“You’re remarkably composed,” I said, voice near gentle. “For someone afraid of monsters. But you — against all reason — still insist on my not being one.”

She didn’t glare. Didn’t jerk back. Just blinked.

Slow.

Flat.

Like I wasn’t even worth the adrenaline spike her heart betrayed — a rapid staccato beat thrumming through her wrist, far louder to me than any words.

Oh, that wouldn’t do.

I leaned in, lips brushing the curve of her ear. Her pulse was a drumline against my chest now, so close I could taste it on the back of my tongue — warm and metallic and dangerously bright.

“That’s a dangerous thing to bet on,” I breathed. “So let’s see if I’m really just a prick.”

She didn’t blink.

But her knuckles whitened on the cloth she held, as if it might anchor her. Still pretending. Still pretending I didn’t matter.

So I dropped my hand to her hip.

No tenderness. Just weight. Possession. Her heat seared up through my palm, startling — I’d forgotten what it meant to feel something truly warm. My whole undead body thrilled to it, sharpened around it.

“This big, bad, evil vampire is dreadfully bored,” I murmured, mouth grazing her temple, “and has decided to chase your monsters in the dark. We creatures of the night are awfully territorial. I couldn’t have you frightened out of your wits for anything else. So tell me, little dove — what did you mean by saying you saw your tomb?”

My voice dropped lower, catching on a rasp.

“Was it really your grave? Or someone else’s? A lover? A child? Or did some little nobody claw at you so hard you left them to rot? What was the monster you saw there?”

She shook.

Not in fear.

In memory.

It hit me in the chest, pungent as blood — that old, hidden rot of remembered horror. I drank it in. Almost moaned.

Gods, I hated her for it. That she could still stand here. Still breathe. Still clean. While I—

While I couldn’t even close my eyes without seeing another mouth, another hand, another ruin.

“Come now,” I hissed, voice raw with teeth. “What are you hiding in that pretty little mind? What were the monsters in your dreams?”

“Just spiders in a cave,” she finally said.

So small. So pathetic. So infuriating.

I grabbed her throat. Tight.

Rough.

Unforgivable.

“You had a panic attack after a nightmare with spiders. But I grab your neck, threaten to—”

My voice cracked.

“—and you just... stand there? You’re telling me I’m less frightening than spiders?”

The gall she had. Just staring. As if it were obvious. As if no matter what I did, I could never be worse than what already lived inside her.

It stroked something deep in my marrow, made my fangs slide fully out, pressing painfully against my tongue.

“This won’t do at all. Let me show you.”

“You don’t want seduction?” I whispered, breath cold against her cheek, my hand sliding to the back of her head and tangling tight in her hair. “Fine. I can try something else.”

She didn’t flinch.

Didn’t scream.

Didn’t even breathe.

And I should’ve stopped.

But I didn’t.

Because something in me — bloated and hot from the hunt earlier, sated in a way I hadn’t been in centuries — was already unspooling. Coming apart in knots of want and shame and rank cruelty. The old phantom leash gave a ghostly tug at the base of my skull — more, more, more.

“That’s what you really want, isn’t it?” I crooned. “For a monster to take you? For fear to wrap cold fingers around your guts?”

I let my other hand slide lower, tracing the curve of her waist to her stomach. Just close enough to feel the flutter of breath that didn’t match her blank face. The other hand wrenched her head back in a slow, deliberate arc, exposing her throat.

“That’s it. You want to be broken,” I breathed against the soft skin there. Her pulse hammered so close to my mouth it made me dizzy. My fangs scraped against my lip. “What if I took it? Your body. Your blood. What would you do then? Curl up and shiver like that every time?”

I was so close I could taste the panic on her skin, that perfect tang that lived somewhere between sweat and tears. It made my head spin.

“Would you just stand there? Lie still? Pray me away? Or would you bite back?” My voice went low, husky. “Either way… I would savor it. Savor breaking you apart.”

Nothing.

Not a twitch. Not a tremor.

Just that awful, unbearable stillness.

I pulled back just enough to look at her.

It wasn’t bravery.

And gods — I recognized it too late.

It was absence.

That hollow, cracked-glass quiet of someone who’d crawled so far inside themselves they couldn’t hear you anymore. I knew that stillness. I’d clung to it every time he bent me over the altar and said—

If I’m quiet enough, maybe it won’t be worse.

Something splintered inside me.

I grabbed her throat again and slammed her against the wall.

Faster than I meant.

Harder.

“How?” I snarled, voice cracking on something too raw to name. “How can you just let me — do this? Do nothing when I threaten to bite you, to—”

She blinked once.

No fear.

No pleading.

Not even anger.

Then it hit me. A second wave of sick recognition.

She wasn’t just hiding.

She wasn’t fighting because she wasn’t here.

Not really.

Not at all.

Not anymore.

Her eyes stayed fixed. Glassy. Unblinking.

And for one horrible heartbeat I wanted to rip my own throat out. Because I’d done it. I’d pushed her. All to see what she was made of.

She still didn’t move.

But I felt it. A spike of heat. Not arousal. Not fear.

That sacred, silent tension before a storm tears everything down.

She didn’t scream.

But her eyes met mine — cold. Flat.

“Unhand me.”

Not a plea. Not a challenge.

A verdict.

I had already done it.

I held tighter. Wanting to see it. That final break.

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Then I’ll make you.”

And for a second—

Her eyes deepened, that storm-wracked blue turning bottomless. Magic thrummed around us, the Weave pulling tight like a bowstring.

No spell. Not yet.

But the promise was there.

The air sharpened — that quiet, electric ache just before lightning strikes.

Still, I didn’t let go.

Because some rotten, feral part of me wanted her to try. To knock me flat. To prove she could.

And then—

She whispered, soft and vicious as a scalpel — “Et alibi.”

And she simply vanished from my grasp.

Just—gone.

“Shit—”

I spun, blood roaring in my ears. Where—

She was back.

At the table.

Wiping glass.

As if none of it had happened.

As if I were a child throwing tantrums.

I snarled. I wanted to tear the whole room apart.

Fine. There were other ways to force meaning back into the world.

I stalked forward.

“Can you stop with the games, Astarion? You’re being particularly unkind.”

Her voice wasn’t angry. Just tired. Distant.

“Tonight wasn’t easy. And you’re not helping.”

She didn’t even look at me.

“Whatever it is you really want — just ask.”

She turned one last jar in her palm.

“Because it’s not this. You don’t care what haunts me. Or who I am. You just want me to leave… or attack you. Why?”

And damn her.

Damn her—

Because she was right.

“I just…”

My voice cracked, shamed by how thin it sounded.

“I just wanted to know what you were made of.”

She turned to me.

Not scornful.

Just… confused. Heartbreakingly mortal.

“Why does it matter? I’m just someone who found you in a ditch. Why not take what you need — and go? Why these games? Decide what the fuck it is you want to do and do it. Or is that what this is? Am I your distraction?”

I said nothing.

Because nothing I could say would be enough.

Not now.

“Yeah,” she said at last, her voice low, steady — like reciting a verdict she’d already sentenced a hundred times in her head. “I figured you wouldn’t answer that one.”

She didn’t look away. Just set the jar down with that maddening precision. Fingers careful. Movements deliberate. Every gesture her own private armor.

“Listen,” she went on, tone flat enough to flay. “That was fucked up. As much for you as it was for me.”

She paused — long enough for it to hurt. Her eyes didn’t waver.

“I understand fear responses. I understand lashing out. Believe me. But…”

Her breath left her in a quiet exhale, shoulders loosening just slightly.

“I can’t — no, I won’t — be your punching doll.”

Gods.

It was like being staked.

Not through the heart — that would’ve been cleaner. Merciful, even.

No, this pierced somewhere lower. Rot deeper. Right into that raw knot that still remembered humiliation. Still remembered being worthless. Still remembered guilt.

Her words didn’t blaze. Didn’t cut like a hot brand.
They were cold. Clinical. The kind of cold that burns slow — all the way through.

Because she was right.

Because she wasn’t even angry.

She was calling my bluff.

She looked at me the way one might look at a dog that bites when cornered — not with horror, not even pity. Just tired, unsurprised recognition.

My fangs ached. Literally itched in my jaw, pressing against my lips like they wanted out. Her heartbeat was a war drum in the silence, thrumming so loud it made my ears ring. The room stank of pine rot and old blood, sweat and ash, and that faint ghost of her hair oil. Every scent too sharp. Too layered. Too real.

I swallowed. Felt my throat catch, dry and tight.

Because she was still here.

Still standing in front of me. Steady. Unmoving.

And for a sick moment, all I could think was — just strike again. Push until she breaks.
Because if she screamed, if she finally shoved me away with a spell or steel, it would prove something. That I was a monster. That all of this was inevitable. That there was no choice left to make at all.

But she didn’t.

She just kept looking at me.

And I realized, with a horror that turned my guts cold, that I was trembling.
My hands. My shoulders. Even my breath.

Trembling like a child caught with stolen sweets — only there was nothing sweet about this. Nothing innocent.

Her words still lingered in the air like frost.

I can’t be your punching doll.

Of course she couldn’t. Of course she wouldn’t.

I’d spent so long putting on masks and playing these games I didn’t even recognize them anymore.

And even now, she offered me a choice.

I tried to muster something clever. Something vicious. A smirk, a taunt.
But it snagged in my throat.

So I just stood there. Fangs still pressing at my lip, breath rattling, listening to her heartbeat like it was the only steady thing left in the world.

And for one terrifying instant — I wanted to lay my forehead against her shoulder. Just to rest. Just to stop being this.

Instead, I swallowed again. Shame hit like a lash. Managed a sound that might’ve been a laugh in better company.

“...Noted,” I rasped, voice thin. “I’ll try to… find a more consenting target for my charming little tantrums.”

Pathetic. Gods, I was pathetic.

She only turned — calmly — back to her work. Back to her jars and her notes and her neat, orderly little world. As if letting me stand there with my monstrous shame and shaking hands was the most ordinary thing in Faerûn.

And that was it.

That was the mercy.

That was the blade.

She still wasn’t afraid of me.
Not really.
Not yet.

But now I wasn’t sure if I wanted that to change.

---

She didn’t go to bed.

Of course she didn’t.

She retreated to the far wall — same cloak, same quiet, same maddening restraint — and started scribbling in one of her endless tomes. By the time I glanced up again, there were three books cracked wide, two candles guttering low, and half a dozen ink stains blooming across her fingers like dark bruises.

And still — no sound.

Not a single word since she walked away.

—

I watched her longer than I meant to.

And for the first time in days — gods, maybe decades — something inside me stirred that I didn’t immediately try to kill.

Shame.

Not guilt. I’ve never had much use for guilt. Guilt means you think someone else’s pain matters more than your pleasure. It means you care.

But shame?

Shame is different.

Shame is private. 

It’s knowing exactly how pathetic you look.

How obvious you are.

How you must have seemed — blood-drunk and snarling, flaunting all my monstrous little games in front of someone who walked straight into a vampire’s grave and didn’t even flinch.

—

She’s a saint, that one.

Or an idiot.

Or worse — something for which I have no name.

Because she didn’t stake me. Didn’t run. Didn’t even curse.

She simply offered me a choice.

Like I was still capable of making one.

—

Gods.

It’s been what? Four days? Five?

And I haven’t felt him. Not once. No leash. No phantom claws burrowing down my spine. No bright, searing command that hollowed me out from the inside.

Maybe—

No.

Don’t hope.

But maybe.

Maybe he doesn’t know. Maybe he still thinks I’m rotting in the crypt where he left me.

Maybe — for the first time in centuries— I’m somewhat free.

So what now?

This half-starved scholar with saintly delusions and a martyr’s complex under her skin is the best chance I’ve got?

Maybe I could fake my death, vanish so far he couldn’t see. Stage a kidnapping, claim zealots of Ilmater dragged me off and flayed me for my sins. He’d believe it. He isn’t particularly clever — just cruel.

Or maybe—

Fuck.

Maybe I already ruined it.

—

I pressed my hands together hard. Pressed until the joints popped.

You’re a fool, Astarion.

She was the key. The next move on the board.

And I cornered her like a dog. Pushed her. Sank my claws into the only person who could’ve helped me.

For what?

To feel what?

To feel like I still had control of something — anything — after all these long, bloody years?

—

The truth is, I’ve never been stronger.

Never.

Not even in those early decades, back when the horror was still bright and new and he made sure we were kept lean and mean. I am fed. I am rested. My skin is rich with stolen blood that doesn’t sour in my veins.

And I don’t know what to do with it. With this monstrous fullness. With the cruel clarity of senses that have never been sharper — the taste of the salt on her throat, the way her pulse blares in my ears like a war drum, louder than any mortal voice.

I am powerful in a way I’ve never been allowed to be.

Still,

She was stronger than me. Has been all along.

I just didn’t want to see it.

I thought being fed made me powerful again. Thought rest and arrogance would patch over the rot inside my bones.

But she’s still standing.

She always was.

And me? I’m not even sure I know how to run.

—

Fix it.

—

Maybe not beg. That never works. Not anymore. I’ve knelt on too many marble floors, bled too many prayers that only ever ended in laughter.

But… a gift?

A smile?

Something street-cat soft — a scratch, a twitch, a dead bird laid at her feet.

And if all else fails—

Apologize.

Gods, I hate apologizing.

I’ve done it too many times. The right way. The kneeling way. The way that leaves your knees raw and your pride in shreds.

But she doesn’t want that. Wouldn’t believe it anyway.

She sees too much.

—

So I cleared my throat. Quietly. Like a man stepping onto thin ice.

“You’re very quiet tonight.”

No response.

She didn’t even pause. Just turned a page, dipped her quill, kept writing.

I tried again.

“I suppose I’ve earned that.”

Still nothing.

So I moved closer — slow, careful. Like she might vanish if I startled her.

“Look,” I said. “Earlier… I wasn’t at my best. I might’ve… said a few things.”

No reaction.

I swallowed.

“Terrible things. Inexcusable things.”

“But you didn’t kill me. And I… well.”

I forced a smile that felt thin enough to break.

“I suppose I owe you for that.”

That finally got something.

She set the quill down. Closed one of the books. Not slowly. Not dramatically. Just… finished.

And turned to me.

—

Her eyes were quiet.

Almost tired.

Not angry.

Not sad.

Just—

Distant.

—

“It’s okay,” she said.

“No real harm done.”

“Just mean words. Spoken by someone still hurting.”

—

I flinched.

Gods, that was worse.

So much worse than fury.

Because I didn’t matter enough for anger.

I was nothing but a stranger. A regrettable bruise on her night.

—

“Thank you,” I said softly.

And I meant it.

For not staking me.

For not being cruel.

For not giving up.

For leaving the door open — even after I’d slammed it in her face.

—

I watched her turn back to her books.

And I hoped —

Gods, I hoped —

I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

Not twice.

Not with her.

---

“You know,” I said eventually, my voice quieter than I meant — softer now, rough at the edges, almost uncertain, “you could’ve just killed me when you found me.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t even tie me up.”

“No.”

“That’s very stupid.”

She only hummed, a low sound that slid through the space between us — like she disagreed, but wouldn’t waste the breath to say so.

“You gamble with life a lot?” I asked.

“I gamble with mine,” she said. “Not with others’.”

That made me pause.

Because that was the opposite of everything I’d ever known. Her words settled between my ribs and pulsed there, hot and slow.

“You really think I’m worth saving?”

“That’s not my place,” she said evenly, her voice steady as coals in a hearth. “Not my decision to make. Who deserves saving.”

“Then what are you doing? Whose decision is it? Your god?”

She looked at me fully then, her eyes open and still. No trick light, no sharpness. Just a calm, unguarded blue — something that felt as close to honest as anything I’d ever seen.

“No. It's the people I help. That's what I am doing, giving you a chance to decide if you are worth saving. A chance to save yourself.”

My mouth opened.

Nothing came out.

Because what do you even say to that?

No bargain. No threat. No sermon.

Just — a chance.

As if I deserved one.

“You know that’s not how this works,” I said, trying to slip a touch of my usual careless charm into it, forcing a lift into my voice. “People like me don’t get to choose what we are.”

She stood and stirred the fire with a flat iron rod. The flames jumped, gold and red across her hands, turning her scars into small rivers of light. The scent of herbs on her skin stirred up with the motion — sage and old dust and sweat.

“So who decides, then? The world? You can’t keep existing for centuries and still blame everything else for who you’ve become. Maybe everything else isn’t yours to control — maybe you’ve had no say in what you do, what you wear, what you eat, where you live, even what you fucking think. But this? Who you are at your core? That’s yours. That’s the one thing no one else gets to claim. Unless you’d rather keep denying it. In which case... go on. Prove me wrong.”

I was too tired to snarl. to scream at her, she didn't know what she was talking about, but it didn't matter, or more accurately, it shouldn’t have mattered. She wasn’t pleading. Wasn’t even trying to convince me. Just letting her words exist, plain and solid, like stones laid on a path. But that quiet — gods, that gentle quiet — felt heavier than any sermon. And I hated how much weight it carried.

“I wish it were that simple.”

“Then help me see what makes it complicated.”

“It’s a long story.”

She stepped closer, warm from the fire. The glow picked up the loose ends of her hair and turned them into copper filaments. Her breath smelled faintly of tea, herbs, and fatigue.

“I can imagine. It ended with you buried in a tomb, didn’t it?”

Not soft. Not cruel. Just… real.

“I don’t know how to start,” I confessed.

“Then let’s start smaller,” she said. “Are the people who did this to you still alive?”

I nodded.

“In the city?”

Another nod.

“Then why not leave first?”

Her voice was still gentle. Still maddeningly clear. Just a steady question with no barbs tucked inside.

It made something in me recoil.

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because someone will come looking,” I snapped. “And next time… next time it’ll be worse.”

She paused. Her gaze didn’t flinch. Just settled on me, quiet and patient, as if she could wait forever.

“Are you sure they’d find you?”

“Positively sure.”

“Then do you have another option?”

I let out a thin, ragged sound that might’ve been a laugh. “I could… go back. Try harder. Bring a gift. Be useful. Grovel.”

I waited for her judgment. For her to turn away, disgusted, or flinch, or pity me.

It never came.

Only silence.

And then—

“And you won’t end up in another grave? Starving and broken again?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s still your choice.”

She folded her hands together, fingers interlaced, thumbs brushing back and forth like she was comforting herself.

Then quietly:

“If you had shelter? Protection? Allies? Would that change anything? Or are you still convinced they’d find you?”

“I’d need a miracle.”

“I know a god.”

I scoffed, half-hearted. “Do you?”

“Yes.”

No fanfare. No irony.

Just calm certainty that cracked something delicate in my chest.

“Do you have anyone in the city you love?”

“No.”

“Then good. Nothing holding you back.” Her voice stayed gentle. Certain. Like warm water poured into my hollow places. “The way I see it, it’s simple. Stay, and you’re sure to suffer. Or run — and maybe succeed.”

She turned, smooth and sure.

“I’m leaving in three days.”

She looked back at me — not pressing, not threatening — just stating a fact.

“Decide if you want to come with me.”

I stared at her.

“Do you even know what you’re saying?”

“I’m not trying to be cruel. And I’m not trying to force your hand,” she said. “It’s a deadline. Sometimes, the mind loops itself into oblivion, making everything more complicated than it needs to be. You said yourself it’s not simple. I’m just… trying to help you choose.”

And that left me with nothing but silence.

And the one thing I feared most.

A way out.

“You’re the strangest person I’ve ever met,” I said.

“You’ve lived too long for that to be true.”

“Oh, no. It is. Completely.”

There was a small, glowing pause.

“I think I hate you.”

She smiled.

Not sly. Not mocking.

Just a small, lopsided thing that warmed the air around us more than the fire ever could.

And gods—

It wrecked me.

Because it wasn’t careful. Wasn’t a performance.

It was real.

It was… kind.

And I don’t think it was even for me.

She just had it in her. Tucked beneath all that iron and scar and dust. Some gentle spark that the world hadn’t managed to crush.

“I think you don’t,” she said.

And then she looked back at the fire as if that was the end of it. As if it didn’t have to be more complicated.

And somehow, that was worse than any threat.

Because it meant it could still be simple.

If I let it.

---

I stared at her for a long, unbroken moment.

That tired hair, half-falling from its tie. Those scar-lined fingers moving with calm, practiced purpose. That voice full of sharp edges that somehow never drew blood unless she meant to.

I had seduced nobles with nothing but a glance. Broken hearts with a laugh. Convinced men and women to slit each other’s throats for a promise of affection that was never real.

But I didn’t know how to handle a woman who looked at me like I was real.

It undid something in me. Something low and starved and desperate that I didn’t want to name.

I wanted to smile back. Gods, I nearly did.

But something too hollow, too bruised, too feral clawed me back behind my own walls.

So I leaned against the rough timber, arms folded, head tilted just enough to watch her by the fire’s glow. Eyes half-lidded, feigning disinterest even as I devoured every quiet movement.

The scent of pine sap and resinous smoke wrapped around us like a thin blanket. Her silhouette was traced in shifting gold and ember, soft shadows pooling at her throat and wrists. Her hair caught the firelight in places, shining like dull copper.

She made even silence feel deliberate.

Not controlled. Not armored.

Just… lived in. Breathed in. Carried like an old wound that no longer surprised her.

And I didn’t know what to make of it.

“You really don’t scare easy,” I murmured, the words slipping out softer than I intended.

She glanced up, the firelight catching faint amber flecks in her eyes. “I don’t have time to be scared of everything.”

“Unlucky for you.”

She smirked — that little crooked pull of her lips, not quite amused, not quite bitter. “That’s relative.”

My gaze drifted more freely. The way she sat was wrong for rest — loose in the shoulders, but her spine never quite relaxed. Every line of her body was ready to move. Ready to run, though she didn’t. Like watching a wild creature try to mimic stillness.

“Your smile,” I said suddenly, startling even myself. It was too soft to be a jest. Too honest.

She turned, brows lifting. “What about it?”

“It’s not like the rest of you.”

She went still. Her expression turned pensive, almost cautious. Then she tried to twist it into humor, brittle around the edges.

“What — has no one ever complimented your smile, darling?”

“No, it’s not that… What do you mean it's not like the rest of me? ”

I shook my head, almost annoyed. “I just meant it’s… less stoic. Less guarded. Why? That’s a very strange reaction for something so small. Even for you. What are you thinking?”

Then, calmly, like she was noting something in a ledger: “When you said my smile isn’t like the rest of me, I realized neither is the rest of me.”

That made me blink. “I’m sorry? Are we still speaking Common?”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t look away. Just held my gaze, unafraid of whatever might be written on my face.

“This isn’t my face,” she said at last. “Nor is it really my body.”

I sat up straighter, cold prickling across the back of my neck. “This isn’t what? I touched you earlier — I would have recognized a glamour.”

“No.” Her voice softened, low but even. “Not a glamour. Not an illusion. I can shapeshift. I don’t know why. I think I’ve always been able to — sort of. But not well.”

She nudged a log deeper into the coals. Sparks popped, the scent of pine resin blooming sharper. Her voice dropped, almost confessional.

“I think I was forced to shift when I was a baby. I don’t remember it. But I got stuck. Like my skin didn’t know how to go back. I grew up like that — with that face. It never fit. For a long time I didn’t even know I could change again.”

Her eyes found mine — haunted, but steady. A survivor’s eyes. “Until one day something… unstuck. I woke up with another face. Another body.”

She looked past me, somewhere far where the firelight didn’t reach.

“I didn’t even know it was real,” she whispered. “I thought maybe my body just… got confused when I was too young. It took years to learn I could change on purpose. Even longer to control it.”

I watched her through the hush that followed. The low fire wrapped her in restless gold. Lines deepened under her eyes. Her shoulders settled by a hair — like saying it made it less of a secret, more of a scar she could trace.

“The form you grew up with…” I said softly, gentler than I meant. “It’s not yours, then? Just another face you must’ve stolen as a babe?”

She nodded, barely perceptible.

“How is that possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“Was one of your parents…?” I fumbled. “A shapeshifter? A doppelganger?”

Her mouth twitched. Dry. Almost a smile, but it died before it reached her eyes. “I don’t know that either.”

I let out a slow breath. “An orphan, then.”

She actually smiled at that — small, tired, edged in something old and sad. “You could say that.”

“Can you change everything?” I pressed, voice low, dark curiosity biting at my tongue. “Make yourself anything?”

“Pretty much.” Her shoulder rose in a helpless shrug. “But the eyes are the hardest.”

I studied her then — truly studied her. The elegant slope of her jaw, the faint burn traces at her wrist, the way her lashes caught the firelight like gilded wires. How her mouth always seemed poised on the edge of a sigh or a laugh she hadn’t decided on.

“Who is this face you’re wearing now?”

She looked at me, long enough for the fire to pop again, sending sparks between us.

“No one, really,” she said finally. “Just… a travel suit. Something harmless. People help human girls who look like me well enough, while ignoring them enough. It’s safer.”

I stared.

A travel suit.

Just another mask.

Something dark and fascinated twisted low in my chest. “Show me. Your real face.”

Her mouth twitched. Not quite a smile — closer to a bruise.

“I don’t know it.”

I sat back, struck dumb by the quiet devastation of it. The way she said it with no plea, no anger. Just a simple, exhausted truth she’d carried longer than I could imagine.

She turned back to the fire, folding her hands on her knees. The glow caught a faint sheen in her eyes, though it never fell.

The silence stretched, soft but heavy. Too raw to be comfortable, but shared. Something fragile we both held between us, neither willing to drop it.

---

When she finally looked at me again, her eyes were softer. Almost gentle. It made something twist low in my belly.

“Thank you,” she said quietly.

I blinked. “For what?”

“For asking questions. For listening to the answers. For not making it uglier than it needs to be.”

Gods. I almost laughed, breathless.

“That’s a low bar, darling. Surely someone else—”

“No,” she cut in. Not cruel. Just final. “No one else.”

The words fell between us like stones dropped in water.

I looked at her hands — pale, nicked, one nail still faintly stained from some tincture. Those hands had dug me out of a grave. Held my blood-stiff shoulders when I couldn’t stand. Offered me a potion I nearly spit out just to spite her.

Those hands weren’t the right shape either, probably. Weren’t her own. But they were steady.

---

I should have said something clever. Something cutting. A jest to remind her who I was.

But I didn’t.

Because in that dim circle of firelight, with the night pressed close, it struck me that even wearing someone else’s bones, she seemed more whole than I’d ever been.

I was the one with stories to spin, masks to swap, sweet words to poison. The one who could become whatever anyone needed, so long as it ended with their throat under my teeth.

And still — even with all my practiced charm, all my illusions wound tight enough to choke — I had never seemed so entirely myself as she did, sitting there in someone else’s skin.

I hated it.

---

Finally, she exhaled. Let her shoulders drop.

“You don’t have to decide anything tonight,” she said. “Not about me. Not about you. Not even your future.”

I nearly flinched. Because somehow, that was worse. Being given time. Being given space.

But she only reached out — slow, deliberate, careful — and brushed her fingers across the back of my hand. Just once. A touch so light it might’ve been an accident. But it wasn’t.

It was warm. Steady. Real.

Then she pulled back. Turned to the fire again, folding her hands like she hadn’t just cracked me open with the simplest kindness I’d ever been offered.

“You should go rest now,” she said, voice low. “The sun’s about to rise.”

“I should,” I murmured.

But I didn’t move. Not immediately.

Her hand left a phantom warmth on mine, ghosting across the cold marble of my skin. It shouldn’t have meant anything.

But it did.

Gods help me — it did.

So I lingered. Just for a breath. Then pushed off the wall and turned away.

Because if I stayed any longer, I might have done something ruinous.

Chapter 9: Kill Me Please

Notes:

Author’s Warning: This chapter is heavy. If it stays with you after reading, I hope it’s in a way that reminds you you’re not alone. It contains references to child abuse, SA, captivity, suicidal ideation, and psychologically disturbing themes. Please read with care.

Elenya’s POV

---

Midday sunlight poured hot and bright through the city streets, gilding the cracked flags and bustling shoulders of the Eastway. Eleyna moved through it like a thread drawn through cloth—quiet, unnoticed, ever shifting.

At Eastway Expeditions, the air smelled of oiled leather, old bloodstains, and the sour tang of bargain steel. The walls were hung with mismatched adventuring gear—cheap grappling hooks, dented lanterns, rope of suspicious quality. Scalm Shilvin prowled the clutter with her sinuous tail flicking, bright golden eyes narrowing every time Eleyna ran a finger across something without buying.

At the counter, Eleyna wore the face of a plain, dust-flushed human girl with a sunburned nose and shy hands standing in a sun-warmed aisle between moth-eaten bedrolls and battered climbing gear, hands tucked into her sleeves.

The shop stank of old leather, sweat, and bitter lamp oil. It was a good smell—honest, in a way the perfumed parlours of the Upper City never managed. Eastway Expeditions had a reputation for buying back dubious dungeon salvage and reselling it to the next round of idiots. But its true trade was less obvious.

Mercenaries. The kind who didn’t wear livery or colours. The kind who asked no questions, not about the job, not about the route, not about the companions who might or might not survive in sunlight.

Scalm Shilvin—slick, crimson-skinned, her tail constantly flicking—greeted Eleyna with a smile that was all teeth and bright gold piercings. Her dark cutaway coat, embroidered in curling silver, swished dramatically as she led Eleyna to a discreet rear alcove.

There, it was easy enough. Gold did most of the talking. Eleyna did the rest.

Scalm raised an eyebrow at the bond pin Eleyna flashed — discreet, burnished bronze. Official enough that Scalm didn’t ask questions when Eleyna demanded upfront coin. The tiefling counted it out with amused, clicking claws.

She didn’t need the escort. Not for herself.

But if Astarion chose to come—well. Even a vampire would do better with ten highly competent hired blades between him and anyone sniffing too close. They wouldn’t hold forever. But they’d hold long enough. Enough for a teleport.

Not cheap. But that was fine.

She simply opened a new ledger. As long as she wrote something respectable for the Master Reader by season’s end, they’d be more than happy to fund whatever expedition she pretended she was on. Her Candlekeep signet at her throat had earlier secured a generous advance at a small counting office off Garmult’s Way. The world opened for Avowed, especially those trusted enough to be sent out on long assignments.

The rest she’d draw from little funds squirrelled away in letters of credit and dusty dowry bonds left to rot under false names.

And so she booked the men. Grim-faced, chain-clad, eager for coin, and pointedly incurious about who might be joining them on the road. The contract went through Scalm’s clawed hands with a final tap of sealing wax. Done.

She bought gear, too. Some for herself—new canvas sacks, packets of hard wax, charcoal sticks, spare rune chalk. But also commissioned armour, reinforced and cleverly vented, tailored for someone broader at the shoulder, narrower at the waist. Swords balanced with sunken weights, grips carefully fitted, ordered under her alias.

Astarion would need them. One way or another.

She left Eastway Expeditions with a tight smile, ducked around a half-collapsed warehouse, and reshaped herself.

The first face she wore was an older woman—greying hair pinned under a dusty brown kerchief, warm brown skin lined at the eyes, shoulders slightly stooped. A quietly fussy merchant’s widow with careful speech, who pressed a small golden ring to her lips while waiting for change.

From there she wound her way down through the Basilisk Gate into the press of carts, fish-gutters, and shouting porters. The sun rode high. It glared off puddles of offal-streaked water. Twice she paused in quiet corners, hands to her chest, shifting the bones of her face like they were no more than pliant wax.

She became a bright-eyed girl with strawberry-blonde curls, a scattering of freckles across a pert nose, lips quick to smile. The sort who giggled at the stable boys and could talk a vendor into throwing in a bit of ribbon for free. A little hungry in the cheeks, a little too clean for this part of town—no one questioned her buying sweets and packets of lime.

Later, she was a hard-jawed woman of thirty with ink-black hair cropped close to the scalp, high cheekbones and dark, sun-worn skin. Soldier’s posture. Practical boots. She barked a sharp laugh when a vendor tried to short her on rune chalk.

Each shop, each stop: a new woman. A new smile. A new reason for them to give her exactly what she asked.

She picked up more supplies—charms of warding, dry teas for sleep, dried meat for the road, sharpeners, wire, packets of lime for treating wounds that wouldn’t close.

She also picked up all of what Astarion had asked of her.
He had asked for something.
Accepted her help.

Coin. Lockpicks. Oil. Vials. Chalk. Padding. Marbles. Smut.

She ticked each item off her little list, each new face calmly arranging its expression.
By the time she crossed under the high, dangerous arches of the Basilisk Gate, Eleyna had a different face—longer, sharper, with unruly dark curls pinned under a battered green kerchief. The guards barely spared her a glance. Just another Avowed, come down from Candlekeep with too many dusty errands.

Her new face drew quick nods of recognition from merchants on the road—some combination of cautious respect and mild irritation. It helped grease palms and lower prices.

She also sent missives at two separate courier stations, letters addressed to eight different recipients up and down the coast, each instructing responses to go not to Baldur’s Gate, but to Daggerford’s main station, split across five names. All of them hers.

A safe nest of complications, ready to smother any trail if someone ever came looking.

By the time she reached Sorcerous Sundries, her newest shape—Amelia Stranstal—felt nearly comfortable. Amelia’s mouth smiled easily. Her dark hair sat pinned in a scholar’s coil, catching the kaleidoscope sunlight under the great stained glass dome like polished walnut.

Sorcerous Sundries was bustling. The bottom floor roared with laughter and arguments over spell components. Enchanters squabbled near a rack of scrolls. The coloured light poured across the floor in broad, dancing arcs.

Rivalen Blackhand was there, of course. The old mage’s right hand was black as char, as if burned to bone but somehow still alive, curling with delicate precision. It tapped against the counter while he tallied her purchase.

Books on vampirism. Basic scrolls. Potion components. Two minor foci. Spare sigil paper. A little white stone that would softly chime if certain abjurations were triggered.

Blackhand admired her expanded bag—marvelled aloud that he’d never met someone who needed quite so much space.

“Fieldwork,” she said, tucking a curl behind her ear with Amelia’s neat grace. “Dreadfully inconvenient. But needs must.”

He laughed and bowed, as he always did for Avowed. Promised her that if the more delicate commissions weren’t ready by tomorrow, they’d be discreetly forwarded to Candlekeep.

“Of course,” she said, smiling. “But best if you manage it by tomorrow all the same.”

Two hours later, she wore an entirely different face—skin several shades deeper, hair short and roughly layered, nose slightly crooked as if from an old break. She returned to Sundries’ upper annex and commissioned a teleport scroll, this time under another false name. Paid with a promissory script tied to yet another web of invented lineage, to be sent on to Daggerford if it missed tomorrow’s mark.

She also bought three sending scrolls.

She stopped by a butcher on her way back. Bought fresh blood—lamb, cow, pig, some still warm. The man didn’t blink. Plenty of alchemists needed it. Plenty of diviners liked it by the cup.

And then — somewhere between hiring mercenaries who wouldn’t care about sun-averse travelling companions and buying blood from a butcher who never asked questions — Eleyna ducked into a cramped little private library.

Not a grand archive like Candlekeep. Not even one of Baldur’s Gate’s dusty public halls. Just a backroom lending house run by two tired sisters, shelves pressed close as confessional walls.

She lingered nearly an hour, letting the scent of old paper and binding glue soothe something raw in her chest.

She picked out a slim monograph on vampire feeding pathology — more practical notes. Another thin treatise on alchemical stabilizers. A sheaf of local travel advisories.

And then — gods help her — her eyes snagged on something else entirely.

A dog-eared, gilt-edged little book with a lurid painted cover. Lovers tangled in improbable ways under moonlight. Silk sheets. Flushed skin. The title promised hearts, hands, and things best locked away.

She hesitated.

Then she looked at her list, tugging it from her pocket.

• Coin.
• Lockpicks.
• Oil.
• Vials.
• Chalk.
• Padding.
• Marbles.
• Smut.

He had asked.

And so she took it. Slipped it between her treatises on vampirism and travel advisories. Kept her face carefully calm.

When she left, her borrowed skin didn’t even twitch, though her ears burned under it. The proprietor gave her a knowing little wink, as if perfectly aware of exactly what book was hidden among her notes on blood chemistry.

At last — finally — the list was complete.

The mercenaries secured. The gear commissioned. The sending scrolls wrapped in leather and stashed deep in her pack. The ledgers of coin carefully prepared. The blood bought and stored.

And that little smut book, shamefully light in her hands.

---

That evening, she sat alone in the kitchen after organizing everything by guttering sunlight, counting coins into small purses, tying each off with scraps of coloured string. Preparing.

Tomorrow at dusk, she would leave. Whether he came or not.

But gods—

She hoped he would.

The kettle hissed once, then quieted. No steam. No boil. Just the faint whisper of water remembering heat.

Elenya didn’t look up. She kept her hands moving—methodical, precise—stacking what remained of their dried meat into linen pouches. She double-knotted each one, tested the weight, and adjusted.

Pack light. Pack with purpose. Always leave room for silence.

She slid the pouch into her Pack and paused.

There it was again.

The pull.

Not a voice. Not a command. Just a feeling—low in her chest, like a chord held too long. It had been there since she’d found him, humming behind every breath, guiding every step. Not divine, exactly. Not even magical. Just pain.

His pain.

But now?

Now it felt… quieter.

Still present—still strong—but no longer sharp. Like something had stopped bleeding.

She exhaled slowly through her nose. Relief swelled up, brief and unexpected.

He was healing.

For a moment, she let herself feel it. The job—whatever this was—was working.

And then, just as quickly, the relief curdled.

If the pull faded completely, it meant she could go.

It meant she was no longer needed.

And she wasn’t ready for that.

Her hands moved again, faster now. She packed her salves and her potion belt and folded down the spell book with practiced care. Her mind darted ahead—miles and hours. If she left alone tomorrow night, where would she go? South? Back to the coast? Would Ilmater send another pull?

Would she know how to live without one?

She tied off the last roll of gauze and sat back on her heels, staring at the cold hearth.

His pain was lessening.

But something was still wrong.

She could feel it. The way you feel the echo of a scream in a cave. Stillness, after something has shattered.

Elenya stood, slung the satchel over her shoulder, and moved to the door. She paused there, fingertips brushing the frame, gaze distant.

“When the pull is gone,” she whispered, “I leave. Or when he asks me to.”

But until then—

She stayed.

---

He came up at dusk, when the fire had burned low and the smell of boiled herbs clung to the walls.

Elenya looked up—just briefly—and nearly forgot the name of the root in her hand.

It wasn’t that he was changed.

It was that he was revealed.

He moved like silk unraveling—slow, intentional, soundless. His feet barely touched the floorboards. Clean now, fully healed, skin no longer sallow or sunken—he looked like something pulled from a painter’s obsession: white hair like river ice, swept back and perfectly framing his face. Skin smooth, ghost-pale and freckled only where the light hit him just right.

His eyes, those blood-glass rubies, caught the fire-light like wine in a broken cup. Terrible and exquisite. Too alive for a corpse. Too corpse-like for the living.

He wore the clothes she’d gotten him yesterday—he had ignored them that night until now. A practical set: dark wool trousers, a dark-gray undershirt, a long coat of black and red canvas, and a high-collared tunic meant for layering. Nothing extravagant.

But on him?

They looked tailored. Intentional. He wore them like velvet and silk.

The tunic clung just enough to suggest a waist, fell just right over his hips. He’d rolled the sleeves to the elbow—subtle, casual, showing off elegant forearms unmarked by scars. The coat flared slightly at the knee, moving like it had been sewn for a stage. Even the boots—plain leather, travel-grade—seemed to carry a princely gleam.

She didn’t comment right away. Just set the root down and twisted the jar closed with one hand.

“Red suits you,” she said finally.

“Darling,” he purred, “everything suits me.”

She rolled her eyes, but the corner of her mouth betrayed her.

He moved closer, lazily surveying the room like a cat inspecting a rearranged den. Then he leaned a hand on the edge of the hearth, angling just slightly toward her. Not imposing—posing.

“You know,” he added, “for a moment I almost believed you’d dressed me like a pauper to get revenge. And yet…”

He gave a twirl of his fingers down his side, eyebrow lifted.

“Apparently not even the gods can suppress good taste.”

“That tunic cost three silver. In the discount pile.”

“Well then,” he sighed theatrically, “I’ve done it a mercy.”

She snorted.

“Was the soap to your taste, then?”

“My dear, I scrubbed so hard I nearly vanished. But you didn’t tell me it smelled like moss and grandmother regrets.”

“Still an improvement in the smell department. You’re welcome.”

“You’re cruel.”

A beat. Then he looked at her, the showmanship easing. His voice dipped—not serious, not soft, but… quieter.

“Thank you. For the clothes. And the bucket. And the brush. And—well, everything, really.”

She gave a small shrug. “It’s okay. Don’t sprain your tongue. I don’t collect thanks.”

“No, of course not. You collect stray corpses and nightmares. Much more practical.”

He was teasing. But not weaponizing it. There was no barbed hook beneath his smile tonight. Only the shadow of habit.

She leaned against the hearth, arms crossed loosely, watching him with half-lidded eyes.

“You’re still trying,” she said.

“To what?”

“Control the room.”

“Ah. And am I failing?”

“No,” she admitted. “You just needed less desperation.”

His smile twitched—the amused twitch of someone not sure whether they’ve been complimented or dissected.

Then he straightened and turned toward the door.

“I’m going out,” he said. “Not far. I thought I might try a walk. Stretch my legs. Maybe… hunt something small and warm-blooded.”

“Try to stick to rabbits,” she said.

“Oh, no. You’re no fun.”

“I can be,” she replied dryly.

He laughed—a soft, surprised thing. And then, when he was halfway to the door, she added:

“Be safe. And… come back. If you need me.”

He stopped. Not dramatically. Not with a gasp or a turn. He just froze—shoulders still, head tilted slightly, like he was trying to decide whether he’d heard her correctly.

“That’s new.”

She didn’t reply.

He opened the door and stepped into the night.

---

The fire crackled behind her. She stirred the coals with the back of her knife and stared at the glow.

Cat-like. That’s what he was.

Always moving like he didn’t want to be caught standing still. Graceful. Dangerous. Never fully relaxed—even when clean, dressed, and fed. There was still tension in the way he leaned against things, like every surface might betray him.

Calculating. Coiled.

His charm was performance. His control was fear. But when the edges dulled, when the venom receded, there was something uncertain beneath it all.

Like a creature who had spent too long being prey and didn’t know what to do with soft ground.

She exhaled slowly, tucked her blade back into her boot.

“Some cages don’t need locks,” she thought. “The bars live in your ribs.”

And she wondered—just for a moment—if anyone had ever stayed for him.

Just to stay.

The moon had risen.

Then drifted.

And still—he hadn’t returned.

Elenya didn’t pace. She didn’t fidget. She sat by the hearth, sharpening her dagger with slow, even pulls. One—two—three—

The same motion she’d repeated an hour ago.

The pull was still there. Not gone. Not faded.

Stronger, even.

She hated that it didn’t make her feel better.

She told herself it was fine. He had survived worse. He could hunt. Hide. Handle himself, if needed. He was fast. Smart.

But the air felt wrong. Too quiet. The city beyond the boarded windows held its breath.

Maybe he had left.

Maybe he didn’t know how to say he didn’t want her help anymore. Maybe he had decided to go back and negotiate.

Maybe this was her goodbye.

“He would’ve said something,” she muttered aloud.

But then again—would he?

If all he knew was how to perform, how to appease, how to obey or how to hurt—maybe he would’ve smiled and vanished. Let her feel unneeded. Let her go.

“It’s his right,” she said quietly. “He owes me nothing.”

The blade in her hand trembled. She set it down.

The door slammed open.

Elenya surged to her feet, hand on her weapon before thought caught up to fear.

He stumbled through the doorway.

Astarion.

Wild-eyed. Panting. Eyes glassy and unfocused. His coat hung open, one boot half-loosened. He looked like he’d run through hell barefoot.

He wasn’t injured.

But he looked broken.

He fell to his knees. Hands trembling. Shoulders locked. Chest heaving—pointlessly, instinctively.

“He knows,” he gasped.

She didn’t move. Not yet.

“He knows. He knows—I didn’t say anything—I didn’t—”

His voice cracked. Not theatrical. Not shaped.

Just raw.

“He’ll get me. He always gets me back. It doesn’t matter where I go—how far—I never make it. I never—”

He clutched at his hair, nails scratching at his scalp like he could claw the thoughts out.

Elenya stepped forward slowly.

“Astarion—”

“It wasn’t me,” he choked. “You—you took me out—he’ll know. He’ll know I didn’t stay. That I let you—”

“He always knows. Even when I smiled. Even when I obeyed.”

He collapsed forward onto his hands.

He was shaking.

Not the way frightened people shake.

The way animals shake.

Elenya knelt a few feet away. Close enough to reach him if he tipped. Far enough not to crowd.

“Astarion,” she said again—gently. Not soothing. Just solid.

He turned his face toward her.

There was no charm. No mask. No mask to break.

“He’ll take me back,” he whispered. “You don’t understand. He’ll call me, and I’ll go. That’s how it works. He says, and I go. I’ll smile when he says to. I’ll say thank you when he hurts me. I’ll—I’ll forget you. I’ll forget me—”

He stared through her.

“Please,” he begged. “Please kill me before he finds me.”

Her throat tightened.

“I’ll walk into the sun if I have to,” he said, voice cracking. “I’ll burn. I want to burn. But I don't have until sunrise. Please, just don’t—don’t let him take me.”

He wasn’t pleading anymore.

He was breaking.

Just a boy.

Terrified.

Empty.

“Please.”

It was the way he said it.

Not with fear. Not even with shame.

But with that hollow, aching certainty—that someone would own him again.

Elenya didn’t move.

Because something in her had already cracked.

---

She had stopped counting the days a long time ago. But she knew she was sixteen.

The matron had screamed at Nere the day before—something about failure, about shame. His face had gone white with rage. His fists clenched like he wanted to hit the matron.

He hit Elenya instead.

The next night, he dragged her into his quarters without a word.

There was no laughter. No commentary.

Only pain.

His hands weren’t just cruel—they were methodical.
He struck her over and over, until the welt on her ribs sang with each breath.
He twisted her arm until something tore.
He shoved her against stone walls, against the edge of a metal brazier, against the bed-frame.

She couldn’t scream.
Not because she was strong.
Because her voice was gone.

Her mouth tasted like iron and bile.

Every time she tried to slip away in her head—to become someone else, somewhere else—he did something sharp. Something hot. Something meant to anchor her in her body.

“No running,” he whispered once. “Not this time.”

By the time he finished, she couldn’t move. Could barely breathe.

She’d bled on the floor of his quarters.

And when the guards came to clean, they laughed.

“Looks like she won’t last much longer,” one muttered.

They dumped her in the cradle of the broken. The long descent out of the crown, then into the inverted ziggurat. Just to end up with the untrained slave dungeons. Wet floor. Rotting linens. A broken crate in the corner. A forgotten space, just big enough to die in.

And she wanted to.

Every breath rasped, like fire down her throat. Something in her chest felt loose, jabbing with every inhale.

“Let it be now,” she thought. “Let me finally be done.”

No prayers. No god. No hope.

Just nothing.

That was all she wanted.

Then—

A footstep. Bare. Soft.

Ulma.

Another slave. Newer than Elenya. Human. Quiet. Quick with her eyes down, careful not to speak unless spoken to.

She shouldn’t have been there.

She should’ve left her.

But she came.

Ulma didn’t say anything.

She knelt—slowly, quietly—and pulled something from the pocket of her ragged apron.
A torn scrap of cloth.

She tore bread with her fingers. Dipped it in a waterskin. Pressed it to Elenya’s lips.

Elenya chewed. Reflex. Nothing tasted.

Ulma set the crust aside and took her hand.

And into it, she pressed the paper.

A scrawl. Faded ink. Symbols Elenya didn’t know. And words—written in a shaky, foreign hand:

He suffers with you.

Elenya couldn’t read all of it.
Didn’t understand the language.
Didn’t even know who he was.

But the shape of the words stuck in her chest.

Her jaw trembled.

And in the smallest voice—broken and hoarse—she whispered:

“Please kill me.”

Ulma didn’t flinch.

She didn’t answer.

She just squeezed her hand and left.

No promises.

No miracles.

But when the door closed and darkness wrapped back around her—

Elenya wasn’t alone.

Something—someone—was there.

Not watching.

Witnessing.

The pain didn’t fade.

But for the first time, it had company.

And that made it bearable.

---

Astarion sobbed on the floor before her, muttering things no-one should have to speak aloud.

And Elenya?

She did not tell him she understood. This was his moment.

She didn’t reach out, didn’t soothe, didn’t offer false comfort.

She simply set her palm on the ground between them.

And stayed.

Because sometimes that’s the only mercy the broken can offer each other.

And the only one that matters.

---

The fire behind them hissed faintly, but the room itself had gone weightless. Like the moment before a scream, or the breath before a blade.

She moved slowly, deliberately, kneeling beside him and placing her hand on the floor between them again. No touch. No pressure. Just the promise of nearness.

And when he didn’t flinch this time, she spoke.

“If it comes to that,” she said, her voice calm and clear, “I’ll do it.”

His breath caught.

She let the words settle.

“I even know the spell.”

There was a long silence. His gaze didn’t rise, but his body stilled—like prey finally convinced the hunter wouldn’t strike.

“But not tonight,” she said. “I don’t want you dead.”

His lips parted. Barely.

And then he whispered—so quietly she barely heard it:

“Why?”

It wasn’t defiance.

It wasn’t manipulation.

It was sincere confusion.

She met his gaze, but didn’t answer.

Instead, she rose. They were not ready to move but...  She outran things with worst odds. 

“Right now, we move. ”

He didn’t follow immediately. Didn’t speak. Just turned his head as she crossed the room, dragging breath into his lungs like it might anchor him back in his body.

He watched her open her satchel and retrieve something he had not expected: a thick, weathered spellbook.

Bound in mottled rothé leather, its edges scarred from fire and wear, it didn’t gleam or flash. It looked old. Hand-crafted. Re-bound more than once.

Elenya knelt before the hearth, her movements as precise as ritual.

Astarion rose unsteadily and took a step closer. His voice was hoarse:

“That’s not a bard’s book.”

She didn’t look at him.

“No,” she said simply. “It isn’t.”

He stared.

“You’ve been holding out on me,” he tried—half-flirt, half-accusation. His voice was still frayed, but it wrapped around habit like a threadbare coat.

“I do that sometimes. You need to pay more attention.” She flipped to a page written in harsh, slanted Undercommon.

She burned some incense and muttered an Undercommon incantation. The ritual soothed her. It gave her clarity.

The air shifted.

The temperature dropped.

And then she sang them.

It wasn’t a performance. It wasn’t music.

It was power—low, rhythmic syllables woven into melody, old magic passed like memory.

Astarion’s eyes widened. His posture straightened—not in fear, but in focus. He tilted his head, watching the magic collect around her like dust in a sunbeam.

From the coals of the hearth, something shimmered.

The spider. Small, translucent, invisible, many-eyed, impossibly graceful. It blinked once at her, and he felt the reverence between them. Only could she see it. 

Astarion didn’t understand the words, but the spider did. It twitched one leg, bowed its small body, and slipped away—disappearing into shadow.

She watched it vanish while skittering.

She closed the book and latched it tight.

She stood, slinging the satchel back across her shoulder.

“If the house is compromised,” she said. “They’ll come here first, or soon. Maybe they’re already watching.”

“Then what?” he asked, finally straightening. “We disappear into the gutters?”

She met his eyes.

“We go into the sewers. Filth is safer than fire.”

For a moment, he looked at her like he wanted to say more. Question something. Confess something.

But he didn’t.

She looked back at him once, cloak already slung over her shoulders.

“Coming?”

He hesitated—then gave a single, dry exhale.

“Wouldn’t want to miss the worst part.”

The entrance to the old sewer tunnel lay behind a butcher’s alley—half-hidden by rotted crates and the stink of forgotten runoff. The iron grate clung to the stone like a wound sealed in rust.

Elenya knelt before it. With her thumb, she wiped a bit of ash from the lantern wick. Carefully, she drew the shape across the lowest stone: two bound hands, the symbol of Ilmater. A silent mark—not to sanctify the path, but to name it: a place endured. A passage survived.

“Cloak on. Keep it tight.”

He nodded, wordless, and drew the long cloth around himself.

Elenya stepped in close. He didn’t recoil, but he stiffened when her fingers moved to the hem. She murmured something—a cantrip, sharp and clean—and cool air began to flow through the lining, creating a small barrier from the rising heat of the coming sun.

Then, with two fingers dipped in sewer grime, she etched a sigil along the inside of the fabric—a twisted knot, barely visible.

“It’ll break a simple tracking enchantment,” she said.

Astarion watched her work. Silent.

When her hands brushed his shoulder to adjust the cloak, he flinched. Just slightly. But he didn’t pull away.

The tunnels stretched out before them—narrow and damp, smelling of mold and iron. The air pressed inward like a held breath.

They moved fast.

Elenya led without pause, steps measured by memory. She had used this path before. Not to flee. Not like this.

After the third turn, she stopped.

“Hold still.”

Astarion didn’t question.

She pressed her palm to the space above his heart. Not to touch—but to direct.

She cast Nondetection.

The magic sank into him like a whisper. And with it—Ilmater’s presence. It came as it had before: quiet, unseen, but known. Not warmth. Not relief. Just company.

She didn’t smile. She didn’t pray. But her shoulders relaxed. Just a little.

Astarion tilted his head.

“What was that?”

“Protection,” she said. “You don’t have to understand it.”

He scoffed softly, but didn’t argue.

As they reached the final junction, Elenya slowed. She placed a hand against the wall. Closed her eyes. And let herself warg into the spider.

Sight shifted. She was in the rafters of the safe-house. Dust. Silence. The glow of sunrise leaking through the cracks.

Then—movement.

The door creaked open. Two figures entered.

They moved like whispers through the wreckage—too graceful, too quiet. One was tall and wiry, draped in what might once have been noble robes, now torn and streaked with dried blood. His face was sharp, unnervingly pale, eyes gleaming with an unnatural red light that caught in the dark like coals. The other was crimson-skinned and horned, her movements sinuous and predatory, like a flame given flesh. She didn’t speak—just snarled softly, revealing a flash of fang as she raked long black claws through overturned furniture. Their bodies were thin but coiled with strength, marked with strange, burned-in runes that pulsed faintly beneath torn fabric. They weren’t looking to steal. They were hunting. Vampires.

They didn’t speak.

They scanned. Searched. Sensed.

Then the tiefling’s voice:

“He was here.”

The human nodded, voice gravel.

“Still warm.”

They moved to the basement. Settled. Waited.

They could not find the sewer entrance.

They did not find the spider.

Elenya snapped back to herself, breath sharp.

“We have the day. Two vampires are in the house. We have to travel by day. Put some distance. Stay under the cloak at all times.”

They surfaced beyond the city wall, through a runoff hatch near the abandoned tannery. Elenya pressed Astarion down beneath a crumbling arch and started casting.

She knelt and pressed her palm to the earth, whispering names from old folklore—faithful steeds—while her other hand drew the precise rune sequence in the air. The silence stretched. Then, slowly, a shimmer of silver threads wove itself up from the ground beneath her touch, as if moonlight were stitching bone and sinew from shadow. The air around her stilled.

No thunder. No drama. Only shape—graceful, lean, and spectral.

The steed that rose was not beautiful in the way of courtly tales. It was too quiet. Too thin. Almost sorrowful. Its hooves made no sound, its mane flowed like veiled mist, and beneath its translucent hide, something faintly pulsed—like starlight trapped in old scars. It had no eyes, only hollow sockets where a mortal beast might see, and yet it turned to her as if recognizing her pain.

She mounted without hesitation. This wasn’t a beast for show. It was for moving forward, always forward—through night, through memory, through silence. A mount for the long road, and those who never rest.

She wrapped Astarion head to toe, securing the cloak with pins and tightly layered stitching. At the hem, she repeated the tracking sigil—twice.

Before taking off, she double-checked every inch of exposed skin. Not a sliver of him could be touched by sun.

She offered her hand.

He took it.

The horse snorted once, then began to run.

They rode hard. South. Away from Grave Wash. Away from the smell of blood and basements.

The dawn rose, pale and indifferent.

Astarion lay curled behind her, silent beneath the layers of shadow and cloth.

Elenya gripped the reins tighter.

She did not look back.

“Only the dead turn around.”

And she was not ready to be one of them.

 

Notes:

This one cut close. I know that was the point but I needed a couple of days after finishing. Things do pick up quickly from now on.
Let me know your thoughts

Chapter 10: Her First Prayer

Ilmater’s POV

---

Ilmater knelt in the Sanctum where no light ever reached, the twilight air still as a held breath. The world’s pain drummed at the edges of his awareness—familiar, distant—until a single note sliced through every layer of silence.

It was so small.

A child’s prayer, echoing up from tunnels far below the sun, threaded with terror and unlearned hopelessness.

Kill me, please.

The words struck like a blade spun from pure grief. They did not beg for comfort, nor for rescue—only for the end. And in that moment Ilmater knew: this was the same voice he had once felt fluttering behind the promise, the voice bound in a wager he had witnessed and never understood.

He gasped. The sound cracked in his throat; salt filled his mouth. For years he had watched her from afar to keep the promise he was bound to—just another forgotten soul trying to breathe in a pit of monsters. She never shone brighter than the rest. She never asked for him. She simply endured, day after day, and he respected the quiet valor of her survival. Lolth have outdone herself but his hands were bound. He thought it the aim. To make him watch unable to help. 

But now—now she was asking for him. Not to be freed or saved but to be unmade.

He saw her where she layed in the filthy dungeon in the Underdark: chained broken and bathing in grime, blood and in dim torch-glow. Her skin bruised violet, eyes made of void too large for her small face. There were spider-silk cords on her soul—a mockery of mercy. She had no tears left. Only the dull, final wish: let it stop.

Ilmater’s own tears fell freely, splashing on the cold stone of his Sanctum. He remembered the breath against his ear, remembered the wager sealed with a kiss sharper than any knife. You will love her more than any mortal. He had dismissed it as another of her cruelties.

And he did not even know her name. No one ever gave her a name. 

A fresh sob wracked him. He pressed bleeding palms to the altar and whispered the gentlest vow he had: 

" I will not kill you Little One, but I will carry this."

He reached across the planes, laid unseen hands upon the child’s heart, and drew a thin seam of agony into himself—just enough to make her lungs fill again, just enough to dull the edge of the thought end it. Enough to be missed by the spider. The pain struck him like iron bars. His robe darkened where blood blossomed anew, but he held it, cradled it, bore it as he always had.

Far below, the child gasped once, like surfacing from black water. She did not know why the pressure eased or why the darkness seemed less absolute. She only felt—faintly—an unfamiliar warmth, a sorrow so immense it made room for her own.

Ilmater bowed his head, grief and wonder mingling inside his chest. Somewhere in the shadows he could almost hear Null’s soft laughter, dancing on the rim of memory.

“I can love her,” he prayed to no one. “Let that be enough—please.”

And the Sanctum, long silent, rang with the echo of a prayer he could never answer for himself.

 

Notes:

A little break before the chase.
Let me know of your thoughts

Chapter 11: What do you have to lose ?

Astarion’s POV

---

The road was nothing but blur and thrum beneath us.

As I lay pressed against Elenya’s back, hidden under layers of cloth and magic, the world narrowed to the sweat-soaked, darkened heat of her black hood over me and the shifting press of her spine.

It had been hours since dawn. Maybe more. I couldn’t tell. The sun was up; I could feel it—not as fire or flame, but as absence. The way a blindfold knows light.

And still, what burned me wasn’t the daylight.

It was the memory of last night.

Not long after I left the safehouse, the pain returned. Not physical. Not magical.

Worse.

A feeling. A gaze. His gaze.

Cazador.

Cold and sharp, like a letter opener dragged against my thoughts.

He knows.

The moment it happened—when I felt him—it was as if a wire had pulled taut inside my ribs. A command that hadn’t come yet, but would. A punishment that hadn’t been spoken—but was already being prepared. He could feel me. Knew where I was. I felt his disgusting anticipation of all the torments that would await me once I was back in his grasp. I felt his displeasure. His quiet anger. Deeper than I had ever felt it before.

Deeper than the night he sealed me in the crypt.

I will pay for this.

The world narrowed to the slow pulse of my undead heart. My vision blurred, and the night sounds faded as a primal fear gripped my innards.

He will make me pay for this.

I wanted to scream and thrash. I wanted to argue. I hadn’t disobeyed, not really. I didn’t leave. I was dragged. This was not my doing. I would’ve screamed and resisted every step—if I wasn’t starved. I didn’t choose to run.

Which made it worse.

Deep down, I always knew Cazador didn’t need a reason to hurt us. Never did. He just needed to want it. And right now, he wanted it more than ever.

I started running.

Frantically.

I can’t go back. I can never go back. I would do anything to not go back. I would be anything to not be his.

Because now the leash didn’t even need words.

The leash lived in me.

I had nearly turned back. Returned to the palace.

Three times, in fact. Because I didn’t know how not to be his.

Every step forward, every second I resisted that slow, coiling instinct to return to the safety of my cage, felt like peeling flesh from my own body.

I am his.

FUCK.

Fuck this.

I’d rather be nothing at all.

As I ran, my mind traced back to the person who had pulled me from the crypt. She could help me. She could kill me. She has to. She has to take responsibility. I already hurt her. She could do it before they found me. There was still time. Soon, it would all be over.

I would die—purified by the mercy of the Crying God. The end of a monster’s suffering.

Death is mercy.

But she hadn’t said yes. Nor had she said no.

She’d said: “Not tonight.”

And that ruined everything.

Because she had made it real.

She had turned a grave into a doorway.

And now… gods help her, she thought they could run.

I shifted beneath the cloak. The wind from the galloping spectral horse knifed through the weave. Her back was rigid beneath my arms. She hadn’t spoken in over an hour.

That, more than anything, made me sick.

She didn’t ask for praise. But she didn’t deserve what was coming.

Cazador would find her. Would rip her open. Drain her dry. Hang her as a message.

Even if she killed me first—she would never be free of him.

She dared to touch what was his.

Another poor soul I led to slaughter. One I didn’t even grant a shred of pleasure before.

And she didn’t even ask who I was. Took nothing from me. Didn’t blink when I begged her to kill me.

Who refuses to kill a vampire?

I would have screamed, if I wasn’t too tired to pretend anymore.

---

Then, abruptly, the horse slowed.

The ground shifted—rougher, looser. Stones. A narrowing pass. Time blurred as we rode through increasingly difficult terrain until we stopped near the mouth of a cave. The sun felt past its zenith.

I blinked against the brightness filtering through the edge of my hood. Elenya dismounted in one fluid motion. Dust kicked up behind her boots. She turned, offering her hand to help me down.

I hesitated.

Then took it.

Her grip was steady.

I hated how much that calmed me.

---

The cave was narrow, cool, lined with old travel marks—scratched sigils, mossed-over stakes. We were tens of miles from the city now.

Safe. For now.

Cold. Too quiet.

It felt like a tomb.

Elenya navigated expertly despite her human sight. Later, she brought me a bundle of moss and herbs and asked me to rub it all over—to mask my scent.

I went through the motions but couldn’t focus. I felt outside myself.

We kept going. The scent of the surface disappeared. Shadows clung to her like old friends. She did not seem scared. Or panicked.

Only focused.

SOON, you'll learn.

Later, she gestured for us to stop in a large cavern. I sat near a patch of stone. She unpacked in silence. Lit the smallest fire she could coax from damp moss. Pulled water from her satchel. Cut food into strips I wouldn’t eat.

She hadn’t looked at me once.

I broke first.

“You should have killed me.”

No preamble.

She didn’t look up.

“I still might,” she said. “If I fail. I always have Mercy’s End prepared.”

“You’re already failing.”

That landed. She paused a second too long.

“Mercy’s End? Noble phrase for a kill. You should’ve done it last night.”

Now she looked at me.

Her eyes were calm. Unyielding.

“You didn’t ask.”

“I begged.”

“Not really. You begged not to let him take you back. To that, I promised. The method was a suggestion.”

I stood too fast. The cloak fell from my shoulders.

“Gods, you don’t get it. You’re going to die. He’ll find you. Use you. Break you. And when you scream, it won’t matter—because no one’s listening.”

She looked up.

And her eyes—gods, her eyes—were tired.

“I know.”

“No, you fucking don’t!” I snapped. “You think this is a game. You think you’re righteous. You didn’t even ask who I was. What I’ve done. You just assumed I was some broken soul worth dragging out of hell.”

“I didn’t assume anything.”

“Then what the fuck are you doing?!”

I was shouting now. My voice echoing off stone like a curse.

“You don’t care! You can’t! You don’t even like me!”

Something twitched in her jaw.

“You’re right,” she said. “I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you.”

“Then kill me and leave before—”

She stood. Slowly.

“All must die. I don’t fear that. But I’d rather you live. I'd rather we both live.”

“What’s the point of living if you’ll never be free?” I spat. “Running will only make it worse. He thinks I chose this.”

She hesitated. Then whispered:

“Didn’t you?”

“Didn’t I what?”

“Choose this? Did you not ask for my help?”

“I chose death. It’s the only escape.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But not yet.”

Her stillness enraged me.

“This has nothing to do with you. You did your good deed. Pat yourself on the back. Kill me and fucking go.”

She didn’t move.

“You don’t even want me.”

“That’s not the point. I care about—”

“Oh, please.” I laughed bitterly. “You see a broken toy and think it’s your sacred duty to play nursemaid until it’s shiny again. You don’t care about me. You care about your crusade.”

She said nothing.

“I never asked for your help. I don’t want it. I can end this—step into the sun and be done. But you won’t even let me.”

“You called,” she said softly. “We answered.”

“I called for death,” I snarled. “Not pity.”

“Astarion—”

“No! Take your ‘Mercy’s End’ and shove it. I don’t need your charity. I don’t need your hope. Just go back to your little thorn-path faith and leave me the fuck alone!”

I was shaking.

I didn’t mean it.

I was scared.

Please, gods—let her go.

---

But she didn’t flinch.

Didn’t cry.

Didn’t walk.

She lowered her gaze. Slowly. Letting something inside her settle.

“I didn’t come to fix you.”

She looked up.

“I came because someone was screaming. And I listened.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she added. “If staying does, I’ll leave. But I want you to live. I want to help you live.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. What does it matter? Astarion—why won’t you let me try?”

“Not good enough, Kill me now, Elenya, or I will kill you. Rip your throat out. Leave you bleeding.”

“No.”

“WHY NOT?!”

“BECAUSE YOU’RE STILL IN PAIN!”

The words struck like a lash.

She tossed her tin cup to the floor.

“I never said I liked you. I don’t need to. That’s not what this is.”

“Then what is it?”

“It’s not leaving you alone in this cave of a world while you fall apart and call it fate.”

She stepped forward.

“You don’t want help. I know. But that’s not what Ilmater taught me. That’s not why I do this.”

I stared at her. Breathing ragged.

“I don’t want you to be alone through this.”

It stopped me.

Just that.

Too much.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

Silence stretched.

“You’re delusional.”

“Probably.”

A bitter laugh escaped me. I didn’t mean for it to.

“So what now? You follow me like a lost pup until he drags me back?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“You can’t.”

Another silence.

"Is that it? That's what worries you? You don’t trust me to finish you before you are taken. Very well then. Let me put your mind at ease".Then she pulled something from her shirt. A small shell, filled with thick purple liquid.

“Three-times-concentrated purple worm poison. Brewed it myself. If I ever fail you—if he finds you—if I die… bite this. It’ll all be over.”

She closed my hand around it.

“If you want me gone,” she said, “say so. I’ll go. But if not—let me stay. Just until you’re not hurting. Or until you can carry it yourself.”

Her eyes were fully dilated. Calm. Pleading.

I looked away.

When I spoke, my voice was almost too quiet.

“You’re going to get yourself killed.”

“So be it.”

“Stop saying that!” I said, voice laced with vitriol. “Stop acting like your death is this noble sacrifice I’m supposed to be grateful for! I do not want to be in anyone's debt.”

“It wouldn’t be for you. It would be for me. My choice.”

That landed like a blade in my chest.

“You don’t even know what I did.”

“Then tell me. But I don’t know why you think it matters so much.”

I couldn’t.

“What’s the fucking point?”

“The point,” she said, “is that you haven’t tried.”

“I have! I’ve survived!”

“Survival isn’t life,” she snapped. “It’s not the same.”

I turned away. Fists clenched.

Then finally—I broke.

“Fine,” I whispered. “Stay.”

---

She started eating in silence, her hands steady despite everything that had just passed between us. No anger. No sorrow. Just calm, focused practicality—like she hadn’t just stared me down and offered me the means to end it all.

“I guess we’re running now,” she said softly between bites.

And just like that, the weight shifted again.

This idiot chose this.

She made her choice.

It wasn’t on me anymore.

I glanced down at the tiny capsule she’d given me—deep violet, swirling faintly inside the shell, like some perfumed death. Beautiful, in a way. Elegant. A single press of the jaw and it would all be over. No more panic. No more leash tugging. No more fear.

I held it for a long moment.

Then, slowly, I began fashioning a cord from one of the cloak’s frayed drawstrings. My hands worked with the same care I used to steal rings off a sleeping nobleman’s hand. Precise. Gentle. Detached.

She gave me death in a pearl.

I might as well wear it like one.

As I worked, my thoughts drifted—unbidden, unwelcome.

Can I really escape?

What does it matter?

Her words echoed, sharp and stupid in my skull:

“What do you have to lose?”

Nothing.

Everything.

She doesn’t understand. She couldn’t. She trembles in her sleep at the thought of spiders—I’ve seen it, the way her fingers twitch when she stirs. The little gasps. She’s brave, yes. Clever. Devout. But she’s not ready.

Not for him.

Not for the likes of me.

Cazador isn’t just evil. He isn’t just cruel. He’s patient. Precise. I am a masterpiece carved from centuries of his sadism. She has no idea what it means to be made like that.

They’ll find us. They’ll rip her apart. And I’ll be dragged back. If not by leash, then by force.

But at least I have a way out.

I tied the necklace. Slipped it over my neck. It settled against my sternum with a whisper-soft chill.

She made her choice.

I wouldn’t let it be on me.

I glanced up—and stopped short.

Her eyes were black.

Not dark. Not dim. Black—like voidstone or the reflectionless surface of still water in a cave. Cold and seeing.

“What the fuck—”

I began.

She didn’t even blink.

“There are two vampires in the safe house came last night two hour after we left they are still stuck in the house basement. one is a redskined teifling and the other a human looking male with ashy blond hair.”

she said calmly. “They came looking for you. Come nightfall. The teifling woman is going back while the man will follow your scent."

My skin prickled.

“How do you know that?”

“I found a way to keep eyes on them. At least until my little trick is noticed.”

I narrowed my eyes.

“You’re watching them?”

She nodded.

“Through my familiar.”

I stared.

“Now I am no mage but even I know they’re too far for you to be able to see them through a familiar. You’d need to be in the vicinity to see clearly.”

“This familiar’s… a bit special.”

“How?”

“It wasn’t really summoned.  At least not by me. I freed it. And it taught me how to use what I know. To finesse the spell.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It does if you listen,”

she replied, too calm for my liking. “I can watch long and close—or far and short. The magic tires it, but it works.”

“What kind of familiar?”

She met my gaze without flinching.

“A spider.”

I froze.

“You said you hated spiders.”

“I do,”

she answered.

And that was it.

Flat. Honest. Like it wasn’t contradictory at all.

She reached into her satchel and pulled out a small jar—glass, blood-red. She handed it to me without a word.

The scent hit me instantly: pig’s blood. Rich, iron-thick, and still a little warm.

“How ?” I muttered, eyeing the jar with suspicion.

“I hoped you’d come with me,” she said. “So I stocked up. Your food’s going to be a problem if we stay underground for long. I wasn't expecting we would go this route.”

I hesitated.

Then drank.

It tasted better than I deserved.

I almost said thank you.

Almost.

“Who are they? Especially the male vampire whith mid-length light hair?” She asked after a moment. “ Pale one, human with the… arrogant face. He looks somewhat similar to you in a way”

“Don't you dare compare me to Petras,” I said, setting the jar down. 

“Is he the one who hurt you?”

“No.”

She nodded as if that mattered. Like she was keeping some quiet list.

“I’ll cast Nondetection on you every eight hours,” she continued. “That should shield you from most divinations.”

“It won’t be enough,” I said flatly. “He doesn’t need divination. He has… other ways.”

“What ways?”

“Blood.”

“Like a blood tracking?”

I laughed. “Like a vampire.”

Her face didn’t change much—but her eyes narrowed.

“So he can find you by smell?”

“By bond. Doesn’t matter. he’ll feel it, If I’m alive.”

She didn’t answer.

Just stood. Walked to the fire. Stirred it once.

Then, as if it were nothing, she said:

“I see, If we are sure to be always pursued then i think we should go all out. So that If he comes, he’ll have to make it through trolls, deepspawn, yuan-ti, bhaal waters and cursed ground. Without a guide.”

I blinked.

“What?”

“We’re not travelling through the trading way but directly through the Troll hills.”

I stared at her like she’d grown a second head.

“That’s suicide.”

“It’s clever,” she countered. “No one tracks through the winding water unless they’re desperate. And most don’t live long enough to become that desperate.”

“You’ll get us both killed.”

“You’ve spooked me enough times for me to know that you’re very good at sneaking when you want to. And I’m very good at crawling between monsters.”

My mouth opened.

Then shut.

She went back to her pack. Sat, resumed eating like she hadn’t just declared we’d be walking through hell.

“Is that okay with you, Astarion? We are under Cloakwood right now. If you really don’t want to, we could go west and join the Trade Way. It would be safer in the short term but... I am working with the limited information I have. And the only way I know to stop someone chasing you is to make it not worth the trouble. I am confident I could take us mostly in one piece through the Trollclaws all the way to lizard marsh. There may be some need to defend ourselves on the way, but our pursuers would need that as well. No witnesses to communicate our whereabouts. It could keep him off our trail for longer. But if you don’t feel comfortable traversing, I won’t force you.”

And all I could think, watching her, was:

This fool is serious. She chose this.

I looked down at the necklace again.

Ran my thumb over the capsule.

Then looked back at her.

Still, quiet, competent.

Maybe she didn’t need gods.

“What do I have to lose."

---

I was sitting by the cave wall, twisting that little poison pendant between my fingers, when she finally fussed back over to me with that godsawful bag of hers—drab, battered, something that should have belonged to a washed-up hedge-witch or a tanner’s widow. I’d always dismissed it. Hard not to. Looked like it had been dragged behind a cart for twenty miles.

But then she knelt. And began to pull things out and I saw things pooling out one after the other. Not one or two. Not even a small handful.

The pile started to grow.

First it was a clean bedroll—far better than the one she’d laid out for herself, I might add. Then came ropes—two lengths, one thicker for hauling, one thin and waxed for traps. A set of grappling hooks clanked against the stone. Climbing irons. A canteen of fresh water.

Then oils—carefully stoppered glass vials, each with a neat little mark at the top. I leaned forward despite myself. Gods, she’d labeled them. 

Then came the potions. Five, six, seven—some crimson, some green, some a soft opal shimmer I didn’t recognize. Followed by a potion belt to carry them.

Then a whole Brand new backpack. Inside were multiple bundles. A traveler's kit. Then tools—lockpicks, trap disarming kits, delicate sets of picks and thin pliers and mirrors and hooks I hadn’t laid eyes on since… well. Since I’d last been allowed to play thief for Cazador’s ambitions.

She didn’t stop.

Chalk. Padding. Marbles. I remembered asking for these. As a joke really. She wrote it down. She bought it and more. Even a damned collapsible ten-foot pole, carefully wrapped in linen.

She laid down a coil of cord, two rolled maps, a tiny iron stove, a waterskin of what smelled like cheap brandy, and then—gods help me—scrolls. Labeled scrolls. One was faintly warm to the touch. Fire. Another shimmered like ice. Defensive magic. Arcane nonsense I couldn’t read, but could learn to use.

Finally—clothes. Better than the last lot. A tailored shirt, a dark doublet lined with soft wool, trousers that looked like they might actually survive a run through the woods. Even gloves.

I sat there with my mouth slightly open. I must have looked like a lunatic.

Because her voice was oddly gentle when she said, “It’s for you. I tried to get everything on your list”

I managed to croak, “All of this is for me? What if i didn't come with you?”

She just shrugged and said " better to be prepared and most of this would have been useful to you either way"

She actually had the gall to look faintly sheepish. “I meant to give it to you earlier. I just… forgot. I’d been trying to keep it organized by priority.”

That was when it struck me.

How the hell had all of this been in that pathetic little bag?

I blinked. Narrowed my eyes at it. Reached over and flipped the flap back. Sure enough—inside it was dark and impossibly deep. A faint, cold draft drifted up.

“Is that—” I started.

“A bag of holding,” she confirmed.

Of course it was. The quiet little martyr would have an enchanted bag and never say a word. Gods.

But she wasn’t finished. Her mouth tightened a fraction, like something sour touched her tongue.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Actually said. “I’d also commissioned weapons and armor for you in the Gate—more enchanted gear—but we left before I could collect them.”

I couldn’t speak for a second. My tongue felt too thick. My hands hovered over the front of the backpack, then settled on a small front pocket inside was a purse I hadn’t noticed. I cracked it open. Gold. A full purse. Heavy.

I remembered. “Coin,” I’d told her when she asked me what i needed, half-mocking, just to see if she’d balk.

Three hundred gold. Just sitting there.

And then—then my hand struck something slim, gilt-edged, with a lurid painted cover. I picked it up, squinting at the debauched tangle of limbs on the front.

A smut book.

A real, honest-to-gods, ridiculous smut book.

I laughed.

Sharp and sudden and cracked down the middle. I laughed so hard my chest hurt. Because I remembered asking for it—just to throw her off. Just to see if she’d flinch. And she’d gotten it anyway. Because she was thorough. Because she didn’t take chances. Because something in her had heard even that stupid, petty request and decided it was worth honoring.

I should have cried.

Because what sort of prick did that make me—laughing over a pile of spoils in the dark, when this was the first time in gods-knew how long anyone had tried to give me something so utterly unnecessary just because I asked.

So I just pressed my palm over my mouth. Let the laugh hollow out into a dry little ache.

She didn’t say anything. Just watched me with that infuriating, patient stillness. But I noticed her avoiding my gaze and the smell of copper sharpened slightly in the air. 

I laughed harded. 

This statue of a women who barely reacted when I had my mouth at her throat was embarrassed by a mere smutty tome. 

I cleared my throat. Looked back down at it all.

Everything I’d asked for. And more.

“What am I supposed to do with all this?” I rasped.

She tilted her head, tired smile tugging at her lips.

“Use it. I can keep the heavy stuff in my bag but you should choose what to keep on you in case we get separated  or we get into a fight."

Maybe I would.

What do I have to lose?

Chapter 12: Descent

Summary:

Way down they go!

Notes:

This chapter took me an embarrassing amount of time, several existential spirals, and one (1) unholy snack binge to finish.

If you spot typos or timeline crimes, please know I probably cried over them already. Thanks for reading—I’m so glad you’re here.

Elenya’s POV

---

The cavern beneath Cloakwood breathed.

It wasn't the wind. Not exactly. Just the slow settling of stone and air, like the world above, had exhaled long ago and never drawn breath again. Water dripped somewhere in the distance—steady, indifferent. The kind of silence that had weight.

Elenya crouched low near the mosslight, spreading her map on the damp ground. The parchment was fraying at the edges, stained with mud and blood and memories. She’d redrawn the route herself in rough charcoal—trails beneath the forest, along the Winding Water’s spine, between bones of hills long abandoned to trolls and lizardfolk alike. A story in tunnels, written in scar and instinct.

Behind her, Astarion groaned theatrically.

“Darling, are we done crouching in mold yet? My cloak smells like old dirt. I’ve already spent too much time buried to want to revisit if you ask me.”

She didn’t look up. “We’ll surface for the first time tonight. Just a few hours from now. Just enough time to finish your whining.”

“Oh, joy. I do so miss moonlit treks through predator-infested forests with only your cheery disposition to guide and entertain me.”

She cast a sideways glance. He was sprawled across a toppled stalagmite like some bored noble trapped in a peasant’s nightmare. One leg dangling, arm over his face as if he’d fainted from the indignity.

He looked more like himself. Not the feral thing she’d unearthed. Not the creature who’d flinched from water and light. Nor the broken man who begged for death.

The sharpness in his voice had returned, but the edge had dulled—his barbs now meant to provoke, not wound. He was growing back into something person-shaped. Slowly.

It must’ve been hard for him here after what he went through. She didn’t know exactly how long he’d been buried, but it couldn’t be less than half a year. And now he was back underground. Back in the dark. It would’ve undone lesser men.

Surface folk hated it down here.

Hells, she hated it down here.

And she’d grown up in it.

“I’m listening,” he said after a beat. “Give me the doom-filled travel plan.”

She tapped the map three times.

“We stay below as long as we can. Underdark tributaries follow the Cloakwood sinkline. Then we catch the old Slaver’s highway until we are able to get to the serpent folk tunnels. They cross beneath the Winding Water twice—one deep, one shallow. We surface seven times: eastern Cloakwood, Fields of the Dead;  Trollclaws, Troll Hills near Warlock’s Crypt; Trollbark forest and Lizard Marsh —only at night.”

“Charming vacation destinations,” he murmured.

“You hunt. I Forage.  We disappear before dawn. Some segments will force us to travel on the surface near the top of Troll Hills, but it’s only one or two days out, and we still can hide in the upper caves during the day.”

He leaned over her shoulder, studying the redrawn map and itinerary with surprising interest. The mosslight cast his features in a sickly blue glow, highlighting the hollows beneath his eyes and the paleness of his skin. Still not at full strength—but regaining.

“And how, exactly, do you know these delightful tunnels so well? I thought you were some wandering martyr, not a… spelunking expert.”

She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she reached out and touched the stone, fingers brushing a rune nearly lost to age.

Drow script, old and angry. A warning to slaves long dead. The rough grooves bit against her skin like old scars. They were supposed to.

“I know many unconventional things. Plus, I’ve made some part of this crossing three times. Younger. Stupider. More desperate.”

That silenced him, briefly.

“Talk for yourself, darling. I find myself plenty desperate as of now. How did you survive?” he said.

How did she survive the first time? That was an excellent question.  Maybe spite alone,  maybe the desire to see the sky. The promise of the surface, of Freedom.

Memories long suppressed flooded her mind. Images of never-ending tunnels filled with horrors. Of an orcish body gaunt and disheveled. Climbing higher and higher in the Upperdark. Running further toward death or salvation. Maybe both, they used to mean the same thing back in the days.

She remembers days of fleeing, fighting, and killing. She remembers starvation, Cold, fever, and hallucinations.

The voices in the dark.

The songs in the crystals.

She remembers the tunnel narrowing behind her like a throat, slick with moss and breathless dark.

She didn’t know when she stopped running.

Only that her legs had buckled somewhere near a fault line of stone, and she’d crawled—half-starved, half-mad—until her fingers scraped quartz.

Then she lay curled beside a fractured geode, its heart cracked open to the world like a wound glittering with crystal teeth.

Cool air moved around it, humming low.

A good place to die.

Not yet.

But it could be.

The limbs of the girl who wasn't yet Eleyna trembled. Her deep green orcish skin was like jagged ice.

Cold and torn with hundreds of wounds and bruises.

Her breath ragged, her mind confused.

Fever clung to her like the hands of every drow, slaver and monster that had ever dragged her backward.

She pressed her forehead to the rock, whispering:

“I need to Stop.”

Not from despair.

Just from exhaustion.

The stone gave no answer. But the silence deepened.

And then

The geode glowed.

As the light caressed her face, a wave of sorrow and mourning deeper than anything she ever allowed herself to feel overtook her. Tears started streaming heavily on her hollowed cheeks. Her tusks, long and jagged, dug into her face from the force of her bite into her lower lip.

She needed to mourn but, what was there to mourn? She was nothing. A thing with no name. No face. Used and broken. Born to suffer and then, to be discarded.

What was there to regret? What was there to miss? 

The light of the geode mesmerized her, faraway voices started to resonate in the recess of her shattered mind.

Softly 

Like breath.

The sound of voices.

One.

Then two.

Then a thousand.

They bloomed around her—harmonies woven into the stone, into the marrow of the cave. Not voices of the surface. Not the sharp language of the deep. These were older, wrapped in root and frost and memory.

The geode shimmered like a moonlit wound.

And the cavern sang in her fever riddled consciousness:

In caverns cold where moonlight sleeps,
And crystal roots in silence weep,
A starlit girl with wings of dusk
Led the light who wept, in robes of musk.

She danced where sorrow kissed the stone,
But never let it touch her bone.
Her wings were glass in midnight hue,
Each flutter stirred the cave’s own dew.

She smiled, but softly—never wide—
As though she feared too much inside.
“You shouldn’t follow,” she had said,
“The caves are cruel. The paths are dead.”

As the thousands of voices harmonized. Tears kept flowing down her eyes.

The girl felt her body change and shift into something smaller. Her spine twisted sharply, vertebrae compressing with soft, sickening cracks as her chest folded inward. The tusks that had long jutted from her jaw slid back into receding gums, swallowed by bone that re-formed itself in broad, brutish planes.

Her skull reshaped under her fevered skin—cheekbones flattening, brow pushing out into a heavy ridge, jaw thickening with raw, blunt force. Her ears warped into nubbish, folds of flesh. Her eyes—once wide,shrunk, lids sealing over them with a thin gray film, leaving only blind, pale slits that twitched as though still trying to see.

Fur that had barely begun to sprout along her arms vanished under a coarse, pebbled hide. Gray skin overtook her entirely, cracked and knotted with muscle that coiled too tightly around her frame. Her hands flared open, fingers lengthening into crude, claw-tipped digits that twitched and curled, scraping grooves into the stone beneath her.

Her breath rasped. Her ribs heaved against the new weight of a chest built for bellowing, not delicate speech. And when the last of the change rolled through her—her nose flattening into little more than slits, nostrils flaring with a predator’s wet hunger—she lay still.

Unseeing. Unthinking. A creature now that belonged more to the dark than the light. She was too tired to care. 

 The voices seemed to grow louder, to slither closer. The song was beautiful. Its haunting harmonies gripped her heart.

But he, with gentle, steadfast eyes,
Just shook his head and whispered, “Why?”
He followed still, through silver halls,
Past echo-wells and mirrored walls.

And there she showed him—far below—
A cavern veined with candle-glow.
The crystals bloomed in mournful light,
A symphony of soundless white.

Each shard a memory, trapped in glass,
Of tears the earth had let slip past.
“This is my heart,” she said at last,
“A place the others walk right past.

They say I sulk. That I’m too strange.
That sorrow stains me. I should change.”
She folded wings. Her glow grew pale.
The stalactites began to wail.

“They look at me—and think me cold.
They touch my cheek, but want her gold.
She shines like summer’s waking dew…
And when they look, they don’t see you.”

She turned her face. She tried to hide.
He reached, and brushed the tears she’d dried.
“They might love sunlight,” he then said,
“But I love where the night has bled.

I do not want the golden flame—
I want the one who spoke my name
When no one dared to say it soft.
I love the wings, the hush, the frost.”

He knelt before her, kissed her palm.
The crystals hummed a second psalm

Love, she wondered what it would feel like to love.

There is no word in undercomon for the concept. She never understood it. The master alchemist that translated the elvish word for her when she was the drow boy, told her it was a useless word. A word that described a useless thing. He said it was choosing to be weak for someone or something.

The girl didn’t understand, the girl was already weak. Does it mean she was already love? No, nothing she felt or sounded like the song. Maybe that's the difference. She didn’t choose to be weak for anything. She just was. Or maybe she did, just once for him. She said hi and that got her the pit.

She hated love. 

“I do not want a thousand hands.
I do not crave those warmer lands.
Let others dance in halls of grace—
I’d trade it all for this one place.”

Her wings flared wide. A blush took root.
She laughed—a sound both sharp and cute.
“You say such things, but you are kind.
You’ll meet a god. You’ll change your mind.”

But still he stood and cupped her face,
As stardust danced with winter’s grace.
“No throne could tempt me. No vow could part
The way you stirred my tethered heart.

I do not want to take and go—
I want to stay, and help you grow.”

Why was her mind conjuring this stupid song before her death? Why did she hear those ridiculous lyrics? 

And there, beneath the cave’s embrace,
He kissed her with a sacred grace.
No rush. No fire. Just quiet gleam—
A single breath. A midwinter dream.

And when they parted, she still cried.
Not tears of grief. Of joy denied.
For even sorrow, sharp and true,
Had never known a love that grew

From weeping roots and crystal stone—
A love that saw and did not own.

Is that what love is? a kiss that doesn't hurt? 

And somewhere still, beneath the deep,
Where gods no longer dare to weep,
The cave remains. The crystals gleam—
The echo of a midwinter dream.

When the last line faded into the air, the silence returned.

But it wasn’t empty.

It was full. Thick with the ache of something sacred.

The girl didn’t move.

Couldn’t.

Her lips parted—but no sound came. Only breath.

She felt tears on her cheeks. Cold. Clean.

“I… I know you.” she whispered to no one.

But it wasn’t true.

Not yet.

“Who are you? ”

The geode stopped glowing.

Her body, too tired to fight, finally surrendered.

Her eyes fluttered.

Darkness took her like a cradle.

Astarion's finger-snapping brought her back to the present. He looked at her quizzically and repeated. "How did you survive ?"

 “I am not sure myself. I guess I adapted.”

 “How very inspiring. And what if we’re noticed? Charming as we are, I doubt we’ll be welcomed with open arms and pastries.”

She opened her satchel and put a small pebble in it. “That’s why I need to change. Hopefully, that will deter some.”

 “Even if I would pay my weight in gold to never be forced to look at the rags you dare to call an outfit. I don’t know if a costume change will cut it, darling. Unless it comes with an invisibility cloak and a troop of armed bodyguards.”

She chuckled while standing, dusting moss from her knees. “Sorry to disappoint, but you will have to suffer the rags much longer. It’s the rest that changes. Human and surface elves down there would be too conspicuous, noticeable and tempting. And a liability. I need something more recognizable and a bit venomous.”

He raised a brow. “What are you talking ab--?”

She didn’t answer—just turned, stepped back from the mosslight, and began the shift.

It started at her spine. Her bones stretched and twisted, limbs lengthening with a sickening grace. Her insides moved like a remembered song, not cast but released. Her skin grew smooth and glossy, scales tinged with light gray-green shimmer. Her jaw narrowed, her nose flattened, and her tongue forked. Her hair vanished entirely replaced by scales adorning a triangular serpentfolk head. Her legs remained but got covered in scales, and her eyes—

 “Gods,” Astarion muttered, stepping back. “You look like the cursed child of a lizard and a floppy eel. You telling me on top of being absolutely miserable underground, I’ll have to slum it with a fork-tongued freak!" His hand grasped his face dramatically before he added "By the gods, you could have at least chosen something less disgusting. I can barely look at you.”

She turned, blinking her inner horizontal lids. “I don’t see what’s so disgusting about a Yan-ti. It's a highly efficient form, perceptive and particularly adept at survival and trekking. I don't see why you would struggle more to look at this form than any other. it's just another travel suit.”

“Not remotely. You look grotesque, slimy, and monstrous." He scoffed.

Bile rose in her mouth as she heard his words echoing in her mind overlapping with thousands of older lines. She tried to remain neutral, but some venom leaked into her words as she said, "Keep your archaic beliefs to yourself, elf. Or should I call you vampire?  "

He sensed her distaste and zeroed in on her. "Oh, please, darling, did I offend your sensibilities by stating the obvious? Or is that your true form, and you took offence to my description of your general lack of beauty?"

"Far from it, but few things are as distasteful to me as much as bigotry is. And you would do well to remember that beauty is in the eyes of the beholder."

He rolled his eyes before fixing her for a long moment and adding " But—” he squinted. “Your eyes are the same. More snake-like but the color remained the same.”

She nodded. “That’s always the hardest part to change. ”

He didn’t laugh this time. Just stared, wary. Not of her form—of her. It stung more than it should have.

 “You’ve mentioned shifting before,” he said. “I thought you were exaggerating. Or being metaphorical. I didn't expect you to be able to change into... that.”

 “Does this look metaphorical to you? I can change into anything remotely resembling a humanoid. Could even turn into a troll”

He sniffed. “You look like a nightmare from a children’s cautionary tale.”

She answered  unamused, "You are the nightmare in those tales, Astarion."

"Fair point, I guess," he conceded reluctantly. 

Still, he watched her like he didn’t know who she was anymore. Maybe he didn’t. Shifting had always unsettled people, all the people who saw it, most of them were people she helped, always looked at her differently after, but this time, the weight of his distrust and visible repulsion stung heavier than usual. Perhaps because he had reacted extraordinarily well when she talked about it, or maybe because she’d worked so hard to earn what little trust he’d given. He still hadn’t told her much of anything. Not really. Not who he was, nor who he was running from. Not what had been done. Not how much he remembered. Not what he feared.

But she could wait.

They packed in silence. His eyes still drifted to her serpentine form, and when she passed close, her tongue caught his scent—and she flinched. Too strong. Too sweet. Vampiric blood was sharp and lingering. It burned on the back of her tongue.

---

The trees above Cloakwood held their breath.

Branches arched like cathedral beams, heavy with shadow and old rain. Even the wind tread softly here, slipping between the trunks with reverence—or fear. Somewhere in the distance, a bird cried out and was silenced before its echo returned.

Elenya crouched at the edge of the clearing, her form still serpentine—tall, hairless, limbs elongated and scaled in a sheen of grey-green. Her tongue flicked out, tasting the air.

Cold.
Damp.
Blood.
Not enough.

Behind her, Astarion knelt over the deer’s still-warm body, his hands gentle, almost reverent. He didn’t drain it dry today either. He never did after the first night. She’d noticed that, he left some life behind in what he fed on. It wasn’t mercy, exactly—it was restraint. He was careful with his hunger. Afraid of feeding too much. 

When he stood, his eyes glowed faintly, red-rimmed and wet with the shine of new blood.

Elenya was already moving, knife flashing in a quiet rhythm. The deer’s organs came free with clean precision, steam rising from the carcass into the cool air. She worked like a surgeon—efficient, unsentimental, but never careless. Each cut was practiced. Intentional. Every part that could be used, was. She bundled strips of meat into a cloth, then scraped marrow into a wax-sealed pouch. Fat was saved, sinew rolled. The heart, she left. Too rich. It would spoil quickly and attract beasts down below.

Astarion watched her work in silence. His hands wiped clean against his coat, though the fabric was already stained in a dozen places. She decided to prestidigitate the cloak to clean it. After that, she did the same for both their clothes and bodies. Fewer scents are better. When she sat back on her heels, she spoke—more to the woods than to him.

 “We’re low on supplies,” she murmured. “Should’ve packed more. I didn’t expect—”

 “The stunningly beautiful vampire you found buried alive to have people coming after him?”

She just gave him a dry look, then returned to tying the butcher’s bundle tight.

“That we would be forced to leave a day early.”

The wind shifted. Astarion didn’t reply.

But something in him drew inward, chin lifting slightly, jaw tight. Not angry. Not even defensive. Just quiet.

They moved through the underbrush with practiced quiet. No fire. No trail. Only the crunch of frost on dead leaves and the distant sigh of the forest watching.

She paused near a low outcropping of stone. With fingers still sticky from the kill, she opened a small pouch of herbs and moss, crushed them in her palm, and began to rub the mixture along the inside of her arms, her throat, beneath her tongue. The scent was bitter—resin and ash. A masking blend. It would confuse beasts. Blur their trail.

She turned to him, gesturing.

 “Your turn.”

He blinked. “You want me to rub myself in mulch?”

“It’s a silent scent. Better than leaving a scent trail straight toward us.”

He sighed but stepped forward. She dabbed the mixture beneath his ears, just along the collarbone, then over his wrists. Her hands moved quickly and efficiently. Still, he watched her with a strange expression—somewhere between amusement and something she couldn’t quite name.

“Your scent is too strong, too sweet” she muttered. Her forked tongue kept tasting the air around him“ Still to sweet. You need to rub some more”

“Charming,” he answered, face stuck in a slight frown.

When she stepped back, she reached into her pack and drew a pouch of diamond dust. She was running low maybe two weeks daily casting. They would need to loot and plunder down there. Bodies were always abundant near Troll Hills.

Asterion needed protection.

She began to murmur the incantation—low, rhythmic—a chant half-sung in the old Rashiman cadence, pulled from a winter folktale about the chief’s son hiding from a witch. Her fingers moved with practiced precision, pinching the crushed diamond dust between thumb and forefinger, tracing a symbol in the air.

The rune shimmered—faint and slow-burning—as the dust dissolved into silver mist. A sigil hung for a heartbeat, drawn in flickering light, while an echo of long-dead shamanic voices rippled through the air like breath on glass.

Darkness was drawn into light. It gathered above his brow—just a gleam, there and gone before it settled. The magic shimmered—barely perceptible—but she could feel it warped over him like silk spread across still water.

“What,” Astarion asked flatly, “did you just do?”

“Non-Detection,” she murmured. “On you.”

Astarion tilted his head, eyes narrowing. “That was... oddly gentle.”

Yesterday he’d begged her to kill him.

Now his expression was tangled—guarded, maybe, or annoyance, but something else too. There was a sharpness to it. A new edge of weariness. The sharpness of someone who was beginning to want to live. But the thing that had driven him toward death hadn’t left. It still stalked looking for him. One wrong move or setback could send him spiralling again. But this time, she won’t be able to talk him out of it. The capsule still hung around his neck.

She reached beneath her cloak and drew out her holy symbol. Pressed it to her chest. Closed her eyes.

 “Keep an eye on this one for me,” she whispered. “Help him endure.”

Silence followed.

This spell wasn’t part of what he’d taught her. It wasn’t part of her training either. It was a gift—given freely, long ago. A divine thread, woven into the very wood of her symbol. In all the years she’d carried it, he’d never withheld the magic. Never warned her against using it, even for this.

But anxiety still surged. He’d told her, gently but firmly, that he could no longer intervene with this charge. And Astarion... was undead.

And she was asking for protection.

For an undead.

For Anathema.

Her stomach twisted. Her thoughts spiralled—

A whole segment of creatures being Anathema was just stupid. 

Her anxiety rose

—and stopped.

She felt it before she saw it. The slow warmth of Ilmater’s presence.

It didn’t blaze or shout.

It breathed.

Red and rose-gold light flickered down her arms—not fire, but something older, deeper. Chains of radiant crimson and pale white wound softly through the air and sank into Astarion’s chest.

Odd, it shouldn’t have worked. 

Ilmater was being sneaky. 

The light vanished.

His eyes widened.

“That was radiant...” he said. “Divine magic.”

He recoiled instinctively, hand drifting to the dagger at his hip. Panic bloomed off him in waves. She caught the scent of it on her tongue—bitter and metallic.

His voice sharpened. “Did you just casually cast divine magic? On me?”

She didn’t flinch. She held his gaze.

“Yes, just protection. The first was mine,” she said, hand resting lightly over her heart. “This one... was his. To keep you from dying.”

She lifted the holy symbol.

The magic lingered in the air like smoke, then melted into him—subtle, protective.

“That was a Death Ward?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

His face twisted, confusion and mistrust flickering behind his eyes.

“How the heck were you able to... nevermind that, you can channel Ilmater’s divine magic?”

“I can.”

He stared at her like she’d grown fangs.

“You said..I..I thought you were just… some madwoman. A wild-eyed, delusional recluse with a martyr complex. Praying to air.”
A beat.
“No offence.”

She laughed, a full, warm sound that startled them both.

“None taken. You wouldn’t be the first to think that. But being a mad idiot praying to air and being able to channel divine magic?” She tilted her head. “Not mutually exclusive.”

“How the fuck—? Please explain to me how a talentless bard with a goddamn savior-complex can cast divine magic!” Shock laced the words but beneath them hid something else. Something uglier and darker. Distrust and ...envy.

“I am indeed a bard,” she snarled, “and thank you so much for not bothering to tell me not to take offence because I absolutely do, you arse.”

Her voice sharpened.

“And I’m not talentless, you —" She tried to take a steadying breath and resummon the fog around her mind. "I just specialize in different bardic studies. I collect and preserve knowledge, oral traditions. Folktales. Rituals. Songs, stories and practices never or rarely written down. Knowledge you don’t find in libraries, because they live in people no one bothers recording.

Being a bard isn’t just about running around performing for drunkards with a lute and a silly outfit you o-.”

“That’s not the fucking point!” He paced. “You’re not a cleric. You swear too much. You smile too little to be a cleric.”

“Not all blessings come with vestments and clergy,” she said flatly. "Also, why exactly are you flipping out about this? I told you I knew a god. I told you I had a relationship with Ilmater.”

“Because your kind hunts mine!”

Now THAT pierced the fog. She felt a cold piercing anger settle behind her ribs.

She turned slowly toward him

 “My kind?” she echoed, voice tightening. “What exactly does my kind mean?”

“Holy people. Clerics. Paladins. Divine champions. You know the type throwing radiant fire at anything with fangs and too pale of a complexion!”

She stared at him—flat and unamused.

“Tell me, Astarion,” she said quietly. “What does channelling divine magic have to do with my kind or yours? Because As far as I can tell, the only kind I belong to that you don’t... is the living.

And from that perspective. Wouldn’t It be more accurate, at least in my experience to say that it's your fucking kind that hunts mine.

I’ve never held that against you now, did I?”

He froze.

She stepped closer, still calm.

“I understand this is fear speaking. I do. But, it is very rich of you to be throwing assumptions while you accused me of doing it all but yesterday." She looked at him fiercely before adding, "I don’t deserve this. ”

The words hung, thick and hot.

Then—

“Are you a paladin?” he asked finally, voice quieter. “You can’t be a paladin. Not with arms like that. Gods. Please tell me it’s not bad enough I have to suffer travelling underground with a sanctimonious giant snake, she also has to be some antiquated self-righteous oathbound halfwit."

She smiled faintly.

Her voice was quiet but steady.

“First of all—rude. Second... I suppose I’m something like that. But not really.”

“You’re not going to smite me for being rude, are you?”

“Tempting but, as you said, not with arms like these.” She shrugged. “ I suppose I could shapeshift into someone stronger if you’d really like me to—”

He looked vaguely alarmed.

“It’s a joke, Astarion. I don’t smite nor change my inherent strength by shifting. I’m not a holy warrior purging the land of evil. I’m just... someone with a divine blessing. A wanderer. That’s all.”

“Hmph.” He muttered something in Infernal that didn’t sound complimentary.

She arched a brow. “Are you done insulting me, or should I get comfortable?”

He didn’t answer.

---

They found the sinkhole before dawn. It yawned beneath a thicket of ivy and tangled roots, a wound in the earth waiting to be remembered. The descent was steep, stone slick with moss, air cold and familiar.

Astarion lingered at the edge.

He didn’t say anything. But she saw it in the angle of his shoulders. In the tightness of his grip.

he didn’t want to go down again

Not truly.

She stepped beside him.

“We can stay up here if you want; it's not worth it to lose the people behind us if it's going to make you feel buried again. Just say the word” she offered quietly. “I’ll find another route.”

“No,” he said. “I’ll follow.”

And he did.

One step at a time, into the dark

The Underdark awaits.

Home sweet home.

---

The deeper they went, the more the world forgot what light was. The air thickened first, moist, warm, and breathing. It clung to her skin like a fevered dream. The stone was covered with algae. Threads of green-gold slime veined the walls, slick and pulsing faintly as though the tunnels had a heartbeat of their own. Every breath tasted like fungus and forgotten things. 

She slowed her steps, shifting her weight into the curve of her hips, pressing her scaled palms to the damp stone.

Her form was fully at ease now—legs coiled in smooth muscle, skin a pale oil-slick covered in pearlescent grey-green scales, patterned faintly in silvers and pale sapphires.

The tips of her fingers bore short, curved talons, and her forked tongue flicked out every so often, reading scent as much as sound. Her tail kept swaying to balance her steps.

They passed two myconids spore servants before the second hour.

Sleeping.

Hulking.

Bloated mushroom beasts, slumped like breathing statues in shallow alcoves, their gills twitching. Filament trails drifted across the floor like thin silk. Elenya raised her hand.

Stopped him.

She stepped around the creatures on bare, careful feet—silent, sinuous.

Her body was made for silence. Limbs long and angular. Her scaled feet arched to avoid puddles. Her serpent eyes narrowed to vertical slits, absorbing every trace of phosphorescence along the cavern wall. And behind her, Astarion followed.

Not noiselessly.

But close.

His boots made soft squelches in the algae-soaked floor, but nothing louder. His balance was good. He moved like someone used to listening for footsteps behind him. Like someone who had once lived in places where the slightest noise meant death. And that unsettled her further. Because he had never been to the Underdark. He’d said so. Had never stepped foot in its devouring depths. And yet here he was—moving like one of them.

He’s never been here. Then how is he so good at this? He’s good, too good.

---

They kept walking in silence for hours.

Down.

Always down.

Every hour, the temperature dropped further. Not only in degrees, but in feeling.

The air grew older. More still. Time felt thick like honey that had gone sour.

Elenya kept to the edge of the main corridors, following the worn etchings carved by desperate hands—scratches and symbols she’d once memorized in chains.

They finally entered the Liberation Path.

Only in reverse.

The way out that the Seladrine worshiping Drow used to escape their captors, their mothers, and their cities.

The tunnels led to surface gods and unknown Skies.

She had once fled upward, dying and delirious. Now she led someone else downward.

What am I doing?

At the eighth bell, they crossed a chasm bridged by a tangle of long-dead phosphor vines, strung across like snapped harp strings. A single misstep would send them plummeting into lightless depths. They had been travelling since before dawn, and the weight of fatigue and tiredness started gripping her muscles. By her record of the time, it must be around noon. This could be dangerous.

She hesitated. 

He didn’t.

Astarion moved across the vine bridge with the grace of a cat and the silence of mist. Only once did he glance back, as if unsure she’d follow.

She was.

They found an old Vernet worm's terrace deeper in the natural caves. She gestured to Astarion, and he nodded before starting to climb toward it.

The cold was gripping now, and the moisture in the air soaked their clothes.

They needed supplies in order to survive.

The anxiety kept bubbling under her sternum, but she was able to push it behind the fog. They will enter the slavers' highway soon enough. There are always bodies to loot. Something to plunder. Some armour would do great. Weapons as well. 

She felt irritation spike at all the gear she had paid for and was forced to abandon at the Gate.

As they settled on the terrace overlooking the mid-sized fungal cavern. She hunkered down and focused on the slight burn in her calves and back muscles.

She started munching on whatever dried rations she had and a bit on Bulbfruits she found along the descent. The strong onion-like taste raised her scales.

She did not miss It.

She looked at Astarion and took stock inside her pack for the blood she still had. It will keep for two more days. But, their next surface stop would be in three days if all went well. She still didn't know how much blood he required. 

She hoped it would be enough but four jars for two days seemed too little to her. 

"Are you hungry?" She just blurted out. 

Astarion looked at her. His crimson eyes caught the faint glow of lichen and fungal spores drifting in the air, shimmering with that ethereal sheen that made the Underdark seem almost dreamlike, if not for the way it tasted like rot and forgotten blood.

She could see the lie forming in his throat. The old performance. The charming smirk. The easy dodge.

But he didn’t use it.

He just exhaled and looked down at his hands.

“…Yes,” he said softly. “But I can wait.”

The honesty startled her. He hadn’t deflected. 

She blinked slowly. The snake's inner horizontal lids rasped together.

“Don’t,” she murmured. “Don’t wait. I need to know.”

He tilted his head. “Know what?”

“How much? How often? What you need to not starve. Is only animal blood okay?”

He frowned. Not in frustration. In… thought.

“Animal blood is fine. As for the rest, I don’t know,” he admitted. “I spent most of my undeath starved. Never drank enough to find out how much I really need. It was always just scraps. Controlled. Rationed. I have never fed so much.”

Her hands clenched.

He noticed.

“You asked,” he said with a shrug, trying for lightness, failing.

“I did.” She reached into her satchel and pulled out one of the oldest sealed jars—thick, black-glassed, with layers of bitterroot and bloodgrass wrapped around the rim. The preservation herbs flickered faintly as she twisted the seal open. The scent of blood—animal, old but still liquid—rose between them like steam.

He didn’t reach for it.

She extended it toward him. “Take it.”

“I—” He hesitated. “It smells odd.”

“It’s safe. There are fresher ones from the deer, but this one will turn the earliest.”

He took the jar. Not greedily. Almost reverently.

And when he drank—it wasn’t like the first time.

No frenzy. No moan of hunger. No shaking fingers or red eyes wide with need.

Just a slow, reluctant sip. As if testing whether the act itself would betray him.

When he finished, he set the jar down beside him. “It helps. Not great, but… sufficient.”

She nodded. “Next time, I’ll give you two. I know it's not ideal but, It’s all I have until we can kill something bigger or...”

A long silence followed. Not heavy. Just tired.

"Or what?"

"Or we figure something else" 

He didn’t say much after that. 

When her meal cas finished, she started reviewing her old maps of the tunnels as well as her travel notes.

Then he said, too quietly, “You smell differently in this form.”

Her forked tongue flicked reflexively.

“…What?”

“When you shift. You sent changes, I think.” He didn’t meet her gaze. “I miss your old scent."

She went still. “Not true, It changes a bit but the base scent remain the same I think you are picking the silent scent.”

“I hate it.” His fingers brushed the stone beneath them, slow, deliberate. “Smells like the crypt. You used to smell ... better.”

She looked away, blinking hard.

Her voice, when it came, was barely a whisper. “Sorry.”

“No.” His answer was too fast. Too sure. “It's stupid.”

Another silence.

Eventually, she lay back against the stone, scaled arms crossed under her head, eyes open. Hood retracting.

Just waiting.

He leaned back beside her, staring at the cavern ceiling—veined with bioluminescent roots that pulsed faintly, like nerves.

---

After a short rest, they kept descending the last section of the sinkhole. The fungal forest became thicker and thicker and the path became less and less recognizable.

The next threat came without warning. A pulse.

A hum.

Something wrong.

She grabbed his arm before she could name it. And then the cavern opened around them into a basin of fungal towers—looming stalks glowing with sickly green light. Nestled between them were ropers. Five. Maybe six.

Their disguised tendrils blended into the floor like roots.

It’s a trap. It’s all a trap.

Astarion said nothing. Didn’t flinch. He crouched beside her. Waited. And for a second—for just that second—she didn’t see the flirt or the liar or the elegant ruin of a man.

She saw the thing that had survived centuries, the predator used to skulking in the shadows. The creatures worshiped within Lolthite circles. He was still. Not Like prey pretending not to breathe. Like a predator choosing when to strike.

She led them around. Slowly. Quietly. Every step was a prayer she didn’t believe in anymore. With every step, she expected to feel a roper’s tendril grab her ankle and drag her, screaming into the maws of the aberration.

But it didn’t happen.

They made it out.

By the time they resumed their descent, the fungi were blooming brighter. Glowing stalks. Hollow vines that pulsed when passed. A cluster of hook horrors nested in the upper reaches of the cavern, all dormant. But one stirred. Elenya had just enough time to press her back to the wall before its jagged claw scraped stone. Its gaze slid across the cavern, scenting.

Then Astarion did something… odd. He didn’t freeze.

He sank—shoulders lowering, eyes half-lidded, heartbeat dropping. It wasn’t stealth.

It was mimicry again. Predator recognizing predator. Stillness, not born of fear, but of calculation. And the creature—sensing nothing familiar—turned and crawled back into the dark.

Elenya exhaled, low and slow. She hadn’t taught him that. She wasn’t sure who, if anyone, had.

---

By the time they made it to the lower chambers, they were bleeding time and heat. The passage narrowed as they left the basin behind.

No longer a cave.

Not even a tunnel.

Just a crack in the stone. A wound not meant to be walked through.

The air pressed close, dense with ancient breath. Her scaled shoulders brushed the walls. Astarion had to turn sideways, his coat catching on jagged stone. Even the sound of their movement changed—no longer steps, just friction. Just breath and stone and heartbeat.

Claustrophobia didn’t crawl. It clenched.

The kind of tightness that seeped into the lungs and made every inhale feel like a theft.

Elenya’s serpentform slithered ahead, body flattened to fit the spine of the tunnel. Her tongue flicked every few seconds, catching nothing but their own scent and the damp iron tang of mineral water far, far below. The temperature dropped again—not suddenly, but certainly. It sank into the marrow.

Until she tasted the panic, Astarion's,  on her tongue. The pull roared in her ribs. He was in pain. Something happened to him.

She turned arround and looked for threats and couldn't see any. She turned toward him and saw the fear and raw panic clenching his face. 

Astarion’s hand braced against the wall, trembling. His breath came in shallow pulls. Not loud—but wrong. The same way he’d sounded in the crypt. Like the air itself hurt. Like just being hurt.

His pupils had blown wide in the dim. Too wide. His mouth was parted but no sound came.

Elenya froze.

Not in fear.

In understanding.

He wasn’t here.

Not truly.

The walls were stone—but in his mind, they were closer. Tighter. Buried. The crypt was here again, under his skin, behind his eyes.

Shit!

She should have seen this coming.

She slithered back through the passage, her form compressing further, joints bending where they shouldn’t, until she was beside him. She reached slowly and touched his wrist.

Cold. Too cold.

“Breathe,” she whispered. “You’re not in the crypt. You're here. With me.”

His jaw clenched. He shook his head.

“No— I can’t— it’s the same—he  buried me—he’s here—he’s in the stone—he’s—”

“Astarion.”

She said it firmly. Not loudly. Just enough. Like casting a tether.

He looked at her.

Eyes glassy. Wild. But he looked.

“You are not buried. You are walking.”

Still, he trembled.

“I can’t move—I’ll wake up and it’ll be back—I'll be starving. He’ll be standing there, taking me back, saying I am his, I can’t—”

She didn’t answer.

Instead, she reached out, hand steady, and touched her palm to his face.

Her scales brushed his cheek. Sweat. Cold breath.

She let her forked tongue flick once—softly, slowly—just enough to taste his panic in full.

Then she whispered:

“You are not in the grave. You are not with him. You are with me, the stupid bard you hate so much. We are trekking in the Underdark. We are about to exit the sinkhole.”

“I—”

“You’re in my path now.”

Silence.

“Look at me,” she said.

He did. Barely.

And she whispered, voice quiet and true:

“I will drag you out again soon. Just follow my voice.”

He made a broken sound in his throat.

Not a sob.

Not yet.

But something close

She reached again—and cupped his face, thumb brushing his cheek. Her claws didn’t cut. They anchored.

“You are walking. You are here. You are with me. And you are not alone in this tunnel.”

And he collapsed forward, forehead pressing into her shoulder, arms catching at her elbows like he didn’t know how to ask for help but needed to hold something.

She let him.

For a long moment, there was nothing but breath, stone, and two bodies.

She whispered nothing more.

Words were done.

Only presence mattered now.

Eventually—eventually—his breath slowed. The panic began to ebb. And when he pulled back, his voice was hoarse.

“Feeling better ?”

He nodded.

“Great, let's get out of this shithole”

His mouth quirked, just barely. “Oh, darling. I was hoping you would say that.”

And they moved again.

Together.

Step by step.

They emerged into a wider cavern near the eighth descent, the ceiling high and studded with luminescent motes like false stars. The air cleared just enough to taste lichen and metal.

She didn’t look back. But she felt him there—close, but not touching. Like a shadow remembering how to walk. Like someone trying not to exist too loudly.

Their hands brushed once, accidentally, as the path shifted. Neither of them pulled away.

The stone narrowed again—so tight she had to press sideways, tail coiled around her leg like a second limb. Her ribs ached from where the walls forced her frame. Her tongue flicked—

And caught it.

Something ancient.

Salt.

Dust.

A scent like burnt bone.

She stopped.

He did too.

“What is it?” he whispered, so low she almost missed it.

She didn’t answer at first.

She turned her face, eyes narrowed in the faint shimmer of bioluminescence.

“…This tunnel ends soon.”

“Ends?”

“Opens. But it’s... rot.”

“Everything down here is rotten.”

She shook her head. “No. This isn’t the same.”

The weight settled around them again.

This time, it wasn’t claustrophobia.

It was a warning.

Astarion didn’t reply. But she heard his boots shift behind her.

She pressed forward as they passed ruined frescos of an old dark elven Slaver's highway crossing with a natural cave exodus.

They stepped into the basin. And froze.

Dozens of bodies, in various stages of death, rot, and scavenging, lay scattered across the floor. The fungal glow bled sickly green against bone and blood. She counted twelve drow, six serpentfolk, and the rest—beasts, humans, elves, a few dwarves. Most of them were unarmed. Most of them are branded.

A frown settled on her serpentine face. 

This does not make sense.

Why would slavers use this path? It was abandoned long before her birth. They preferred the one south of the coast. This is too close to the gate and to both Yuan-ti and trolls territory. 

"I guess we can finally restock some supplies now," she said, walking toward the bodies.

Astarion’s laughter echoed off the stone—too bright, too sharp for a place filled with the dead.

“Oh, darling,” he said, still chuckling, “I did not expect this from my favourite little saint. Looting corpses with such enthusiasm? I’m starting to think you might actually enjoy this.”

Elenya didn’t pause as she knelt by the nearest drow body, fingers already moving to undo the buckles of a bloodstained pack.

“I told you,” she said coolly, “I’m no saint.”

“Mm. You say that, but then you go around blessing vampires and whispering prayers to broken gods. Very confusing messaging.”

“I carry the living,” she said, eyes flicking up to him. “That doesn’t mean I won’t pick the pockets of someone else’s dead. It's lost to them eitherway.”

He grinned. “Now that’s the spirit.”

She yanked open a satchel and began sorting through its contents—ration packs, flint, a small notebook, two sealed vials with drow etchings.

Astarion crouched beside her, eyeing a glimmering blade half-buried beneath a serpentfolk corpse. “Tell me, is this your process for all battlefield clean-up? Or am I just getting the exclusive behind-the-scenes tour?”

She didn’t look at him. “You think the dead need gold?”

He arched a brow. “I think the dead don’t care either way. But I do enjoy watching the pious dig through intestines for spell components.”

She plucked a scroll from under a collapsed chest cavity and offered it to him without comment.

He took it, smirking.

“So no guilt? No muttered apology to the gods of self-sacrifice?”

“Gods don’t bleed,” she said. “We do. And supplies run out. Guilt won’t protect us when we’re starving or surrounded. I can't do much for them and their nearest kin is far away.”

Astarion's smirk faded—just a little. He watched her work, the speed of her hands, the way her mouth stayed tight and quiet like it had learned long ago not to tremble.

“You’ve done this before,” he said softly.

She paused, just for a second. Then:

“Too many times.”

He didn’t press.

Instead, he stood and stretched, his cloak fluttering behind him like the last breath of a storm. “Well then, General. Let’s make it count.”

She nodded. “Loot fast. We move in ten.”

And without another word, they got to work—two predators in a field of ghosts.

She crouched beside one of the corpses and pushed back the cloth over its shoulder.

There it was.

The symbol of Bhaal, carved in ritual scarring between the shoulder blades—delicate, fresh, deliberate. Sacrificial marks. Some were tattooed. Others carved crudely, like cattle awaiting slaughter.

Astarion stepped beside her. Quiet. His eyes flicked over the bodies, not with horror—but with calculation.

“Why were slaves marked with the god of murder symbol,” he murmured.

She nodded. “Sacrifices.”

He looked at her sharply. “Bhaal cult?”

“Looks like it. I still don't understand why they would offer sacrifice to a dead god though.”

She moved to one of the fallen drow—this one armored, insignia still half-visible despite bloodstains. A minor house. House Val’thelen. She remembered them: ambitious. Poor. Known to trade outside traditional channels. Known for offering favors to anyone with coin and cruelty.

The serpentfolk had struck hard. Their weapons still lay near their bodies—curved blades etched with poison channels cracked glyphs of ruin. But none bore symbols of worship. No divine marks. No zealotry.

This wasn’t a crusade.

It was a theft.

Astarion lifted a scroll case from the wreckage and sniffed the parchment. “Still sealed.”

Elenya took it, pried it open, and scanned the contents. Her breath caught.

“We are grateful for the valued friend support. House Val’thethel’s cooperation will be yours for any endeavours to come. Consider this shipment as a token of our good faith. The rest is to be delivered through the northern shaft beneath the Gate. 10 nights from Thalsnite.

Do not delay your visit. The eyes are watching.”

Astarion read over her shoulder.

“Shipment,” he said slowly. 

She nodded. “This was a delivery. Not a raid. The serpentfolk tried to intercept it. But it wasn’t a rebellion. It was… territorial.”

“Or sabotage,” he added. “Maybe someone didn’t want the Cult to get their offerings.”

She pocketed the scroll. “Either way, we’re not alone down here.”

They Finished looting quickly.

From the drow and serpentfolk, they gathered two Spellbooks– One arcane, one shadow-based. Elenya tucked them both into her pack. They also were able to secure a total of eight Healing Potions– Six standard, two greater, one potion of poison resistance, and one unmarked but glowing faintly. Three Vials of Drow Poison, two Smoke Bombs from a broken serpentfolk pouch, a Scroll of Silence, a Scroll of Hold Person, a Scroll of Feather Fall, Gold, about 190 pieces, mostly drow-minted. Some dry fungus jerky and preserved blood sausages. Edible. Barely. One functional studded Spidersilk set, several undamaged daggers, a pair of short swords, and a light crossbow with a quiver of 10 bolts. and finally some Spell Components – Including crushed pearl, incense, and diamond dust—enough for at least a dozen rituals.

Elenya packed with practiced hands, tossing items to Astarion without comment. 

He caught a blade. Weighed it. Nodded. Before donning the spider silk armour. They didn’t speak again until everything worth taking was packed.

Then she glanced back at the brands on the corpses.

“Five days late,” she murmured. “If these were meant for the cult… then someone up there already noticed they’re missing.”

Astarion’s smile was thin. “Then we should disappear faster.”

She looked toward the tunnel ahead. Deeper. Older. Marked with bones and rusted hooks. A slave path. A place she had fled once.

Now she walked it again—laden with blood, memory, and someone who might finally choose to live.

They stepped forward.

Into the dark.

---

The final stretch of the passage tunnel felt like a scar, smooth and unnatural—carved, once. Then collapsed. A dozen old pillars of carved obsidian jutted sideways like broken teeth from the walls, shattered from some long-forgotten quake.

The smell of sulphur rose. Old forges. Spore pits. And deeper things were in the south. But they will be going East. 

Finally, she pulled them into a crevice that opened into a shelf above another fungal basin. It smelled of rot and medicine.

“We’ll rest here.”

Astarion settled beside her, stretching out along the stone like it didn’t cut into bone.

She watched him in silence. He tilted his head.

“If you’re going to stare, Elenya, I suggest at least pretending it’s with desire.”

She snorted. “You’d know if it was.”

“Would I?” He smiled again. This time, his fangs glinted. But there was no hunger in his gaze. Only curiosity.

“You keep looking at me like you’re trying to solve something,” he said. “What is it?”

She was quiet for a long time. Then: “You seem better.”

“No. You just gave me what I need” gesturing to the necklace.

A pause.

Then he added: “Or maybe this lovely romantic getaway is finally starting to agree with me. death and rot tend to do that.”

They sat in silence. 

Elenya rested her head on her pack, letting her scales tighten as she prepared for daily brumation. Her inner and only eyelids shifted to humect her eyes and her breathing started slowing as her yuan-ti form began to reduce her metabolic activity. Her tail slithered and wrapped around her to preserve heat.

Her eyes stayed open but she felt her retina slowly closing.

“Trance,” she said.

“Not sure I could, too nervous,” Astarion muttered.

“Try.”

He answered as he settled down. “Maybe if you helped me unwind a bit. I’ve never bedded a serpentfolk, and as repulsive as it sounds, one can only wonder what it would feel like. I am always interested in expanding my horizons; maybe it's similar to Dragonborn. Could you be a darling and check if you have a s-” 

She cut him off before he could finish, “We eat our mates”. 

A long silence settled as exhaustion started to claim her form. 

“…Thank you,” he said.

“For what?”

“For not leaving me in the ground.”

She smiled faintly, eyes still open.

“I don’t leave people in graves."

He didn’t answer, and so they rested.

Chapter 13: The Farther you Go, the Closer I Get

Astarion’s POV

---

I wasn’t trancing.

I was trapped.

The cave had gone quiet hours ago. The fire had burned down to the kind of embers that whispered rather than warmed. Elenya lay curled near it, breathing steady, a faint ward-hum in the air. Safety—at least in theory.

But my mind had slipped.

And the nightmare was waiting.

---

I was in the palace again.

The scent hit me first—spiced blood, thick as syrup, clinging to velvet drapes and polished bone. The air was heavy with incense and decay, like perfume masking rot. The ceiling soared overhead, painted with torment, the gold leaf cracked from centuries of cruelty. Stained glass threw moonlight in colors too dark to name. Everything gleamed. Everything was soaked in memory.

I stood at the bottom of the grand staircase. The crimson carpet beneath me might have been fabric once. Or perhaps flesh. It was hard to tell. Even the silence here felt sharpened, like it could cut skin if you breathed wrong.

And at the top of the stairs—he stood.

Cazador.

My master. My maker. My cage.

Not a thread out of place. Not a lock of hair astray. Not a flicker of warmth in those glowing red eyes, only disdain wrapped in amusement. That smile—I knew that smile. The one he wore when he was about to give a lesson that bled.

“There you are, vermis,” he said, velvet over razors. “Still writhing around like a rat in a trap. Tsk. And after everything I gave you.”

I dropped to my knees before my mind caught up.

Muscle remembered what thought forgot.

Skull met marble.

Pain blossomed in white-hot streaks behind my eyes.

“You ran from me again. Abandoned your family. Have you no shame?”

He descended the staircase like a phantom given weight, every step measured for maximum dread.

“Ungrateful little cur. Did you think it would last? That you could hide from me?”

“Outrun me?”

He stopped in front of me. The scent of his robes—wine, dust, and blood not yet dry—filled my nose. His fingers curled under my chin.

I couldn’t look away.

“You forget what you are, boy,” he whispered.

“But I never will.”

A hand twisted into my hair.

And then—agony.

My ribs cracked under unseen force. My back split open like overripe fruit. I could feel the leash awaken under my skin, the arcane thread that hummed like a scream, vibrating with ownership.

“You are mine,” he breathed, mouth against my ear now.

“Forever.”

---

And then—

Dirt.

Weight.

Silence.

The coffin.

Entombed again. Arms pinned. Soil in my mouth. Roots clawing at my legs. The wood creaked above me, but never gave.

The air—gone. My breath—pointless.

“No one’s coming for you, little wretch,” his voice crooned.

“They never did. They never will.”

And I believed it.

Gods, I believed it.

I screamed.

---

I screamed when I woke.

Sat up too fast. Fire lit in my throat. Fangs bared. Claws half-drawn. The embers flared beside me, startled by my rage, or maybe mirroring it.

I was choking on ghosts.

Dirt. Silence. The hand in my hair.

I would never be free of it.

Not really.
Not ever.

And then I saw her.

Elenya.

She was sitting upright. Unmoving. Watching me.

One tear, silver and slow, slid down her cheek. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t rush in.

Just watched.

“I’m sorry,” she said, soft as smoke. “You were screaming. Begging me to kill you.”

I didn’t answer.
I couldn’t.

My chest still heaved, lungs burning with panic. There was no air. Still no air. No escape. My skin felt too tight.

“You don’t need to say anything,” she murmured. “Just breathe. I silenced the cave. No one heard. You’re safe—at least for now. Just breathe.”

Safe.

The word tasted like a lie. I exhaled. Or tried to. It came out in pieces.

“I will never be safe.”

She moved a little closer. Careful. Measured. Not reaching.

“I used to believe that too.”

I flinched. I hated her for saying that. For assuming she could understand. For watching me like I was some animal she pitied.

“Don’t. You don’t even fucking know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m sorry.”

Her voice wasn’t defensive. Just tired. Honest.

“Why? Why are you apologizing?”

“For seeing you like that. I know you wouldn’t want me to. But I did—when I found you, and now again.”

“You didn’t ask for me. But I still came. And I still saw.”

She looked away. Her jaw tightened.

“I used to scream in the dark too. And no one came. But sometimes… Ilmater watched.”

“Didn’t save me. Just… stayed. That mattered. But being seen? That can hurt.”

Gods, I hated her for understanding. For seeing too much.

“You said I called. That someone heard me.”

She nodded.

“Ilmater.”

I laughed.

Bitter.

“And what if I didn’t mean to? What if I didn’t want to be saved? Or to endure?”

“Most people don’t,” she said. “Not really. Enduring is what’s left when breaking isn’t an option.”

“I already broke.”

“I know. That’s why it’s no longer an option.”

The firelight played against her scales. They shimmered like old bronze coins.

“I didn’t follow the pull because I believed in faith. I followed because someone was hurting.”

“And I couldn’t walk away.”

“You really expect me to believe a broken god sent you to dig up me? I prayed to him. Plenty. He didn’t care.”

“I’m not here to convince you,” she said.

“I’m here because no one came for me. And I refused to be that person to someone else.”

I turned to her.

My voice broke.

“You’re asking me to bleed in front of you. At least tell me what you want from it.”

“You say it’s nothing. I don’t believe that.”

“Nothing comes for free. I learned that lesson. I lived that lesson.”

Her face twisted. Just slightly.

“You want to know what I want?” she whispered. “To not feel like a monster when I wake up. That's why I help, because if I don’t—then what was the point of surviving? What I get from this is my own sanity. Is that so wrong?”

“I don’t know you. What could I possibly want from you? I just remember bleeding in the dungeon. Praying. Screaming. No one came. I don’t want sainthood. I just don’t want to become like the ones who broke me or left me. So I try to find hurt things, help them. I keep looking for pain to not remember mine maybe. or maybe because I can't ignore it anymore.'

She stood. Eyes burning.

“When I felt you—I didn’t think. I just moved.”

She stepped back.

I didn’t move.

Couldn’t.

“You didn’t call for me. But I heard you anyway. That’s my truth.”

“Believe it. Don’t. I won’t try again to convince you. It matters not to me. I’m trying to get you to safety. And if I fail—and that’s still what you want—I’ll help you go.”

Silence.

Long. Heavy.

It wrapped around us like a second coffin.

I broke it.

“Why would you promise to kill me if you don’t want to?”

“Because no one ever promised that to me.”She met my eyes. “And that’s the kind of mercy I always wanted. Not pity. Not rescue. Just… choice.”

“You think that’s what mercy is?”

“No,” she said. “It’s the one I wanted. To be able to choose.”

That word twisted in my chest.

“You talk like choice mean something to me.”

“It does.”

“I’ve never had one. Not in over a century. Every path was a leash.”

“Then maybe tomorrow’s path will be better.”

“Why should I believe that?”

“What other choice do you have? Live eternity waiting for doom? Don’t say death. You’re not done yet.”

“How the fuck would you know?”

“I watched you all day, Astarion.”

She paused.

“You’re not suicidal. You’re desperate. You’re still in pain. I can feel the pull.”

“You think pain means we’re alive?”

“No. It means something in us still refuses to die.”

I laughed.

Empty.

“That’s your faith?”

“No,” she said. “That’s my damage.”

Then—

Softly—

“Why aren’t you safe, Astarion?”

I didn’t answer her.

Couldn’t.

Because I was staring at her like a madman—this strange, silent, unyielding woman who looked like no one and everyone all at once. Shifting face. Storm-washed eyes. A brick wall that moved like mist. She was cold, not cruel, not harsh, just cold. Not the kind you run from.

The kind that holds you when you’re burning.

And I hated her for it.

Because I couldn’t read her. Couldn’t name her.

And I needed names for things. I always needed names. Tags. Boxes. Weaknesses. I was good at seeing what people wanted and being it. I could be anything—beautiful, pitiful, dangerous, desperate. Whatever made them come closer. Whatever made them give.

But her?

She didn’t take.

She gave. Without asking.

And I—

I didn’t understand it.

Why?

Why help me?

I was nothing. A monster. A whore in chains. My worth was measured in kills and trysts, and she’d shown no interest in either. Not a single lustful glance. Not one.

Just help.

She wanted nothing. Just helped. She was an idiot. A noble, bleeding-heart idiot.

Or—no. Not an idiot.

Not naïve.

I’d seen her in the Underdark. Watched her move through the shadows like she belonged to them. She spoke names I’d never heard, recited rites like a priestess, and bartered with creatures that had no business letting her live.

She wasn’t innocent.

She was informed.

And still, she chose… this. Me.

And I couldn’t process it.

I tried.

I tried what I knew—flirting, tempting, teasing. If I could make her want me, I could understand her. Twist her. Pin her down in my mind. Get a grip on her damnable compassion.

But she didn’t bite.

She just saw through me.

Saw the cracks in the mask, the rot behind the beauty.

She stayed.

She thought I was a victim. A creature to be saved. Something buried. Something tortured.

That was what she saw.

But if I told her—

If I told her what I’d done—

What I’d been—

The lies, the seductions, the hundreds I lured into death with a smile, the bodies I left behind in alleys and gardens and warm silken beds—

She would understand.

She would finally understand what I really am.

A beast. A slave. A pet. A killer. A thing. 

A MONSTER

She’d change her mind.

Wouldn’t she?

…What if she didn’t?

What if she looked at me the same way after?

What if she still tried to help?

Would that make her mad?

Or would it make me something else?

Gods. I don’t know. I’m so fucking tired. So tired of pretending. Of being clever. Of looking for the angle. Of waiting for the knife. 

I want to rest. Just for a breath. Just long enough to forget what I am. Long enough to believe her. Even if it’s a lie. Even if she’s wrong.

Just for a moment.

Let me be more than what he made.

Just a moment.

Please.

…Fuck it.

Gods help me.

---

“My master’s name is Cazador Szarr.”

Nothing shattered. But something shifted. A tension eased. Or snapped.

“He lived in the Upper City. A palace made of blood, torture, death, and velvet. I lived there too—if you can call it that. I slept in cages or torture chambers, a kennel, most of the time. Obeyed every command.”

I swallowed.

“There are six of us. Six spawns. His ‘children,’ he called us. More like slaves, used for bait, ... for everything really. You saw Amelia and Petras with your familiar.”

I told her everything. How we lured victims. How we were starved. Bled. Humiliated. How disobedience wasn’t possible—his voice *lived* in us, inside the bone.

How I ran, once. For a boy, I can’t even remember. How I failed. How I was punished.

Buried. Sealed. Forgotten.

And how I would’ve still obeyed—if he’d come back.

That was the worst part. The leash that never broke. I don’t know how long I spoke. Long enough for my voice to go raw. For my hands to go numb.

Elenya never interrupted. Never recoiled. 

Present. Real. Alive.

"That’s what he did to me. He was a monster to us all. But me, he said, my screams sounded the sweetest. I can still feel him shuddering as he carved into my skin.  He pinned us against each other. Starved us, tortured us,  humiliated us, and used us.

Used me."

She shifted, slow as dusk, 

I’d said too much. Far too much. And now—now came the silence. I knew that silence. I’d performed for it before.

Spoken honey-slick lies, held trembling hands, whispered sob stories into pillow-soft shadows—just enough pain to charm them. Just enough truth to keep them close. And this? This was too much truth. I’d let it spill unfiltered, bloody and broken.

And she was still here. But for how long? Her face was still. Too still. And I felt my mind start to crack. This was it. This was the part where she would change.

Her eyes would go cold. Her breath would catch. She would realize what I was. Not just a victim—but a whore. A weapon. A monster wrapped in silk. All my worth in fucking and fighting.

She hadn't seemed interested in either. She hadn’t touched me. Hadn’t flirted back. Hadn’t pined.

She should’ve run by now. Gods, why hadn’t she? She sees too much. That’s the problem. She sees past the teeth and the charm, straight to the rot beneath. And now she knows. Now she knows. 

I glanced at her hands. Was she about to stand? She couldn’t. She couldn’t leave. Not yet. Not now. Not when I’d just— If she turned, I’d pin her wrist. I could stop her. I’m still faster. Stronger. She wouldn’t scream. She wouldn’t dare.

No—no, that was insane.

She’s helping. She’s helping, and you’d grab her like a fucking feral dog? 

But she’s going to abandon you.

You’re nothing to her.

You’re just a story. A haunted little pet, she’ll get bored with once the crying stops. 

Maybe…

Maybe I should kiss her. Say please.

Play the poor broken thing. Sell the sob story. Offer the only thing I’ve ever been good at. Maybe if I touch her—maybe if I make it sweet, if I make it desperate—maybe she’ll stay. 

Just this once.

I’ll beg if I have to.

Please.

Please don’t go.

Please don’t leave me here.

Gods, I’m so—

My thoughts shattered as her hand moved.

Slow. Careful. Intentional.

Not away.

Toward me.

Scaled fingers, dusk-glinting, reached into the space between us—not to pull away.

To offer.

Fingers open. Not clenched. Not defensive.

Just open.

And her voice, quiet as falling ash:

“That’s enough for now. Thank you. For telling me.”

And it stopped.

The spiral. The panic. The drowning.

It just… stopped.

I stared at her hand like it was a dagger. Then, like it was a miracle.

She wasn’t leaving.

She saw me.

And she stayed.

So I took her hand.

Because I couldn’t not.

Because of all the things I could fake—

That moment wasn’t one of them.

---

I didn’t speak again that night.

Or morning.

Or… whatever cursed slice of time it was now.

Impossible to tell, down here.

The Underdark doesn’t mark the hours. Just cold. Stone. The slow, relentless drip of forgotten water echoed through caverns like the heartbeat of a dead god.

But something in me—a half-memory of rhythm, of the surface, of before—said the day had passed.

Or maybe it was just the exhaustion finally dragging claws through my bones.

Still.

The silence between us wasn’t awkward.

Not anymore.

Not after what I’d said. Not after what she hadn’t.

And—gods.

Her hand.

Even now, hours later, I could feel the echo of it. The steadiness. The strange heat of her scaled palm around mine grounded me like some half-remembered spell. She didn’t hold me like I was fragile. Or tainted. Or needing to be soothed.

She held me like I was real.

And I hated how much I needed that.

How desperately I’d ached for one real thing.

Even now, as I followed a few paces behind her—eyes adjusting to the dim and the narrow—I could still feel her grip on my elbows from the day before. Could remember the way my head had dropped forward, forehead pressing lightly to her shoulder, when the ravine had all but swallowed me, and the walls were closing on me. I’d been panicking. Drowning in phantom dirt. A scream trapped behind my teeth.

And then—her hands. Firm around my elbows, steady as stone. She didn’t cradle me, didn’t murmur soft nonsense meant to soothe a frightened child. She simply held me upright, a quiet anchor in the press of the dark. And when my head fell, it found her shoulder—not by intention, not by desire, but by sheer, desperate gravity. The contact startled something deep inside me, a jolt that nearly sent me recoiling. I thought I hated being touched. I’d always believed I did—I learned to equate hands with hunger, mouths with ownership, and closeness with pain or want.

But this—this was different. Her shoulder was just a shoulder, warm and solid beneath my brow, carrying none of the sharp edges of lust or cruelty. It was a simple human thing, a body supporting a body, and somehow that made it more disarming than any caress. My breath hitched, unsteady, then evened out without permission. The scream inside me sank back into my chest, still there, still raw, but no longer clawing at my throat. Let me rest there. She also talked me out of it. She’d just… guided me out of the tomb, carried me. Like I wasn’t a burden. Like I was allowed.

I was almost angry at how much it calmed me. At how easily my body leaned in, starved not just for blood but for a moment of unclaimed quiet—of being touched without being taken. It shouldn’t have helped. It did anyway.

Who was she?

This strange, shifting woman with walls thicker than the Deep and transparent as glass, silence sharper than steel, and yet she—

She helped again and again without asking for anything. Which meant she was either the most dangerous kind of liar or the most dangerous kind of fool.

She walked ahead, silent as a shadow, her dark cloak swaying with each cautious step. I watched the way her feet avoided the loose stones. The way she didn’t look back. Not out of disregard, but out of trust.

Trust.

That word stung. I didn’t deserve hers. And she hadn’t asked for mine.

“You’re extremely bizarre,” I muttered, just loud enough for the sound not to vanish in the stone.

She glanced over her shoulder.

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

Her lips curled slightly. The barest ghost of a smile. Then she turned back and kept walking.

And I couldn’t stop following her.

---

We passed an altar near the edge of the slavers’ highway—drow craftsmanship, no mistaking it. Webs carved in black obsidian. Silver inlay worn thin by time and hatred.

I knew it immediately.

Lolth.

The Spider Queen’s face had been gouged out—just the vague suggestion of fangs left behind. Her eight legs were cracked and broken, snapped from the stone like someone had taken a chisel to vengeance. Overlaid atop the ruin was a newer carving: the coiled fangs of Zehir. Crude, but deliberate. One god devoured by another.

Elenya paused.

Too long.

Her shoulders went tight. Her gaze fixed—unmoving, unreadable. I watched the stillness grip her jaw. The shadow of something I couldn’t name passed behind her eyes.

“Don’t,” I said, lowering my voice. “If you stop to spit on every damned altar, we’ll be here a year.”

“Not every one,” she muttered.

She didn’t argue. Didn’t explain. But she reached into her pack and pulled free a small scrap of incense. Pale, thin, almost nothing. She lit it anyway. Watched the smoke curl like fingers reaching for something lost. And then— A faint, rose-gold glow stirred beneath her cloak. Soft. Subtle. Not divine wrath or radiant command. Just warmth. A breathless hush, as if the cave itself were listening.

Ilmater.

It wasn’t a spell. Not really. Just… presence. The air thickened around it. Not heavy, not choking. Just full. Like memory. Like old grief that remembered your name.

She didn’t kneel. Didn’t pray aloud. But her hands trembled once, fingertips fluttering like a frayed thread in a windless place. I didn’t ask, I wanted to. But the quiet around her was not a thing to break. So I stayed still. Watched the glow dim, the incense fade, and the mask fall back into place.

---

We walked on.

The tunnel narrowed into a throat, slick with algae and old slime. The air shifted again — sharp, feral. The stench of sweat and meat. Old blood clung to the stones in streaks like smeared ink.

Elenya slowed. Her tongue flicked out — twice, rapid — tasting the air in that unsettling way she did.

Then she lifted a hand. A silent stop.

“Careful,” she murmured, her voice somehow more sibilant than usual. “I can scent their poisons.”

Before I could ask — whose poisons? — I saw them.

Kobolds.

Three of them crouched low across the path, half-hidden behind jutting rocks. Yellow eyes caught the dim light, gleaming with that particular cunning all vermin seemed to share. One sniffed the air and bared narrow, filthy teeth.

Elenya didn’t flinch.

Instead, she stepped forward. Slow. Deliberate. Like a hunting serpent uncurling from stone.

And gods — her scales began to change.

Right there, in front of me, the pale grey-green darkened. Ripples of deeper jade and black bloomed across her shoulders, then spiraled down her arms in hypnotic whorls. Bands of near obsidian threaded over her throat and pooled beneath her eyes like painted war-marks. Her pupils narrowed to vicious slits, the iris burning not with warmth — but with a cold, cunning gold.

She opened her mouth and spoke.

Not Common. Not Elvish.
Something else — ancient and sharp. Draconic, I realized with a cold curl in my stomach. Harsh consonants wound around long, rolling vowels that slithered over the cavern floor like smoke. Her voice vibrated, low and sonorous, carrying a weight that felt older than the stone around us.

The largest kobold answered. Its tongue flicked, shoulders squaring, tail thumping the ground with a thinly veiled threat. It snapped back something guttural, then snarled. The other two shifted behind it, claws tapping anxiously against the rock.

Not impressed.

Snarls rippled through the narrow throat of the tunnel. One took a single step forward, posture tightening — ready to lunge.

Elenya only tilted her head.

And then — gods — something invisible but heavy coiled through the air. It pressed against my skull, an oily pressure that tasted like old metal. I flinched despite myself, feeling it slide across my thoughts — not touching me, but close enough that I wanted to claw it away.

The kobolds reacted instantly.

Their hackles shot up, eyes going wide and round. One let out a strangled yelp and bolted back the way it came, claws scrabbling frantically for purchase. The other two dropped where they stood, foreheads pressed to the stone, bodies trembling. Tails curled tight against their bellies in abject submission.

Elenya didn’t say another word.

She simply looked at them, that cold, sunlit gold burning in her eyes. Something passed between them — I couldn’t hear it, couldn’t sense it beyond that awful psionic echo — but the kobolds shuddered. Then, as if dismissed, they scrambled backward into a crack in the wall and vanished.

Silence reclaimed the corridor.

Elenya exhaled — and her scales slowly faded, returning to that mottled grey-green sheen I’d grown accustomed to. The dark bands lightened, the gold in her eyes dulled back to dusk.

She didn’t even glance at me as she walked on.

But I couldn’t move. Not for a breath.

Because that had been…

Not magic. Not a spell I recognized. Something older. Inherent. She’d compelled them. Without bloodshed. Without a single weapon. Just a flex of something.

I kept close behind her for another dozen steps, mind still catching up to what I’d witnessed — until finally I couldn’t hold it in anymore.

“What,” I hissed, voice sharp and echoing off the tunnel walls, “in the Nine bloody Hells was that?”

Elenya slowed. Her shoulders rolled in a lazy shrug. Then she glanced over at me, slitted eyes cool and unbothered.

“That,” she said simply, “was me using what this form is built to do.”

“Which is?”

She tilted her head, scales darkening again in faint swirls — amused, maybe.

“Yuan-ti halfbloods,” she explained, tone calm, almost scholarly. “All of them — whether from jungle tribes, temple cities, or these old castes that once ruled — have inherent psionics. Like all true yuan-ti, they’re born with a web of instincts and latent power that rides their bones.”

“Oh, delightful,” I muttered. “And what exactly does that entail?”

“Many things,” she said. Then she ticked them off on her clawed fingers, matter-of-fact. “They can change their coloration, much like a chameleon, to blend perfectly with stone or leaf. Sense any poison nearby — smell it in the air, taste it on the wind. By force of will alone, they can morph into the shape of any viper.”

Her eyes glimmered faintly, bright with old serpentine cunning.

“They’re innately resistant to magic. And halfbloods like this form — they can psionically entrance beasts, instill fear, or even push suggestions into weaker minds. Sometimes they can manipulate plants, like a crude form of entangle magic. Or call forth darkness, drown a place in it. Some can neutralize poisons at will.”

I stared at her.

“And you can just… do that?”

She gave a faint shrug, her scales catching the phosphorescence in quicksilver ripples.

“In this shape? Yes. It’s part of the form. This one is adapted from several bloodlines — most halfbloods have specialized traits depending on their house. Some have snake torsos in place of legs that can puff up and make themselves look larger to threaten rivals. Some have prehensile tails, good for climbing or choking prey. House Sseradess could breathe underwater. House Se’Sehen halfbloods could spit venom from snake heads. Others had arms ending in fanged maws that could bite.”

“And you’re saying all of that — that monstrous litany of powers — is just... normal?”

“For them, yes.” She shrugged, utterly matter-of-fact. “They are apex predators by design. They see no distinction between magic and biology — to them, psionics are simply an extension of their nervous system.  It’s extraordinarily practical. I wish I could wear this travel suit more often. Stealth, intimidation, poison resistance, psionic deterrence — all built in. When travelling through the Underdark or serpentfolk territories, there’s no more efficient suit.”

“Most surface folk are terrified and disgusted of yuan-ti treating them as just monsters. Even more so than vampires. But yuan-ti aren’t just monsters — they’re very strong forces that plan, build, strategize, and infiltrate. They rule entire societies designed to manufacture power. So I use this shape sparingly. But down here? It’s recognized. Even respected. The kobolds saw a halfblood — a creature higher in their chain. That’s why they hesitated. That’s why they fled.”

And maybe that was what this place respected.

Not kindness. Not mercy.

Power.

Not just strength — but presence. Will. The kind that didn’t need a blade to make others kneel.

"You sound like you admire them. Is that why you were so offended by my previous reaction?"

“Oh, I do admire their physiology. As I said, it's a very useful travel suit, but no, I don't admire them nor do I identify with them at all if that's what you are getting at,” she said, almost laughing. “Yuan-ti societies are vile. Rigid caste systems, casual cruelty, endless ritual slaughter. They perfected the art of prioritizing power over empathy — and paid for it by fracturing into petty, insular states that never trust one another. I wouldn’t call them kin. But I know there is nothing inherently monstrous or uncivilized about Yuan-ti themselves. It's difficult to be nice when growing up in a demon-worshipping society.”

She continued in that calm, eerily unbothered voice:

“They worship mostly Sseth and Zehir — or at least claim to. That’s their primary gods, the Slitherer Supreme and the great serpent. Though, truthfully? Many of those other serpentine gods you sometimes hear about in old texts — Merrshaulk, Varae, Tlaloc — are often just masks worn by Sseth. Or clever fabrications, false idols they feed to the Scaleless Ones, meaning anyone not Yuan-ti. Keeps the outsiders guessing.” 

Her scales rippled faintly over her shoulders, dark patterns sliding and reforming like oil on water.

“Their worship almost always demands blood. Sacrifice. It’s a transactional devotion: we give you death, you grant us power. Simple. Brutal. Effective in its way. But it’s also why their societies twist so readily toward cruelty and power above all. Even their caste system is a divine mandate. Purebloods at the bottom, halfbloods like this form in the middle, abominations and nagas at the top. Everyone plays their part, and if you deviate, you’re fodder for the next ceremony. They are kept in a constant battle for survival.” 

She looked away, her forked tongue flicking once into the cool air as though tasting old echoes.

“That’s why I was so irritated by your disgust before. Not because I feel kinship with them—gods, no. I find their societies revolting. But it frustrates me when surface folk call them mindless monsters. Because they’re not. They’re just… precisely what they were shaped to be. Favored, yes. But also cursed by their own making and the whims of their cruel gods. The vrael olo — the ‘favored ones’ — are masters of domination, infiltration, survival. But they’ve also been survivors of a system that engineered them into cold, hollow tyrants, always looking over their shoulders for the next betrayal. They are also extremely intelligent. Some of them are actually quite nice when brought outside the confines of their societies.”

"I am not so sure about that." 

" Soon we will hit the serpentfolk tunnel network, and maybe you will see. It's much safer than our journey so far and much faster. Stay close."

I stayed close.

Not because I was afraid.

But because I wanted to.

Because for the first time in a long, long time…

I wasn’t alone in the dark.

Midway through the second day, her prediction came to fruition. The stone beneath our feet changed. 

Smoother. Reinforced. Less wild.

We entered a wide, circular cavern veiled in silence and dust. The air held still—too still.

The walls told stories: coiling shapes, mosaics bleached by time. Gods with too many eyes, worshippers with too few fingers. It all felt ancient and ominous—like a dream nearly remembered, but never understood.

Elenya knelt near the cracked altar in the center. She touched the stone like it mattered. Like it meant something.

“What is this?” I asked, quieter than usual.

She nodded once. “Storing and Sacrificial chamber. Offerings were made here to bless the traveller’s return. This is the entry point of the serpentfolk tunnel network.”

I glanced around at the broken relics, the moss slicking over stone steps like decay with patience.

“Charming,” I murmured. “Do you think I’d qualify for a sacrifice?”

She didn’t answer.

She was about to—her mouth parted. But then something shifted.

The air.

The silence.

Stillness.

Then—movement.

Above.

A shape stirred on the ledge, cloaked in gloom. Pale, lidless eyes blinked through shadow.

Elenya’s lips barely moved. “Hook horror. Don’t move.”

I didn’t.

I’ve heard of them. Never seen one up close. The thing looked like a nightmare stuffed into a shell—blind, plated, taloned, twitching. Massive hooked claws scraped the stone, dragging its bulk forward as it sniffed the air with twitching mandibles.

My fingers inched toward the dagger at my belt. Slow. Silent.

“No,” she breathed. “It’s blind. Tracks scent and vibration. Don’t move.”

I listened.

We waited.

And the silence swelled like a wound.

I stopped breathing. Anything not vital, I shut it down. Even the sound of blood behind my ears felt too loud. My muscles locked into place, trembling with the need to act.

Elenya didn’t twitch.
Still as stone.
Eyes unblinking.

Her breath was controlled, her presence invisible.

After a moment, she reached into her satchel. Wordless. Expert. She pulled out a meat bundle—wrapped in the thick leaves she’d been foraging earlier—and lobbed it toward the tunnel we’d come from.

It hit the ground with a dull slap.

The beast turned instantly.

And pounced.

It devoured the offering in a frenzy—swallowing meat, leaf, and rock alike—before scuttling down the corridor, deeper into the dark we’d emerged from.

Elenya was already moving.

She popped a potion with practiced ease and tossed me another. Then she took flight and fled. Fast. Silent. Fluid.

I followed.

We didn’t stop until the faint sounds of claw on stone faded behind us. Until the air grew still again, and the shadows around us felt like ours.

She didn’t exhale until long after. But when she did—it was like a spring uncoiling. Her shoulders lowered. Her stance eased.

I watched her more than the shadows. She hadn’t panicked. She hadn’t hesitated. Not when it counted.

She’s… competent. No. More than that. She’s experienced. Not just some holy messenger playacting bravery. She moves like someone forged in fire, not blessed by grace. Someone who earned her survival. Who knows what death smells like and how to step around it?

I should be unsettled. Instead, I was thrilled and impressed. 

She did say she was good at this. Good at crawling between monsters. 

And I never took her seriously. I assumed I’d be the one to lead us through danger. The one to charm, distract, and protect. I’ve hunted the streets of Baldur’s Gate for more than 160 years. I know how to read, hide, stalk, survive and kill. 

But this?

This isn’t the city. Down here, everything watches. Everything listens. And nothing forgets. And somehow— Somehow, she belongs to it. I’m starting to wonder if I’m even the sharpest weapon in our pairing. I have yet to see her fight. And everything in her led me to believe that she wouldn't want to bring harm. But maybe I have been operating under a false assumption. 

We didn’t speak for nearly an hour after the hook horror left. Just walked. My feet ached. My muscles burned. But she didn’t complain—so neither did I. I had no real reason to, all this journey felt ... felt liberating. I was fed, protected and watched for.

Eventually, I broke the silence.

“I suppose this is what passes for a romantic getaway in your book, but darling may I suggest something a bit less smelling and more relaxing next time.”

She glanced back, a smirk tugging at her mouth.

“Wait until you’ve seen the honeymoon, then.”

Gods help me, I laughed. Only a little. But still.

Once we had engaged the serpentfolk tunnels properly, things changed. Elenya waited until the final sibilant syllables of the parting rites faded into the shadows before she recast her spells. Nondetection. Death Ward. The old magic settled over me again, quiet and bitterly familiar now. Her hand brushed my shoulder as she wove the enchantments, and just like that, the world stopped pressing against my skin quite so harshly. I hadn’t realized how tense I’d been until that moment.

Neither had she, apparently.

Because something in her posture shifted. Loosened. She walked with more ease, more purpose. The subtle twitch of her ears faded, her shoulders lowered, and the barest hint of a hum found its way into her breath. They were subtle tells. But I noticed. 

We were moving faster now. The difference crept up on me, like realizing a fever had broken only after you’d stopped shivering. She’d told me this morning that the serpentfolk tunnels were safer and faster. I hadn’t believed her.

I hated that she was right.

No drow patrols. No stink of mind flayers or deep rot. No eerie fungal growth or half-digested bones scattered like forgotten prayers.

Just silence.

And shimmering walls.

The passageway wound like a serpent’s spine, elegant in its curvature. Carvings crawled across every surface—scaled glyphs, elegant scrollwork, pictographs of serpents entwining gods. It wasn’t just functional; it was beautiful. In the way a well-made blade is beautiful. Practical. Precise. Lethal.

“You said the sinkhole was the worst of it,” I muttered, throwing a glance behind us at the yawning descent we’d left behind.

“And I wasn’t lying,” she replied. Her head tilted, eyes scanning the wall. “We should be past the deep crossing of the Winding Waters now. If we keep heading southeast, we’ll start climbing soon. With luck, we’ll emerge near the Fields of the Dead by tomorrow.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “And this route is… safe how?”

She gestured toward a carved column, where twin serpents coiled around each other in an endless loop, their scales etched in fine, maddening detail.

“As safe as anything gets down here,” she said. “These tunnels are used. Maintained. Patrolled. Watched.”

I stopped walking. “Watched? By what, exactly?”

“Not what. Who.” She tapped the column lightly with her fingers. “Serpentfolk. Or rather—their masters.”

I narrowed my eyes. “I didn’t know they lived in the Underdark.”

“They don’t,” she said, already turning to walk again. “Not properly. Most of them live above ground—jungles, swamps, forests, east of the Troll Hills. Around Serpant Hill. Ss’khanaja is the closest major city. Built around a passage like the one we took yesterday, but not truly of it.”

“And this Ss’kha-whatever... serpent utopia?”

Her laugh was humourless.

“Ss’khanaja is a caste nightmare as I said earlier,” she said, voice echoing along the tunnel’s curve. “The surface city sits like a crown atop a sinkhole. But inside—in the chambers —it’s all naga. High-caste. Extremely Arcane and intelligent. Terrifying. They rule from circular temples, surrounded by servants, scrolls, and gold.”

“And everyone else?”

“Fodder. Servants. Breeders. Lizardfolk and pureblood serpentkin live in the pits below along the sinkhole. They’re assigned caste roles at birth and punished for deviation. The city survives off trade, mining, magical engineering, raids, blood rituals, and the worship of Zehir and Sseth.”

I wrinkled my nose. “Charming.”

She gave a small nod. “They use these tunnels to move quickly across the continent. Slavers. Priests. Emissaries. They avoid troll territory, though—too much trouble. Trolls are impulsive and regenerate. Takes a lot to kill one properly.”

I paused. I couldn't ignore the way she spoke about this since earlier that day—it wasn’t purely academic. It was familiar. Lived-in.

“How exactly do you know all this?”

She didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow.

“I spent six months there,” she said. “As a servant.”

I stopped dead.

“You what?”

She turned to face me, calm and utterly unbothered. “I served at the Naga court.”

“And didn’t get eaten?”

She snorted. “Not that kind of servant.”

“You keep saying things like that,” I said, “and expecting me not to be concerned.”

“I was studying,” she replied. “Language. Rites. Poisons. Alchemy. The Sword Coast calls the Serpent Hills uncivilized, but that’s just because no one documents them properly. Ss’khanaja has some of the most complex civilizations and societal systems I’ve ever seen.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And you just… strolled in?”

“Not exactly.” She shrugged. “My shifting helps. Racial barriers fall apart when you can look like someone’s sister. And I have a ring of tongues. Even without, I picked up enough Yuan-ti to survive.”

I blinked “You keep managing to be both deeply unsettling and wildly, bizarrely impressive.”

“Thanks.”

“Have you ever, I don't know, considered a normal occupation?”

“I taught music at a brothel once.”

That brought me up short.

“You’re not serious.”

She didn’t even glance back. Just kept walking like she’d commented on the weather—her tone maddeningly casual.

“Harp. Voice. Basic flute.”

I stared at her back like it might sprout wings or scales next. Gods. I’d assumed she was some wandering idiot with a penchant for bad decisions. but this?

“You’re serious.”

She half-turned, that infuriating poker face still in place—the one that made it almost impossible to read her, always said she was toying with me or dead serious. 

“Deadly,” she confirmed, face slack.

I didn’t know whether to be impressed or concerned.

Probably both.

Every godsdamned day, it was something new. Some fragment of madness she’d casually tossed into her past like a broken trinket, only to drag it back into the torchlight as if it were nothing. As if being a shapeshifting holy woman with alchemical expertise and an eerily calm relationship with death wasn’t enough.

“So,” I said, a smirk tugging at my lips, “why’d you stop? Let me guess—you got fired? Or you ran off with one of the dancers?”

She let out a low hum. “Apparently, teaching the workers nothing but drinking songs, anti-aristocrat anthems, and tragic requiems was deemed… inappropriate.”

I barked out a laugh—sharp and surprised, completely involuntary. “Gods. You are insane. That’s ridiculously brilliant.”

She gave a quick “Was that a compliment?”

“Don’t flatter yourself too much, darling,” I said smoothly. “It’s not you, I find brilliant. It’s the mental image of some poor brothel matron trying to explain to a baron why his favourite escort just started singing a lousy protest hymn mid-blowjob.”.

“That happened,” she said, barely changing her expression. “Sort of. It was the headmaster of the city watch, actually. He did not appreciate being called a tyrant mid-verse. I’ll have you know that Le Chant de la Révolte is an underappreciated masterpiece.”

I clutched my ribs, still wheezing from laughter. “Had you no regard for your employer, you fiend?”

She slowed just a bit, falling into stride beside me. Her eyes danced, but something softer sat behind them. Something uncertain.

“None whatsoever.”

“Did you ever—how do I put this delicately—partake in the entertainment before being thrown out?”

“No, I haven’t,” she said dryly. “Though I was propositioned more often than reasonable.”

“Tragedy. Wasn't the brothel any good?”

She tilted her head, considering. “Depends on your metric, I suppose. If we’re talking ambiance and overpriced incense? Lovely. If we’re talking freedom, safety, and fair wages... no.”

I raised an eyebrow. “And how would you know?”

“I helped a third of the workers escape,” she said. “Set them up with other contacts or different lives.”

I went silent for a beat.

And then: “Wait. And they fired you over your setlist?”

“Never got caught.”

I let out a low whistle. “You’re either very lucky or very good.”

“Neither, borrowing faces take care of half the job,” she said, flashing a crooked little smile.

---

We stopped. The tunnel widened—just enough to stretch without scraping stone. A good place for a break. She set down her pack and rolled her neck with a quiet sigh.

“Short rest?” she asked.

“Gladly.”

We settled into the dust and silence. I leaned back against the wall. My body ached, but not as much as my mind.

“What happens if we do run into serpentfolk?” I asked.

“I know a few names to drop. Enough rituals to mimic. And I still have my ring of tongues.”

“And if they don’t believe you?”

She gave me a sideways glance, smirking.

“With a face like yours? No way they won’t assume you’re some high-caste consort or ceremonial offering.”

I blinked. “Was that a compliment?”

“No. That was an objective observation of your… physical conspicuousness.”

“You’re calling me strikingly pretty?.”

“I’m calling you conviniently noticeable.”

“That’s just cruel. My ego will never recover. you could at least say I am too beautifull.”

“That was accurate, you are noticeable .”

I pouted.

She laughed.

Then she rummaged through her pack and pulled out two small jars.

“These are the last of the cow’s blood I bought from the butcher. A little old, but they should have kept. I’ve still got a jar from yesterday’s deer—though we’ll need to restock soon. Hopefully the Fields of the Dead still have game.”

I took the jars without complaint. They weren’t pleasant—slightly sour, like licking an iron fence—but better than the moldy sewer rats Cazador used to toss us.

“You’re full of surprises,” I muttered, wiping my mouth.

“So,” I added, watching her, “how exactly does someone end up serving in a naga court? Sounds like a job you don’t get to resign from.”

She paused. The humor faded from her eyes.

“I was captured.”

“Of course you were.”

“I was trying to free a caravan. They got caught in a trap. I got caught instead. Happens sometimes.”

“Heroic,” I said, tilting my head. “And incredibly stupid.”

She shrugged, unbothered. “At night, I escaped. Shifted form. Pretended to be a scout who got separated from her unit. Enough truth to sound plausible. Enough lies to stay alive. They didn’t question it.”

“And you just… decided to stay?”

“Almost left. Then I heard one of their poets reciting near the fire—an upper-caste halfblood, proud and distant. The cadence, the symmetry... It was beautiful. Unlike anything I’d ever heard.”

I stared at her. “So let me get this straight. You remained in a city of sadistic, snake-worshipping zealots because you liked their poetry?”

She smiled faintly. “I stayed because curiosity is a stronger leash than fear.”

Gods, she was mad. Or maybe just broken in the same strange ways I understood.

“And what exactly did you do in this charming den of scaled barbarism?”

“Helped, where I could. Hid people. Made trades with low-caste lizardfolk. Healed those who couldn’t flee. Learned their language. Studied their poisons. Took notes. Got scolded for not bowing low enough. Not all of them were monsters you know! some even were kind. they were just borm in a system that breed cruelty”

“You make it sound like a research sabbatical.”

“If your sabbaticals include vivisections and soul-binding rites, then yes. Lovely time.”

“And your exit? I assume your high cast naga didn't take kindly to resignation letters.”

“No,” she said softly. “Uxsais didn’t take kindly to much of anything.”

“That’s the one who ran the court?”

“No, she was the high naga I served under—more mage politician than priestess. But worse than all three combined. Cold. Calculated. And not even a zealot. Just cruel.”

I leaned forward, something in her tone catching.

“So how did you get out?”

Her jaw tightened. But she answered.

“I felt the pull. Stronger than usual. Strong enough that I couldn’t ignore it. It led me to the slave pens. Uxsais had received a batch of halfling children. For food. No purpose. No rite. Just wicked entertainement. A new delicacy.”

A pause.

“I ran. With the children. While she was away from the city.”

“You what?”

“I shifted into her butler form and dripped myself into his cologne. Forged her seal. Got us past the border with a caravan. Never looked back.”

“And she never came after you?”

“I made sure she wouldn’t recognize me by scent,” she said, voice suddenly hollow. “That part… took time.”

I didn’t ask what she meant by that.

Not because I didn’t want to know.

We resumed our walk in silence for a bit, the tunnel sloping upward. I noticed now how her eyes flicked across the walls—not for threats, but for meaning. She wasn’t just navigating. She was reading this place.

I cleared my throat.

“You’ve done this a lot, haven’t you?”

“Done what?”

“Risked your life, learned strange things, helped people who weren’t asking for it…”

She smiled, faintly. “Yes, but it's not always that bad.”

“Any good stories?”

She blinked, surprised. Then—humored.

“All right.”

She held up a finger.

“One. In the Sunset Mountains, I lived with a family of thri-kreen for a season. Insectoid hunters. Most people think they’re just wandering monsters, but their dance rituals are highly complex—coded language, memory, grief. I helped them perform a mourning rite for a lost clutch. They let me join the hunt. I still have a fang.”

“You joined a thri-kreen hunt?”

“I got the kill.”

Second finger.

“Two. I once got trapped in a svirfneblin vault city after a tunnel collapse. Deep gnomes. Brilliant craftsmen, secretive. While I was there, I watched a trial unfold where a gemcutter stood accused of stealing someone's laughter—literally. he had bound it in a crystal and sold it. Their legal system treats emotion as property.”

“That’s…” I paused. “I don’t even know what that is.”

“Strange.”

Third.

“Three. I helped evacuate a firenewt enclave near the Smoking Mountains. A volcanic eruption was coming. They didn’t speak Common, but they understood song. I played a fire rhythm on a shell drum, and they followed me out.”

“You saved fire lizards by drumming?”

“Yes.”

Forth

“...I’m starting to think I hallucinated you.”

“Four. In the Shining Plains, I spent time with a nomadic fey-touched tortle clan. Gentle folk, extremely long-lived, as they keep travelling in and out of the feywild through a hidden portal. One of them had been alive since the Time of Troubles. He taught me how to fold paper into charms.”

“You fold paper?”

“Only when I’m bored.”

She held up her last finger.

“And five. I once wandered into a derro lair in the Upperdark. They didn’t kill me because I insulted their lolthite drows and helped a priestess complete her collection of surface metals. It's very common for derro to devote themselves to some strange quest.”

“You… broke bread with the derro?”

“She made me the court insult-keeper for two weeks. It was a weird time.”

I blinked. “How are you still alive?”

“Luck. Spite. And not being stupid enough to fight when I can listen instead.”

“What pulls you to these places?”

“Sometimes curiosity. Sometimes the pull.”

“You keep talking about this pull? What is it exactly?”

“It’s like a hum in my chest. A thread. It leads to people in pain. Or on the edge of something. I follow it. I don’t always only follow it. Sometimes I just… go.”

“And you don’t plan anything?”

“I used to. Now I prefer to see what I find. My world used to be very small, Astarion. Bleak. Controlled. This… wandering, helping, learning—it gives me purpose.”

“You couldn’t find that in, say, a cozy two-story house with a nice hedge and a dog?”

“I’d feel like I was pretending. I’ve tried. But when it’s too quiet, too soft—I just sit there. And I feel hollow. Like I’m watching life through a window.”

---

We resumed travel, taking the southeast passage she’d mentioned. The climb was gradual, noticeable, but merciful. The air began to shift—cooler, but fresher. Less stagnant.

The tunnel architecture changed, too. More symmetrical. Columns carved like coiled serpents, each decorated with spiralling glyphs and colour-coded notches.

“These markings,” she said, brushing her fingers along a wall, “this is part of their navigational system. Each glyph is a transit code. Like addresses.”

“Tactile design. The tunnels were engineered by magical architects. Naga don’t rely on maps like we do.”

“These,” she said, tracing a curve with her hand, “are territorial sigils. Markers used to denote who can pass.”

“That one looks like a fang in a spiral.”

“It is. That’s the House shurce I think. An old sect of naga priestesses who controlled hunting rites.”

I crouched beside another symbol—three lines meeting in a triangle.

“And this?”

“Travel routes. It means the tunnel splits into three viable exits. Ss’khanaja cartographers were obsessive. They kept entire archives down here—stone records.”

I ran a hand along the edge of a carved groove. It wasn’t just art. It was navigation—elegant and hidden.

“I have to admit,” I said, “it’s… ingenious.”

“Not just mindless monsters then?”

---

We kept walking. Upward. The air changed slowly. Lighter. Still damp, still ancient—but tinged with a trace of something more.

Hope, maybe.

Or the illusion of it.

Chapter 14: A Friend in the Silence

Elenya’s POV

---

They were three, maybe four hours from the surface.

The climb would be steep, but manageable—at least by her standards. The rock was firm. The air was thinning, drying. A new gradient of wind pushed through the tunnels, brushing along the back of her neck with the faintest scent of old lichen and fresher soil. That meant light. Not yet. But soon.

The scent tugged at memories of older tunnels, of escape, of hands bloody on stone and eyes straining toward light that wasn’t there yet. The wind always whispered of things to come. But it never promised.

Her eyes tracked the dimness.

For now, the cave stretched still. No immediate threat. No movement. No echo. Just the faint rhythm of Astarion’s breath—slow and shallow, in trance.

Elenya sat cross-legged by the fire, her pack open like a disembowelled beast at her side. Her fingers moved on their own, practiced: grinding, sorting, tucking dried leaves into cloth, adjusting weight distributions. She had already recounted and inventoried everything twice. Her quill scraped across the margin of her journal as she transcribed the mural fragments from earlier. The ancient language was decayed, and the syntax was stilted. She translated it anyway. Symbols mattered. Patterns mattered.

But her mind wasn’t on the page.

Not really.

Astarion’s voice still echoed in her thoughts.

“My master’s name is Cazador Szarr.”
“We slept in kennels.”
“If he had come back—I would’ve obeyed.”

She had committed the words to memory before they even left his mouth.

They weren’t just confessions. They were fractures—slivers of something larger, something shaped in cruelty and rehearsed through survival. Not just pain. Not just loss. But training. Worship, twisted into terror. The kind of reverence born not of love, but of architecture—systematic, enforced, enduring.

She could hear it in the way he said Master. Not like a title.

Like a law of gravity.

He hadn’t told her everything. Of course not. But she didn’t need him to. She was trained to listen between silences. To read what hadn’t been said.

The posture. The hesitation. The way his hands trembled without permission. The catch in his voice when the leash—real or remembered—pulled taut inside his ribs.

“If he had come back—I would’ve obeyed.”

It hadn’t been a metaphor. Or shame. It had been truth.

Speaking of conditioning and compulsion that created a reflex. A reflex encoded so deeply, after a year of starvation and burial, it felt like desire. Going back to the master was better. 

And that—that—was the part that twisted in her gut.

Because she understood it. she remembered it. 

Gods help her, she did.

She knew what it was to crave orders. To long for someone else to hold the reins of your life, because choices only ever led to the same pain. Wanting things meant vulnerability. Yearning meant exposure. But obedience? Obedience was clean. It made the world narrow. The pain is bearable.

For him, obedience had been forged with blood compulsion and probably some conditioning. For her, it had been something cultural, Systemic, less personal, but as Ritualistic. Her hand paused in the mortar. The half-ground root sat like a bloodstain in her palm.

Elenya had been tortured too. Not in the same way. Not as long. But long enough. Long enough to know that there were wounds deeper than skin. Long enough to know that sometimes, survival wasn’t strength—it was dissociation perfected into a craft.

Her breaking had been sex and violence. And pain, pain was part of all breakings. And ritualized violation above the temple stones. In there, she had become what they wanted: still. Quiet. A thing. Empty. She survived by building a void around her core and living behind it.

But Astarion? He had survived by performing. Smiling. Seducing. Weaponizing beauty as shield and bait. His breaking was made through forced cruelty.

They had learned different masks. But the reason for wearing them was the same.

She looked at him.

He was trancing now—limp, soft, limbs uncurled like an animal too exhausted to feign danger.

He looked… young like this. Too young. No smirk, no false, practiced charm. Just lines of weariness too deep to be erased.

Elves aged oddly. She couldn't guess how old he was when he was turned. But he couldn't have been more than 60 years old. Another thing he had in common with him. Now he looked like someone who'd spent centuries learning how to make others want him, and still didn’t know what he wanted for himself.

Even his rest looked rehearsed. How many years did it take to learn that stillness and readiness could keep you alive? She didn’t need to ask. She already knew. It hadn't taken her too long after all. 

She turned back to her herbs. Began grinding again. Mechanical. Hollow.

But her mind wouldn’t settle.

---

If Astarion’s bond to his Sire was that strong, it couldn't be merely psychological conditioning? Was it arcane in nature, psionic, or biological? Does this curse have a magical or divine component? Was it tied to the vampiric curse in the blood, or was it something else—something ritualistic? Parasite or pact?

If so, it couldn’t just be broken by distance. It would need severance. Undoing.

Not just freedom, but unmaking.

A release, or a reweaving of the arcane thread.

Resurrecting Astarion was an option. Too costly and too rare, but still an option. Figuring out how to unmake these bonds would require a lot of research. Killing Cazador would be the obvious solution, but somewhat impractical at the moment. 

His master, Cazador,  had other spawns. And if he could control all of them the way he had Astarion—if their bond was central, not peripheral—that meant any severance could trigger mass retaliation. Pain. Madness. Death. And she would not… she would not become the cause of that. They were not just obstacles. They were people. People like Astarion.

Time had taught her this brutal truth: if you tried to save everyone, you would end up saving no one.

She needed to focus.

Just one, for now.

Just him.

And she had no idea how to do that.

Yet.

Her fingers twitched. Her pen moved.

“Spawn loyalty—biological? Magical? Investigate ritual severance. Possible links to pact-binding or divine curse. Check Underdark Lolth-kiss texts. Consult Mordayn fragments on compulsive inheritance.”

It was insufficient.

But it was a beginning.

A thread in the dark.

---

Still, her mind drifted.

Back to him.

Not his suffering. Not the horror. But the curiosity.

He had asked questions.

About her. Not just superficial ones. Deeper ones. About mercy. Purpose. Why did she stay? Why did she care?

He asked about her past.

Not many did.

Most of the broken didn’t look back. They needed her in the present. As tool, as shield, as guide. Never as a person.

But Astarion?

He watched her like she was a map with missing legends. Like her contradictions couldn’t be ignored. Like he needed to solve her before she dissolved into mist.

It was—unsettling.

And… intriguing.

And she hated that she felt that.

She hated that something in her answered.

The fire cracked, low and tired. Her herbs were finished.

Earlier, he’d chuckled.

Too brightly. Too sharply.

Like a cat that had been half-drowned and still came back purring, tail high, eyes daring you to look away first. Scratched to hell. Still preening.

He was infuriatingly disarming.

It made her furious. And fascinated.

Every time she looked at him, she found herself thinking things she had no business thinking.

The curve of his mouth when he teased her.
The precision of his hands when he cleaned a blade.
The low hum in his voice when he laughed, like it came from somewhere warmer than it should.

She hated how easily he slipped under her guard.

It wasn’t safe.

Not for her.

Not for him.

NO.

Not tonight.

Her gaze shifted back to him.

He looked peaceful now. Almost soft. Like the boy he probably never got to be.

She didn’t trust it.

But she didn’t disturb it either.

She leaned back slowly, arms braced behind her, spine aching.

Her breath felt tight in her ribs. Not painful—just too shallow to mean anything. The kind of breath that pretends to be calm.

She set her hands palms down on the stone.

It was cold. Grounding.

---

Her gaze wandered upward, toward the stone ceiling—uneven and soot-smudged, where centuries of breath and torchlight had left their stain. She let her eyes close.

And she prayed.

Not aloud. Not in Common or Deep Speech or even Celestial.

Not because she couldn’t speak.

But because the words would burn if she did.

They rose within her—quiet, bitter-edged, rehearsed so often they didn’t need breath to live.

I miss you.
I know you’re near. I feel it. Like always. But I miss your voice.
Not the voice of thunder or prophecy. Just… yours. The hush that steadied my hands. The stillness in the corner of the room.
I wish I could commune. Properly. But the components are too limited, and I can’t afford to burn what’s left.

You were the only one who stayed. Even when you couldn’t save me. Even when I wasn’t worth saving. You stayed.
You told me to keep myself. That was the pact, wasn’t it? That was the one thing I had to protect.
I have tried. Ilmater, I swear I’ve tried. I shaped my life in the image of your endurance. I made sense of your silence. I stitched your patience into my skin.
That was enough. Wasn’t it?

A pause. A hitch in her inner rhythm.

Was that enough?
Is this still right?
Am I still right?

Because I feel lost.
More than I ever have. And I’ve been lost before.

The warmth crept in again, like it always did. Familiar. Grounding. The presence without demand.

But she didn’t lean into it.

She held herself upright.

Why him?
Why did you send me to him, of all people?

The vampire.

Her mouth tightened.

It’s too close. Too raw. Too…
It reminds me of things I buried. Buried well.
Of her.
Of him.
Of everything I worked to become after.

I never hated them—not the ones like him. That’s why I never tried to kill Sedlan. I knew they weren’t all monsters.
But this is harder. This is… different.
This is proximity. This is touch. This is memory, dressed in new eyes and asking questions I thought I had silenced.

He makes me remember.
He makes me feel.

She didn’t want to feel.

Not like that.

Not again.

Her spine stayed straight, arms folded across her knees like a ritual. A fortress.

But deep inside—under the carefully arranged breath and the stillness—something ached.

And that something whispered:

Please. Just let me hold to the pact.
Let me keep myself.
Even if the world changes. Even if he does.

She didn’t expect an answer.

But the warmth did not leave.

It never had.

The cave held its breath.

No wind. No fire crackle. No heartbeat, even—just the echo of a silence so deep it rang.

And then—

A voice.

Not booming.

Not foreign.

But familiar.

So achingly familiar it hurt more than comforted.

It filtered into her thoughts like a thread pulled through old fabric—soft, patient, unmistakable.

Her friend.
Her god.
Her family.

I asked you to keep yourself, little one.
Not to kill it.

Her throat clenched. She hadn’t realized she had confused the two—keeping herself and burying herself. They felt so alike now.

The child of the night is yours to save.
Yours to help. Not mine.
I showed you his pain because I could not take it. You had to see it. You had to choose.
I cannot help him. But you—
You can.

The fire at her back suddenly felt warmer. The ground is less sharp. The silence is less alone.

I remember, little one.
All of it.
I remember the dark you came from.
The way you endured.
The scream you never made.
And the blood you claimed.

Fear not to be wrong little one 
I am always watching you.
I will always be Watching for you.

The words faded—not vanished, just released. Like a hand unlatching its grip, trusting her not to fall.

Elenya sat still.

The ache didn’t go.

But it is no longer hollow.

She touched her wrist, where the old scars lay quiet.

Then reached, slowly, for her journal.

She needed to write this down.

Not for doctrine.

Not even for memory.

But because someone had spoken to her.

And she needed to prove—to herself—that she had listened.

Presence.

Gentle. Intimate.

A memory of shelter without a roof. A tether that never pulled, only held.

It wasn’t salvation.

It was him.

The space between ribs softened. Her shoulders uncurled.

And just like that—without sigh or sob or shimmer—Elenya exhaled.

Somewhere in the dark, water dripped once. Steady. Familiar.

The world did not shift.

But it waited.

She wasn’t alone.

Not entirely.

---

She needed to focus. Not feel. Not remember. Not spiral. Just focus.

She exhaled through her nose and pressed two fingers to her temple, summoning the fog. That cool, clinical veil she’d mastered in Menzoberranzan—the one that let her dissect pain instead of drowning in it. She needed it now more than ever.

The pull was still there. Faint. Persistent. Not urgent, but unyielding.

It had remained with her even after the tomb, after the dirt and rubble gave way under her nails and she unearthed Astarion with trembling hands and a potion of hill giant strength burning in her blood like wildfire. She hadn’t even known what she was digging up. Only that something down there was hurting, and calling.

She hadn’t expected to unearth echoes of the past. The eyes of ...

NO! She is not thinking about that.
All to say that Astarion was still suffering. But day after day, the pull grew softer. less insistent, especially since they escaped the city.

Still, they had escaped. Somehow. And that—that—was what made no sense.

If Astarion is to be believed, Cazador should have eyes across the city. Layers of loyalty stitched into the walls. He had gold to spend, and magic to spend it on. Familiars, wraiths, loyal spawns and a horde of undead. Also, from what Astarion had told her, he could feel his spawns like a wolf felt the air shift before the kill.

So why hadn’t the sky fallen?

Why had it taken him almost a week to send two spawn? Just two? Half-starved, half-broken things that hadn’t even known how to track them?

She tightened her jaw.

Something was off.

Either Cazador was underestimating them, or he was watching.

Waiting. It made her teeth itch.

Or maybe Astarion overestimated his master's hold on his thrall and his ability to locate them. But then, how would the spawn have known where both her Astarions were hiding?

Something was not adding up. 
She started writing multiple missives to some contacts to be sent out next time they passed by a place having access to carrying pigeons. She could handle a vampire lord. Just one. She’d protected people from worse. But Astarion being his spawn? That was a whole new category of complication. It wasn’t just about running anymore. Or hiding. It wasn’t even about breaking chains. She needed to understand the leash itself. The mechanics. The blood geometry. The magical and biological anchors that linked a spawn to its master. Was it instinct? Arcane compulsion? Divine curse? Could it be severed without collapse? Reversed?

There had to be a way. There was always a way. The body was just a puzzle. So was magic. You cut, you test, you measure. You rebind. You undo what others assume is permanent. She would need to study vampirism. Unfortunately, the only place she knew to conduct proper anatomical studies of vampires was going to be difficult for her to go back to. She could try impersonating someone else and writing, but she knew deep down it wouldnèt work, they would never reveal these secrets to outsiders.
She needed to go there.
Not now. 

Let's secure the charge, Astarion, first.
To do so, she needed to observe his tormentor. 

She set her quill down.
Took a breath
Her pupils flickered, shifting black as her senses split.

---

The world narrowed.

Her spider—small, delicate, precise—clung to a beam high in the rafters. Just ahead: a black door with no handle.

 She willed the spider to advance behind it,  and saw as the familiar snuck under the door a Large chamber open. Bare, no furniture, no decoration. only cages and a single filthy bedroll soaked with blood on the floor. The room's walls are slick stone, damp with condensation and the scent of rot. Heavy iron bars line each multiple cages. The floors are covered in bloodstains that have never fully dried. Chains hang from the walls, stained with old rust and older suffering.

The scent of rot curled beneath her nose through the familiar's senses: damp velvet, burnt hair, old iron. The walls were stone-veined, trimmed with rotted banners. Iron sconces clung like barnacles. She knew this place.  Or so many other like it. 

Not a cry of pain.

A wail, raw and ragged, the kind that scraped from the throat only when the soul had nowhere left to hide.

Elenya flinched through the spider’s eyes.

On the right side of the chamber, three people, three spawns, hung by their wrists from iron hooks embedded in the ceiling. Their feet didn’t touch the floor. Their eyes were wide, too starved for tears. One had been impaled by three spikes, another, Aurelia her mind supplied,  twisted weakly, a trembling wreck of old beauty and fresh wounds. The third, Petras, had just started screaming.

And in the center of it all stood a tall, skeletal figure clad in decaying chain armour, robes tucked beneath greaves blackened by age and ash. Magic pulsed in twin circles behind its eye sockets.

It didn’t speak.

It simply worked.

With a slow, clinical precision, it dipped a spike into a brazier of coals. Then turned.

Petras tried to scream again.

The connection cut as bile rose to her mouth.

She blinked back into herself with a sharp inhale. The fire had gone low. Astarion lay across from it, curled into himself in that eerily quiet way he had. Arms folded loosely. One hand twitching every now and then—like he was fending something off even in trance.

---

They’d surface soon.

Just past the ridge, if her map was right. Once they climbed, they’d cross the Field of the Dead.

Once a battlefield. Now farmland.

Tilled. Furrowed.

But not clean.

Bones still surfaced in the spring, tangled in roots. Forgotten cairns crushed under plow. Rusted armor feeding wheat meant for market stalls.

It was wrong.

The soil screamed, and no one heard it.

She hated that place.

But it was open. Isolated.

And maybe they could hunt something there.

A fox. A deer. Gods, even a rat with enough blood in it.

If not…

Her hand drifted to her forearm. Fingers brushing the inner vein. Barely a whisper of pressure.

If not, maybe she’d just offer.

He needed to feed.

And her feelings on it? That was hers. Not his.

He’d done nothing wrong.

It wasn't his fault.

It wasn't him

He was hungry.

He was hurting.

And she…

She was haunted.

Maybe she could give something without it feeling like surrender.

Blood not bite.

Maybe this time...

Maybe.

---

She turned back to her journal and finished transcribing the runes carved into the murals they'd passed that morning. Old dialect. Elvish mixed with Abyssal. She noted the syntax—marked patterns of protection and loss. The mural had depicted a woman cloaking herself in her own blood to shield others from a rain of knives.

She recognized the symbolism.

When the last sigil was copied, she shut her book and rubbed her eyes.

Brumation was calling.

Her body slowed before her mind did. Cool stillness trickled through her bones like winter coming. She let herself sink into it, into the deliberate slowness of her kind. Not a trance. Not sleep.

Stillness.

---

Elenya dreams of a forest with no floor.

Only strands.

Silken threads stretch across an endless dark, shimmering with dew and lies. They hum like harps when the wind stirs.

Above, a butterfly flutters—wings cracked, translucent, glowing with soft sorrow. It should not be alive. One wing is torn nearly in half, but still it flies, drunk on pain and purpose. Its colours shift constantly—bruised purples, deep blues, silver like moonlit scars. Mourning and mischief in flight.

Below, the spider waits.

Massive. Beautiful. Drenched in moonlight and malice. Her legs are thin as blades, her abdomen ink-black, covered in pulsing red sigils like living script. She watches the butterfly with hunger and disdain—but does not move.

“Come closer,” the spider whispers. “You are already caught. You just don’t know it yet.”

The butterfly laughs—a sound like glass shattering in a child’s hand.

“Then let me offer myself to you.”

She drops a gift.

A tiny, trembling creature of light and shadow—half-formed, skin threaded with darkness, blood thrumming like a lullaby. It does not crawl. It does not cry.

It simply waits.

Offered.

The spider lunges.

Fangs pierce the bait.

And then—everything turns.

The spider jerks back, limbs twitching. Her silk begins to rot at the edges. Her body contorts—legs curling, mandibles splitting, mouth blooming into flowers slick with rot. She screeches, gagging, thrashing.

“What have you done?”

The butterfly perches above, flickering with light and wound.

“You called me sister,” she sings. “You forgot what sisters do.”

The web tightens.

Not around the butterfly.

But around the spider.

Spun not by prey—but by her own hunger.

“You devoured what you did not understand. And now you are part of it. Now what was yours is mine.”

Then—

A new figure enters.

Not a creature.

Not kin.

An angel.

Kneeling at the web’s edge, face streaked with blood and tears. His wings are broken halos woven into threadbare nets of gold.

He weeps.

Not for the spider.

Not even for the butterfly.

But for the bait.

“You chose the knife” he whispers. 

He reaches for the trembling meal.

But cannot touch her. The web is too thick. Too woven. Too much of her now.

The butterfly, glowing above, speaks without words:

“It like it more this way. For the truth to bloom. For us to choose.”

The bait begins to glow—faint, then blinding. Her body flickers between forms.

Elf. Shadow. Flame. Fey. Light.

She is becoming.

And the spider dissolves into her own web—unmade by the hunger that made her.

Far above, the sky cracks.

An eye opens.

And watches.

---

The silk was gone.

So was the eye in the sky.

But her heart still beat like war drums in her ribs.

She woke gasping—no sound, no scream, just a sharp breath, half-choked in her throat.

“Eleyna. Are you alright?”

Astarion’s voice was close. Too close.

She blinked. The cave ceiling above her was just rock—no threads, no forest, no spiders. Only the face of a pale elf, framed in moonlight and concern.

She sat up, fingers pressed to her chest. Still fast—but slower now. Settling. Like a frightened animal curling back into itself.

“Just a weird dream,” she muttered. “Nothing major.”

“Hmm.” He tilted his head, studying her. “The kind of ‘nothing’ that makes your pulse echo across the cave?”

“I honestly don’t know what that was.”

“Your heart—it was pounding,” he added softly. “It woke me.”

“Was it?”

“Frighteningly fast,” he said, watching her carefully. “I thought you were having a seizure. Or a very vivid fantasy. I wasn’t sure whether to intervene or observe.”

“It was a dream. That’s all.”

“But your pulse—”

“Is settling,” she interrupted, fingers at her throat. Steady now. Slower. “See? Just a weird dream.”

“Hmm.” He didn’t sound convinced. He leaned back on his heels, watching her like a cat might watch a curtain rustle—pretending not to care, but bristling with interest.

“Ah. Was it one of those dreams?”

“Not like that,” she said flatly, brushing the moment aside with surgical precision.

“Did I feature in it?” He grinned, all teeth and shameless charm. “Because I’m told I make quite the dream—”

“No.”

“Pity.”
He pressed a hand to his chest, mock-wounded.
“Truly, I’m beginning to feel neglected. You rescue me from a grave, drag me through half a continent of caves, and still—not even one steamy dream? Not even a cameo? I’m starting to think you don’t find me attractive.”

She rubbed her temple.

“It was a dream about a spider and a butterfly and... a screaming flower. It wasn’t exactly titillating.”

“That sounds like a metaphor for desire.”

“It was a metaphor for breakfast.”

“Ah.” He paused. “Those do get confused sometimes.”

She gave him a sidelong glance, then reached for her pack.

“Shouldn’t you be trancing?”

“I did. And you’re deflecting.”
He tracked her movements with lazy precision, lounging like a serpent beside a sunlit path.
“But I admire it. Stoicism suits you.”

She didn’t respond. She was strapping on her satchel with too much care.

“Let me guess,” he said. “You’re going to pretend this never happened. No dream. No trembling. No pulse like a war drum.”

“No pulse,” she echoed dryly, “is more your department.”

“Oof. A vampire joke. From you.”
He placed a hand over his unbeating chest.
“Be still, my heart.”

“That’s not hard for you.”

“I walked right into that one, didn’t I?”

“You ran.”

He stood, stretching with languid elegance.

“Well. Next time you decide to jolt me awake with your heartbeat, do try to work me into the plot. I’d like at least a supporting role.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, brushing dust from her trousers.
“Right next to don’t push the vampire down the cliff.”

“Darling,” he flashed her a grin, “if you push me, I’ll take you with me. I cling beautifully.”

She laughed—unexpected, quick.

And he smiled—something small, almost genuine.

They packed quickly, exchanging only the most essential words—supplies, timing, spells to prep. The mood shifted easily, as it always did. Whatever flirtation he’d tried, it didn’t stick. She was already somewhere else—half in her thoughts, half on the climb ahead.

By the time they began their ascent, the sky above had shifted from dusk to proper night. Two hours, maybe more, until full dark. The tunnel curled like a serpent around itself—one spiral after another, the rock damp and slick in places, half-carved and half-collapsed.

Astarion moved lightly. He always did. Even when quiet, he felt too loud to her senses. Too present.

She didn’t mind.

The climb was steep, but not difficult. What made it unpleasant was what waited above.

She could smell it before they reached the mouth of the exit.

The air turned dry. Old. Dusted with ash and loam.

And when they finally breached the last ledge and stepped out onto cracked ground, the full shape of the Field of the Dead unfolded before them.

Moonlight glinted off rusted armor poking from soil long since churned for crops. Pale grasses waved like the hair of buried soldiers. Cairns slouched in the distance—too many to count, too few to honor the dead.

She paused, breath hitching faintly and looked over the shadowed furrows, eyes narrowing. The soil here was rich in bone and iron. It would make for good hunting grounds—fox, deer, maybe even stray rabbits if they were lucky.

Or—

Her hand drifted, almost unconsciously, to her neck.

If not…

She’d figure that out later.

For now, they moved forward. Quiet. Watchful.

Toward whatever the night would bring.

Chapter 15: The Watcher of Threads

(Ilmater’s POV)

---

The fog had returned. It rolled low and slow, veiling the memory—of choices, of pain, of life not yet allowed to bloom.

He felt her before he saw her.

The little one.

His chosen.

Most beloved.

Shaking again. Not visibly. Not to the world. But inside—in the marrow, in the places no healing could reach. Where sorrow coils and never leaves.

Ilmater did not play.

Could not play.

Null’s games were always losing ones. Even before.

He had already lost, long before the game began—as had Lolth, though she spun her losses into cunning and pride.

No point in joining.

He never did.

He only watched.

Gently. Quietly.

As one watches a child trying to hold together a cup of shattered water.

She was right. She always was, in almost everything but the one thing that mattered.

But the little one was good.

So painfully good.

She was like her, from before.

No—better.

And that was no small feat.

Still, there she was—his most beloved child—walking across the Field of the Dead with heavy boots and heavier thoughts.

The same one who once knelt in a Menzoberranzan gutter, mouth too bloodied to pray, heart too bright to die.

Enduring. Always.

Why did she always have to endure?

He had whispered to her once—not a command, not even his creed. Just a plea:

Keep yourself.

Not your purity.

Not your joy.

Not even your hope.

Just yourself.

The bone and breath and battered will that was you.

Because he did not need to ask endurance. She was his creed, etched into fragile skin. Or too much of it. He could see that now, just as he could see the fog.

So he had asked her to keep herself.

Not vanish into hurt.

Not let them win by letting them take her.

It was the only pact he ever truly made with any mortal.

Not one sealed in blood, or law, or miracle.

A wager, if it could be called that.

I will stay with you. Always. If you stay with yourself.

That was the agreement.

No chains. No demands. Just watching. Waiting. Holding the thread so lightly it could be mistaken for absence.

And now—here she was again.

Still keeping.

Still walking.

Still choosing.

But this time, not alone.

Beside her walked the child of the night.

Eyes red with hunger.

Heart stitched with cruelties not his own.

One Ilmater could not help. Should not be savable.

And yet—she may yet save him.

That was the new gamble.

Ilmater did not play.

But he did wager.

And this—this was the quietest of wagers.

Not that she would heal the vampire.

Not that he would become something other than hunger.

But that she would remain herself in the trying.

That she would not lose what they had promised—what he had placed his own godhood upon:

That she would keep herself.

Even in compassion.

Even in tenderness.

Even when it hurt more than any lash.

He had seen the moment she lifted the spawn from the crypt.

Saw the way her hands trembled, but did not fail.

Saw the way her soul called out—why this one?—and still carried him.

He had not answered then.

Because she already knew.

He watched now as she thought about offering her life blood—her body, her  fear— the symbol of trust she had spent her whole life being denied and denying.

The last time burned her. 

It was not about feeding.

Or maybe it was.

It was about choice.

About giving freely what had once been stolen.

About refusing to become only the wound.

You did not become the wound, he whispered across the fog.

Please remember.

He saw the trembling in her limbs, the shame she tried to swallow, the deep suspicion buried in her ribs.

But he also saw her eyes—clear, stubborn, shining with a light not even Lolth had managed to ruin.

She was not healed.

She was not healing.

She needed to want to.

to want anything.

And in this story, that mattered more than any miracle.

He did not speak aloud. He did not burn a sign into the sky.

He only reached—softly—with the threads of his watching.

And somewhere inside her, the little one felt it:

A warmth in her ribs.

A hand on her back.

A whisper that did not need words:

You are not lost. I see you. I still see you.

You are walking the right way.

Remember.

The fog thinned, and so he watched.

As the leap was made.

He could see now. 

Thanks to her.

Saw the child of the night.

Saw his soul.

He always felt his pain. Felt all pain.

but now he can see him.

Still Anathema.

But he can see him.

Maybe with time, he could even take some of it.

Not yet. 

He walked under the mercy of his chosen. 

But rules are rules. 

Even ones he regret swearing to.

He hoped for soon. 

But for now he could see him. And he could see her better. 

The fog thinned lifting the cloaking a bit. 

Something is not adding up. 

It’s too powerfull.

what did she do to the little one.

He hears a wind cackling in the back  of his mind. 

Soon.

He placed his wager. But still, refused to play.

Soon

Maybe the cloak could be lifted.

Or maybe he could give the little one his own.

He never used it. 

not since the burning carriage.

but she needed to be able to control it.

Maybe he would finally witness her leaving the fog. Weilding it. Understand what she truly was.

" You will love it without ever seeing it. Because it will chose to be no one. Like I did and by extension like you did". 

Those words said to him used to sounds so true. She'd said them afterall. And she was right about most things. But when he heard the child bleeding. Heard the sound of her soul praying. Well he wanted them to be wrong. 

that was his creed. 

martyrdom, mercy and compassion.

but like so many times before.

Maybe his creed was broken

She already refused the whip. 

maybe she could shed the cloak. 

Maybe the child of the night would teach her that. Show her how to hunger.

Ilmater’s can’t teach her what he isn’t.

Maybe she would show him how to truly endure.

It was all risk.

All fragile, mortal risk.

He had only hope.

He wishes he could tell her. Give her some of the answers so she can understand more this game.

But he can’t. 

Even though he refused to play. 

He still had to follow the rules. 

He could only find loopholes. 

The main player loved these.

So he would help through every loophole he could find. Until she bloomed. Until she remembered.

She already showed him the limit of what he was preaching. 

But for now, she kept walking.

And so he held the thread.

Even through the fog.

Until it lifts.

He could wait.

He could endure.

After all, His fog was eternal.

Chapter 16: All That I Lost

Summary:

It’s the first time Astarion truly tests the leash with Elenya—and the first time he realizes he doesn’t just want to escape, he wants to live. It’s also the first time Elenya lets herself be that vulnerable, not as penance or duty, but as choice.

Notes:

This chapter was… a lot.

Writing this was equal parts painful and cathartic. It dives deep into monstrous craving, shame, tenderness, and that terrifying spark of wanting more than survival.

(Astarion’s POV)

---

We rose from the caves just west of Trollclaws Mountain, where stone cracked under frost into scrub and dying pine. Behind us lay the Field of the Dead—gray, silent, swallowing all memory. Ahead stretched wilderness. Wild. Wind-torn. Impossibly vast.

Two hours past nightfall. The air was sharp as shattered glass, laced with resin and cold sap. Each breath drove needles of ice down to my lungs. Above us, the stars spilled reckless and bright across a sky so deep it felt hungry—like it might lean down and swallow me whole if I dared look too long.

Gods, I had missed this sky.

No ceilings. No walls. No cave or grave or dirt. Just… open.

I stood still—truly still—and let it pour through me. A hush that wasn’t born of fear, wasn’t pressed into me by command. A silence earned by clawing my way out of a coffin, out of a city that reeked of rot and spilled secrets.

The last time I stood under a sky like this, I was still alive.

Or close enough.

That was one hundred and sixty years ago.

I had dreamed of this—this exact spill of stars and thin air—so many times that the real thing felt wrong. The sky seemed too high, too vast, too careless to notice a wretch like me.

But it pulled at me. In my chest. In my throat. Across places long hollowed by chains and clawed dirt. It scraped inside me like a rasp, threatening to wake something I hadn’t felt in decades.

A second unearthing.

Well. Technically the third.

But who’s counting?

I laughed—quiet, unsteady—and turned toward her.

Elenya stood a few paces off, head tilted, eyes wide, mouth parted with small, almost childish awe. Her shoulders were loose. Her hands empty. For once, she looked like something meant to be here—shaped by earth and wind, not by knives and old grief.

And she looked at me like that.

Gods help me, it did something terrible to me.

Not fear. Not lust.

Just… gladness. Joy. Like old parchment catching flame—so starved it burned too bright.

It terrified me more than anything Cazador ever devised.

Don’t get used to that, I scolded myself. She’s probably only marveling at the breeze.

But the way she studied me—like I was something worth knowing, worth staying to see—unraveled me. I didn’t know how to hold it. Couldn’t wrap chains around it or bury it under charm.

We walked on, just the two of us, wrapped in a hush so complete it felt fragile. One sharp word might have shattered it. She said we needed food. Supplies.

Which meant blood.

That, at least, was familiar ground.

We tracked deer through the brush—small hooves, startled eyes, bodies steaming with the memory of sun. My senses drank them in before I ever saw them. I could hear the rapid tick of tiny hearts. Smell sweet musk under thick fur, faint iron of blood racing too close to skin. Even the heat called to me—radiating through the dark like lantern glow, brushing over every hollow place inside.

The forest didn’t mind me. The shadows curled around my shoulders like fond old dogs. Even the night seemed to hold its breath to let me pass.

I brought one down before it could cry. Quick. Gentle. My fingers curled around its throat like a reliquary, thumbs stroking the pulse once—almost tender—before I bit.

Its blood was hot, a living burn against the cold that lived in me, marrow-deep and centuries old. My veins felt sluggish by comparison—an ancient, reluctant machine. This blood poured in like molten wine into frozen riverbeds. I shuddered, mouth clamped tight, swallowing greedily as heat bloomed along old scars.

No mind behind its eyes. No horror. No silent plea. Just blood—clean, immediate, untouched by memory or voice.

It rolled through me like velvet set on fire. I swayed, felt it flood all the hollowed tunnels inside me, knitting them together with stolen heat.

And for that trembling, knife-edge moment, I was alive.

Not spawn. Not echo. Not wretched shadow of someone else’s cruelty.

Just… me.

When I rose, the stars seemed to ripple. The ground looked too thin to hold me. My breath caught on teeth that had forgotten how to sigh. Every sense was cut raw—so sharp I thought it might break me.

I could hear my own heart. Slow, sullen, echoing like distant war drums. A single beat might stretch half a minute, the pause so wide it felt like a promise of death. But under this fresh blood? It sounded eager. Almost eager.

The cold inside me curled back, chased by this small furnace I’d stolen. The deer’s heat pooled under my tongue, seeped into ribs that had forgotten warmth.

I almost closed my eyes just to savor it.

And then I laughed. Broke out laughing like a lunatic, the sound too bright, too thin, scraping across my chest as though it might tear something open. Because gods, this was joy. Raw. Sharp. Dazzling. So bright I didn’t know how to stand under it.

She was watching. From the treeline. Still. Silent.

Didn’t flinch. Didn’t draw back.

Just watched.

And I prayed—like the same fool who once begged Cazador for mercy—that she still saw a man. Not only a monster.

Because I wasn’t sure I did.

We made good use of the kill. Four jars filled, sealed tight, swaddled in crushed herbs. A far cry from the filth Cazador made us grovel in. I should have been smug.

But it was her who smiled.

Just barely. A ghost at the corner of her mouth. But I saw it. Saw how she packed each vial like a small triumph. How she pressed peppermint and lavender into the wax with neat care. How she arranged everything with the tenderness of someone who once knew hunger and vowed never again.

She looked at those jars like they were proof. Of what, I didn’t know.

“That should keep us a few days,” she said, voice edged soft. “Maybe longer if you pace yourself.”

I rolled my eyes, made a sound of mock disdain.

Truth was, I wasn’t pacing a damned thing. The blood still roared through me. My body felt drunk on it—every nerve a live wire, each breath scraped cold and exquisite. The slow pump of my heart sped just a fraction—enough to make me dizzy.

Everything was too bright. Too lush. Too much. The stars shook with cold silver light. The ground seemed to shiver, brimming with roots whispering secrets. I could smell Elenya—salt, old iron, crushed mint—like her blood was already on my tongue. I could hear sap climb inside trees. Tiny creatures pushed through leaf mold, their hearts leaping at the shape of me.

The Trollclaws were rough country. Feral. Unclaimed. But tonight?

They felt generous.

We climbed a ridge shot through with ironwood and cracked stone. Wild sage crowded the rise. Bloodroot bloomed in small defiant hearts. Starpetals opened pale throats to the moon.

She knelt there, quick hands knowing exactly which roots to take and which to spare. Like the land trusted her. Recognized her.

And for the first time, I understood.

Why she wandered. Why she didn’t hunger for hearths or locked doors. There was something honest here. Immediate. Brutal in its lack of pity. Forgiving by virtue of not caring at all.

Or maybe that was just the blood, wrapping everything in sentiment.

I huffed a laugh. Drunk on deer. Add it to my catalogue of humiliations.

Still.

The air was clean. The night deep. My body thrummed with borrowed life, and for once, I didn’t care that it wasn’t mine.

I didn’t tell her any of it.

I just slowed my pace. Let my hand brush hers when we bent around a fallen log. Close enough to hear her whisper plant names like prayers.

And I didn’t mock her. Not even a little.

Because in that ridiculous, fragile instant—I thought maybe I could stay. Maybe there was a world that wanted something like me in it, not only as predator or prize.

And maybe, just maybe, the joy battering my ribs wasn’t borrowed at all.

---

She stepped ahead into a clearing where moonlight poured like milk between the black-limbed trees. The air here was calmer—less torn by wind, hushed as though something waited.

She flicked her fingers, murmured a word under her breath, and I felt it at once: a subtle tug across my skin, like thousands of tiny hooks catching and peeling away filth. Grime, dried blood, pine sap—all stripped in a breath that left me tingling from scalp to heel. I glanced down, half-dazed. Clean. So clean it felt obscene, like being skinned.

Then she did the same to herself.

And just like that, the mulch she’d been smearing on us for days—crushed sage, peppermint, myrrh—vanished.

Her scent came back in full, savage bloom.

I nearly staggered.

She’d been right when she said shifting didn’t really change her. Not where it mattered. That first time I smelled her, I was half-buried—lungs packed with grave-rot, ears full of soil, body screaming for blood. The world above had only been pressure on stone until it cracked open and air rushed in.

And with it came her.

Not just mortal breath. Not just warmth.

But a scent that was impossible.

Cold cavern stone after rain. Burnt myrrh clinging to torn velvet. Mint crushed under desperate fingers. And beneath it all, the faintest ghost of night flowers—whispering of a life I hadn’t believed existed. Sacred and savage at once. Subtle. Stubbornly alive.

In that first breath, I thought it might be the scent of salvation. Or the bait of some crueler snare.

Either way, I’d been lost.

Now—under this feral moon—it was different again. The same intricate scent, but laced with musk. Heavier. Reptilian. A slow, heavy heat that clung to my throat. My mouth watered, despite myself. Hot deer blood teased memory across my tongue.

And then—she changed.

Right there. In the milk-pale moonlight. No illusions. No careful angles. No turning away.

It wasn’t the shimmer of a glamour. Not that soft ripple of magic that left no trace. This was flesh. Raw. Real.

Her scaled skin shivered, then sloughed off—slow, deliberate—like silk peeling from a snake. I heard it. A papery sigh, soft tearing. Her bones flexed, cracked, lengthened. Muscles rippled, stretched, rearranged under moonlight that caught every tremor. Her neck narrowed, jaw slid back into delicate elven angles. Fingers slimmed. Hips drew close. Hair bled red from root to tip.

And her scent—

Gods.

It changed again. The heavy musk mellowed, opening like a bruised flower. Autumn leaves. Pine. Smoke. That faint nip of elf-blood that always carried haunted memories of older forests.

When she turned, she was still herself. Those eyes—dark, storm-hungry, threaded through with grief—hadn’t changed at all. But everything else was a wood elf. Red hair. Freckles across her nose. Long-limbed. Standing with that eerie elven grace that looked more bred into the bone than learned.

Still her. But not.

She caught me staring and arched an eyebrow. “Better?”

I blinked, tongue thick in my mouth. “I— what was—?”

She rolled one shoulder, adjusting her new shape like a cloak. “We’re approaching troll country. The yuan-ti scent draws them. Blood in the water.”

“And?” I rasped.

“And blood draws trolls.”

Her hands lifted, deft fingers braiding her hair over one shoulder. Each careful pull exposed the delicate sweep of her neck. Pale skin catching moonlight. A single, slow pulse there—steady, patient, maddeningly alive. My throat tightened around a growl that never quite formed.

“Elven smells are everywhere in this valley,” she went on, crisp, clinical, not seeing how my eyes followed every twist of her hands. “Half the fort’s garrison is elves. Safer to blend.”

“Ah.”

Sensible. Tactical. Nothing to do with me.

But gods, I couldn’t stop staring.

“Why not go back to your original form?” I asked at last, quieter, the question slipping out. “The first one. The one I saw when you found me.”

Her hands paused. The braid loosened. Her eyes lifted—flat, guarded, unreadable.

“That wasn’t mine either,” she said. “Just a face I borrowed. Another traveling suit.”

Something slackened in my chest.

Not pity. I knew better than that. It was… an echo. A sadness that wasn’t only mine.

Someone with so many faces who still didn’t feel like she owned even one.

“I’m sorry,” I heard myself say. The words felt delicate, like glass balanced on my tongue. “I forgot that for a moment.”

“Don’t be.” Her voice went soft. Not brittle. Not defensive. Just tired. “It is what it is.”

We descended the far side of the ridge into a hollow thick with moss and damp perfume. Crushed sage. Soft rot. The green breath of living roots. Somewhere overhead, an owl turned in its roost—feathers whispering like silk. I could hear the tiny clench and release of its talons on bark—so clear it felt perched on my shoulder. I could taste the musk on its feet, the last squeak of its distant kill.

The night poured into me. Too bright. Too intimate. Every scent, every vibration underfoot, every breath she drew was a benediction and a torment. My ears caught the low, calm tide of her heart—unhurried, pulsing in that blue hollow of her throat where old scars gathered.

She moved ahead. Small branches clutched at her cloak, pulling tiny threads the forest seemed eager to keep. Her hair burned under starlight—silver flashes swallowed by deeper red. The scent of her skin shifted with each breath: mint, salt, myrrh, stone, night orchids. It felt like a private confession.

I couldn’t stop inhaling.
Couldn’t stop listening. Couldn’t stop aching.

Even the earth under her boots whispered to me—tiny fractures spreading through brittle roots. Soil sighed under her slight weight. Frost squealed. The land tolerated her.

It would be less kind to me.

When she paused to check the map—just a battered scrap of leather inked with crabbed runes—I stepped too close. Should have stayed back. Melted into shadow where beasts like me belonged. But I didn’t.

Her pulse was right there. Slow. Fierce. Alive. I could almost see it, that tiny shiver of skin lifting each fine hair on her wrist.

Without thinking—less than no thought—I reached. My hand wrapped around her wrist, thumb brushing the place where life announced itself.

I brought it to my nose.

And breathed.

The world dropped away. The fever of moonlight, the riot of sound—gone. Everything narrowed to this living heat. The drumbeat of her heart, pushing blood under skin I could break with a breath.

My fangs ached. But the vertigo stilled.

I closed my eyes. Could only hear her heartbeat. Could only feel her warmth, breathe that impossible scent. The salt of sweat. Trace copper that promised life.

A startled breath caught in her throat. Not fear. Just surprise.

Her pulse jumped—then settled. Steady. Unyielding.

Gods. Too bright. Too tender.

Like holding the sun.

Her skin was softer than it had any right to be. Fragile under my hand. I could’ve broken her wrist as easily as a stem. But she didn’t flinch. When I opened my eyes, hers were waiting. Quiet. Clear. Seeing me.

Not with pity.
Not with horror.
Just… seeing.

I swallowed hard, forced a smile that shook. Tried to shape it into careless charm. My voice cracked on the first syllable.

“Forgive me,” I rasped. “I forget myself when… when everything is so alive.”

She didn’t pull away. Just let out a slow breath. “That’s all right, if it helps,” she said. Soft. Unsure, but choosing it.

For a heartbeat—long, wide, more than any mortal second—I let myself hold her pulse under my hand. Let it thrum up through my arm, into my ribs, echo in that hollow place Cazador carved and left wanting.

It felt like standing on the edge of something vast.

Not death.
Not even hunger.

She crouched by the map again—her wrist still warm in my hand, her red braid looped over one shoulder, the elven features strange to me but… hers. Somehow. That shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. Even borrowed shapes clung to her with a stubborn truth that whispered: This is mine.

“We’ll need to reach the next cave entrance,” she said, showing me a thin crease etched into the northern slope of Trollclaws Mountain. “There’s a tunnel there. Not one I’ve taken before, but it should bring us through the second winding waters crossing. The shallow one. We’ll have fully avoided the Bhaal-cursed streams.”

I drifted closer, as if scent alone pulled me.

“And where does it come out?” I asked.

“Just under the ridge—right beneath Troll Hill.” Her eyes lifted. “If we keep pace, we can make it in under a day and a half.”

A day and a half. Not so dreadful. I’d endured far worse with far less reason.

“Any reason you’ve never used this path before?” I tilted my head.

“It’s newer,” she said. “Not just new—less traveled. Close to the surface. Less than a hundred feet down.”

That made something in me tighten, old instincts curling sharp.

“Shallow tunnels,” I murmured. “Safer from the horrors below…”

“...but easier to track from above,” she finished.

We exchanged a look. Her pupils were still faintly slit from her last shape—black shards floating in storm-dark eyes.

She was right, of course. Closer to the surface meant fresher air, quicker escapes—but also patrols, sharp-eyed mercenaries, watchful wraiths. All the thousand hands of the surface world, reaching.

Still.

“I’ll take trolls and sellswords over mind flayers and aboleths any day,” I said, trying for a careless tilt.

She huffed—half a laugh, half a fogged breath. “That’s the spirit.”

She folded the map with delicate precision, slid it into her pack, already turning toward the slope, already focused. Her wrist still rested in my hand. And I, fool that I was, kept holding it. Kept watching her.

---

The climb was steady. The path curled like a serpent up the mountain’s northern face—steep, narrow, bristling with ancient pine roots clawing through rock. Above, the sky deepened to bruised sapphire, the first stars trembling awake, humming against dusk.

Elenya led, sure-footed, silent, her braid catching stray streaks of light like molten copper. We moved quickly. No fires. No chatter. Just the soft music of breath, boots on stone, the crisp snap of frost breaking underfoot.

My senses were drunk on everything. Every scent unfurled bright and complicated: old pine resin bleeding from cracked bark, the mineral tang of granite, the thin iron of distant snow. But the warmth of her wrist still burned against it all like a brand.

We were maybe half an hour from the cavern mouth when her boot skidded across loose stones. Just a slip. A breath of imbalance.

But enough.

A roar ripped through the dusk. Low. Wet. Furious.

The smell hit first—bloated carrion left to stew. Rot and mold and acid.

Then it lurched from behind a collapsed watch-post. A hulking troll, skin patchwork with fungal slime. Its eyes were small, stupid, glittering with hunger.

It bellowed and charged. Long arms out. Claws black with old blood.

Elenya froze—not with fear, but calculation. Fingers lifted, lips parting on the cusp of a spell.

Too slow.

I was already moving.

A surge forward, the world blurring into a rush of night wind and scent and bright, shivering sound. My dagger slid into my palm, spun once—a dance step old as anything left in me.

I ducked under the troll’s swing, sliced at the tender cluster of veins behind its knee. Hot brine burst across my face. Then I twisted up the crumbling edge of an old bridge, muscles singing with the last thrill of borrowed deer-blood.

“Over here, darling,” I crooned, voice sharp with joy.

It turned, confused, gurgling. Just in time for me to plant both feet against its chest and shove.

The stones under it gave. It tumbled back with a strangled howl, arms pinwheeling, claws scrabbling at nothing. Then it was gone. The echo of its body smashing on rocks below rattled up to us.

Silence returned. The night breathed again.

I landed lightly, wiped a bright smear from my cheek, turned with a little flourish.

“You were saying something about a spell?” I drawled.

 

Elenya stood frozen, hands half-raised, pupils blown wide.

“You—how did you—?”

“Elegant, wasn’t it?” I sheathed the blade. “Why waste good magic when a bit of flair will do?”

She only stared, baffled. Her chest rose and fell like she was trying to remember how lungs worked.

“I was going to banish him,” she whispered. “You really just… threw him off a cliff.”

“And you’re welcome.” I offered a mocking bow.

But she didn’t smile. Her eyes drifted to the broken ledge.

“I wish we hadn’t had to kill it,” she said.

I tilted my head. The words didn’t quite compute. “It was trying to tear you apart.”

“Yes. Because I made noise. I was careless. It’s my fault.”

Now it was my turn to blink. “You’re feeling guilty about the troll?”

She didn’t look at me. Just pressed a hand to her ribs, like trying to shove the guilt back inside.

“What’s the difference,” I asked carefully, “between the troll and the stag?”

“There isn’t one,” she said softly, after a long beat. “The stag had to die for you to live.”

“Exactly. And the troll had to die for you to live.”

She didn’t answer. Just drew a breath that sounded almost broken. I could see it—this old sorrow she wore like chainmail under her skin.

She pressed her fingers tighter to her ribs.

I didn’t understand her. Not really. This way she mourned everything. Even monsters.

Standing there under a sky just waking to stars, her scent still tangled in my throat—I found I wanted to.

I wanted to know what it was like to be so tender that you felt sorry for trolls.

So alive that even killing scraped at you like a wound.

So… hers.

---

We reached the cave mouth two hours before dawn.

It wasn’t much—a jagged crack in the rock face, half-choked by twisted roots and littered with old bones. Predator bones. Maybe human, maybe not. Hard to tell in the blue dark.

But it was shelter. And I’d learned to be grateful for such things, no matter how savage or temporary.

She moved ahead, already clearing space for a fire, ever-efficient. Her hands worked with practiced calm—stones scraped together, dried needles swept aside, a little arcane murmur under her breath to tease a spark from the cold.

And I—gods help me—I just stood there a moment, staring at the stars like some slack-jawed fool.

The sky stretched forever. A bowl of bruised sapphire rimmed in black, pierced by reckless needles of white. Open. Cold. Alive.

This was the first time I’d been outside the city—truly outside—in one hundred and sixty years.

No alleys to dart through. No rooftops to hide upon. No leashes. No eyes burning gold in dark windows, waiting for me to return.

Just wind, pine, and the terrifying, gaping absence of walls.

It felt… unbearable. Limitless. Like I could run in any direction, keep running, never stop—until I vanished. Or fell. Or found some other horror under the wide, indifferent moon.

---

The fire cracked faintly in the cave.

I sat hunched forward, elbows on my knees, fingers pressed hard against my temples.

No charm. No grin. No mask to hide behind.

Just the ache. The weight. The low, traitorous hum of blood still moving through my borrowed veins.

The rush from the hunt had dulled into something softer now. Not hunger. Not quite satisfaction. Just a heavy, unfamiliar throb in my bones—like the hush after a scream, when you realize you’re still breathing. And you don’t know why.

She sat across from me—arms wrapped around her knees, head resting back against the stone. Watching the flames dance across the cavern wall. Not looking at me.

But I could feel it. That unsettling calm. The way her shoulders didn’t flinch when I moved. The way her eyes hadn’t sharpened or shuttered, even after everything I’d told her.

She’d looked almost… content earlier. Watching me laugh under the moon like a lunatic. Watching me feed. Watching me breathe like the sky was mine again.

She stayed through all of that.

Even after I told her about Cazador. About the kennels. About what I was made to be.

Even after I showed her every fractured, bloody piece.

Two nights ago she had held my hand. Pressed her thumb to that thin fragile bone, right above where my pulse used to live.

And I had been waiting every minute since for the betrayal. For her eyes to sharpen, for the silence to thicken, for the disgust to twist her mouth. For her to decide I was too monstrous after all.

But she hadn’t left.

And that unsettled me more than anything else.

---

“You really mean to stay?” I asked.

It came out low. Gravel-soft. Cracked at the edges. I didn’t want to hear the answer—not really. But I couldn’t stop the question from clawing free.

She didn’t flinch.

“Yes. Do you still want me to?”

Her voice was quiet, almost amused. As though she found my doubts more puzzling than painful. Like she couldn’t imagine why I’d keep asking.

Gods—my mind screamed yes. Screamed don’t you dare go. Screamed you’re the only one who sees me and doesn’t look away.

But my mouth—my coward’s mouth—only managed:

“I don’t know.”

She didn’t look hurt. Just tired. A little sigh slipped from her, caught on the edge of breath.

Of course she was tired. I’m exhausting.

I stared at the fire, jaw clamped tight, throat burning with something that felt horribly close to shame.

“Why are you here?” I asked. Again. Like an idiot who thought maybe if he broke it open enough times, it would finally make sense.

“Not this again,” she muttered, closing her eyes briefly. “Because you are.”

Simple. As if it were the easiest truth in the world. As if I was the obvious answer to her question of where next?

Gods. My mind howled I believe you. I believed her more than I’d believed anything in my life.

But what did I say? What brilliant, vulnerable confession did I offer?

“I may not completely hate you.”

It sounded petty. Small. Like a wretched thing trying to claw some dignity out of dust.

“Finally,” she said flatly, a tiny huff of dark humor escaping. “My plan is bearing fruit.”

It was a terrible joke. Dry, brittle, shaped like something meant to deflect.

But it still made something inside me stutter. Catch. Try to bloom.

I looked at her.

Really looked.

At the way she sat—relaxed but watchful, tired but steady. Mortal and more than mortal. The faint pull of old scars across her throat, the soft lift of her chest with each patient breath.

And I didn’t feel like a monster beside her.

I didn’t feel like a burden.

We just… existed.

Not a cursed creature and the fool who tried to save him. Not some horror story of temptation and ruin.

Just two broken things who had decided—stupidly, beautifully—not to be alone.

---

Later—when the fire had burned down to a long breath of embers—dawn began prying at the mouth of our cave, spilling thin gold fingers across cold stone.

She sat beside me. Not touching. Not speaking. Just there.

And gods, how that undid me. Because it was easier to fall apart when someone stayed close without pressing. When no questions came to peel your skin back. When you were allowed to exist in your ruin.

I could still feel the leash. Tangled through my marrow, stitched into the quiet rhythm of my breaths. That old, ugly braid of blood and fear and him. But it was different now. Not slack—never slack—but… changed.

I risked a glance at Elenya.

She hadn’t moved far. Wasn’t crowding me, wasn’t prodding. Just close enough that I could smell the faint tang of her skin—salt and stone and ghost-flowers—and hear the slow pulse tucked in her throat. The shape of her heartbeat was a comfort I hated needing.

It made it easier.
Easier to speak.

“There are rules,” I said, voice catching low in my chest. Like gravel rolled in old silk. “Commands. I’m not just his creature. I’m his property—an extension of his will. Spawn can’t disobey. Not willingly.”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t fill the silence with pretty nonsense or practiced pity. She just… waited. Let me decide how much to bleed.

I dragged in a breath, let it scrape raw on the inside of my ribs. Then counted them off on my fingers, each rule like a brand hissing fresh on my tongue.

“One: I can’t drink the blood of thinking creatures. Two: I must obey him in all things. Three: I can’t leave—unless ordered. Four: I belong to him. Fully. Always.”

My hand curled into a fist, knuckles going bloodless. It was that or let them tremble.

“You don’t say no. Your body doesn’t let you. And if you try…”
I swallowed. The memory of it—of trying—tightened something black and strangling around my lungs.

She didn’t push.

“But you didn’t go back to him,” she said at last, voice gentle as water lapping stone. “Wouldn’t that contradict the rule of staying by his side?”

“No.” I shook my head. “The rule says I must remain at his side. Not return to it. He was the one who ordered me away.”

“And he hasn’t called you back?”

“He can. It’s… more of a tug on the leash. Not a true command. Like a hand on the back of your neck. Reminding you who you are.”

“So what is a true command then?” Her eyes narrowed, glittering with that cold, ruthless cleverness. “How does the bond know the difference between an order and just… words?”

I huffed a laugh. It wasn’t humor. “I don’t know. Just… hearing him say it. Feeling it crawl under your skin like rot.”

She tilted her head. Went quiet, her dark eyes stormy with calculation. Then softly—almost to herself—“I wonder if… never mind.”

“What?” I pressed. Something fragile inside me panicked at the thought of her dropping it.

“If it’s voice-based. Or blood-based. Or something else. Hypothetically… if I wore his face, could I compel you to forget the rules?”

A chill shot down my spine—sharp, electric. But before the panic could snarl out of me, she raised her hands, quick and placating.

“I would never do that. I can’t. I don’t know him. I’m just trying to understand how it works. What happens if two people wearing your sire’s face give you conflicting orders—and you can’t tell who’s real?”

Sire. Not Master. Gods. Even that word was a balm I didn’t expect.

“I don’t know,” I breathed.

“Have you felt him call you back since the night we left the crypt?”

“No.” It was barely more than a whisper. So thin I hardly trusted it.

She frowned, thoughtful. “Strange. Either he’s waiting for something… or his control has limits. Maybe distance. Maybe time.”

“No,” I rasped. Then harder—more desperate. “The night you found me… gods, I was so hungry. I wanted to—”

My fangs throbbed at the memory. My voice cracked, strangled by old shame.

“You didn’t bite me,” she said quietly.

“I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t. And you think it was his rule that stopped you?”

I blinked at her. Nodded. Slow. Each movement felt like it might shatter me.

“Did it feel like anything? His hold?”

I sat up, dragged a hand over my face, clawed through my hair. “It felt different recently. Last time I sensed him—it was loud, but… broken. Not whole. It’s been faint since then.”

“That’s worth testing.”

My mouth went dry. “…Testing?”

“Better now than later. Better to know what’s broken.”

I stared at her. “You’re serious.”

“Deadly.”

“That’s reckless.”

“And?” Her lips twitched at the corner.

Gods. I barked out a laugh, rough and brittle. “You’re more dangerous than you look.”

“You’ve said that before.”

“You keep proving me right.”

She didn’t reply. Just unsheathed her dagger. The sound was a whisper of silver that made every hair on my arms rise.

“This is the test,” she said, slicing her thumb with one sharp, practiced flick.

A single drop of blood welled up. Dark. Heavy. Glistening.

And it hit me like a storm.

---

Her blood.

I thought I knew hunger. Thought I understood the aching, violent emptiness of it. But this—this was a cathedral. Vast and echoing, echoing, echoing, swallowing every rational thought in me.

It was sweet, unbearably so. Layered in wild mint and dark lilac, tangled with that damp moss scent that clung to her even when she wore other skins. Beneath it all something older—sun-warmed iron, rain on split stones, sharp copper threaded through damp earth.

It wrapped around my mind, hot and alive. I wanted to bury my face in her throat, tear her open until I forgot what it was to be starved in a coffin. My fangs pulsed. My jaw throbbed. I’d claw through gods for one mouthful—because in that scent was everything. Warmth and grief and something that felt horribly, painfully like hope.

My hands shook.

“What are you doing?” I rasped. My voice was barely there.

“Why, it’s the best way to know. It’s just a drop.”

“I can’t. Even if I could—that’s mad. Why would you offer your blood to a vampire?”

She watched me with eyes that didn’t flinch. “Because it’s a test.”

“Why test it now? And if I fail—?”

“Astarion, I am not a fool, no matter how much you think I am. I’ve been operating under the assumption that you chose not to bite me. I found comfort in that. But I can’t allow you to remain under compulsion forever. And I can’t keep doubting whether you’ll drain me dry once that compulsion is gone. Testing is the best option I have. If you fail—then I stop you.”

My throat worked around words I couldn’t find. Then somehow, I nodded.

The leash inside me snapped tight. Cold. Certain. Every muscle locked—every old command screamed take it, every ruined part of me sobbed no.

I didn’t drink.

Gods, I wanted to. Her blood was right there—warm and bright as starlight, singing to the worst of me.

But the leash. The ruin. The black terror of who I’d been made into.

I jerked away, breath tearing out of me like a sob. Staggered from her like she burned.

---

She came after me. Knelt. Touched my shoulder—light, careful. Not a chain. Just… her.

“You didn’t drink,” she said.

“I can’t,” I gasped.

Her hand stayed there, warm through the thin fabric. “That’s progress. Either way—we know now.”

Did we? I didn’t know if it was the rule that stopped me… or just the deep, endless breaking that made me his long before any spell sealed it.

I looked at her. My eyes must’ve gleamed too bright—raw with something dangerously close to tears.

“Then what now?”

“Now,” she said simply, “we plan. You tell me what you know. I’ll tell you what I can do. And we figure out where the leash ends—if it can be cut.”

I stared at her. Then smiled. No teeth. Just a shaky, fragile curve of lips that hurt like pulling old wounds.

She fidgeted then, and gods—it was almost sweet. Elenya didn’t fidget. Not like ordinary people. Her unease was usually buried under stillness, quiet as stone. But here her fingers twitched on her thigh. Her eyes darted from me to the dying fire and back.

“Astarion, I have a confession to make.”

That phrase. It coiled cold through my gut. My pulse snagged. Confession always meant something that tore miracles apart.

“That scared me,” I muttered, trying for levity. It came out frayed.

“It’s not necessarily bad,” she hurried on. “Or something I was hiding. It’s just… a habit I have. When I help people. Now seemed like a good time to tell you.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Go on.”

She exhaled. “I’m a scholar. And a healer. Not… gifted with people. I make sense of things by documenting them. Recording. It’s how I understand.”

A tension eased out of me only to bunch up somewhere else. “Meaning?”

“Right—sorry.” She brushed a strand of red hair behind her ear, eyes skating away. “I keep recovery journals. Notes on patients. Tracking treatments, complications, progress.”

My mouth opened—closed. A thousand dark suspicions bloomed like rot.

“I never use names,” she rushed on. “It’s symptoms. Patterns. Ideas for remedies. Always anonymous. And always the patient’s to keep or destroy.”

I studied her. Her pupils were still faintly slit from her last shape—dark shards adrift in storm. They didn’t look evasive. They looked breakable.

“So what are you telling me now?” My voice was nearly a whisper.

“With you, with this curse, I’d like to evolve it into something else. A real research dossier. Cross-reference it with vampiric literature I found at the Gate. Fact-check with you. Find what’s real.”

My stomach twisted. “You want to dissect me on paper.”

“It can feel that way. I know. That’s why I’m telling you first. If you hate it, it stays a private journal. I’ll hand it over when we part—your story, not my project.”

Her voice was steady but her eyes were wide, vulnerable. “But if you’ll let me… I’d rather you be involved. This is your curse. Your leash. Not just something for me to unravel alone.”

I didn’t breathe for a long moment. My first instinct was old, dirty revulsion—memories of being reduced to ink-stains and scars, catalogued under a monster’s bored eyes.

But then…

She hadn’t ordered. She hadn’t even insisted. She’d asked. Offered to burn it all if I wanted.

And gods, some broken thing inside me—starved for answers—ached to know. To have someone pull it open not to torment me, but to understand.

I exhaled. Slow. Felt words catch in my throat.

“You want me to help,” I said. It came out soft. Astonished.

“I do,” she said. “Not a riddle to solve. Not alone. This is yours. If you want, we pull it apart together—find where it knots. How to cut it.”

A laugh broke out of me—thin, stunned, half-wild. I dragged a hand over my mouth. Gods, if she knew how much I’d needed that.

“That’s dangerously close to compassion,” I rasped.

Her mouth twitched. “You keep accusing me.”

“You keep proving me right.”

Silence stretched, strangely warm. Finally I gave a little shrug. “All right. Yes. Let’s. But one condition.”

Her eyebrow arched. “Which is?”

“You share it all. Notes, theories, questions. I want to see it grow. I want the right to burn it myself if it ever becomes… something else.”

A shadow crossed her face. Then she nodded. “Deal.”

And gods help me, I smiled. It hurt. Like pulling skin too tight over old scars. But it was real.

“Can I ask for something?” I said. " An experiment of my own in a way"

“What?”

“…Maybe a vial of your blood. I want to keep trying. To know.”

She laughed then. Startled. Bright. Like something let loose in the world.

“One vial to go,” she said, eyes dancing. “Right this way.”

Gods help me—I could’ve kissed her then.

---

That night, she curled on her side—dagger under her hand, spellbook beneath her coat. No prayers. No breathless plea to distant gods. Just the cold, mechanical rituals of survival.

Before trance claimed her, I watched her fingers work through her grim little reliquary. Bits of crushed stone. Ash. Tiny sun-bleached bones. Not charms of love. Not even protection from me.

Death Ward. Nondetection.

Again.

To keep me safe. To keep me alive.

It punched something low in my gut. Twisted hard behind my ribs. Made my throat burn with an ache that felt dangerously close to hope.

When she finally went still—breath settling into that soft, shallow rhythm that wasn’t quite sleep—I lay back, eyes locked on the ceiling’s jagged scars, hands clamped tight around the vial she’d given me.

Her blood was a dark universe in glass. Thick, threaded through with tiny strands of iridescence that caught the emberlight when I tilted it. It pulsed—gods, it pulsed—like it remembered the shape of her heartbeat.

I just don’t want you to go through pain alone, she’d said.

I clenched my jaw. Didn’t laugh. Didn’t rip it apart with some cruel barb the way I might have once. Not tonight.

I turned instead and watched the subtle twitch in her fingers, even in a trance. Her nearness felt like a hand at the base of my spine. Pressing. Steadying. Maddening.

She let me have this.

The vial was slick with sweat. My fingers wouldn’t stop shaking.

Gods, I wanted it. Wanted to taste it, to taste her, until nothing else existed. The scent leaked up past the cork—cold cedar, ghost grass under dying stars, the faint iron tang of sun-warmed stone—and wrapped around my mind like a lover’s hands.

I raised it to my lips.

And something inside me shrieked.

My throat seized. My chest convulsed. Panic clawed up, savage and ancient. I flinched so violently I nearly dropped it. I could feel it—the leash, old as nightmare, wound through my marrow.

Property. Obey. Don’t you dare.

I could almost feel his hands on my shoulders—cool, heavy. Almost hear that low, amused voice at my ear.

Remember your place.

I jerked the vial back, breath ragged. My heart was pounding—slow, grotesque, each beat like a hammer blow in cold sludge. Her living pulse thudded nearby, quick and fragile, and somehow my own monstrous rhythm tried to catch it. Tried to keep pace. It couldn’t. It stumbled. Stuttered.

Again.

I forced it up. Forced my jaw open.

The leash snapped taut inside me. A phantom weight crushed my spine. My lungs locked, starved for air that wouldn’t come. The First Rule rose like a blade.

THOU SHALT NOT DRINK THE BLOOD OF THINKING CREATURES.

Memories ripped through me: A collar snapping shut. The crack of a riding crop. A hand stroking my face, gentle as poison.

Good boy. Obey. Or I’ll remind you how.

I wrenched the vial away, squeezed it so hard the glass groaned. My breath broke on a sob.

Gods, I hated this. Hated how fear always won. How even this—this tiny scrap of rebellion—was a war. I felt like a chained hound choking itself to taste something that was mine.

A third time. A fourth. I lost count. Each effort locked my muscles, drew black edges around my sight. The leash was a vice on my spine, acid in my veins. My mouth filled with the taste of old metal.

Obey.

His phantom hands at my neck. Thumb brushing behind my ear. Don’t ruin what you are.

I nearly threw the vial across the cave. My hands clawed at stone instead, nails splitting.

I don’t want to be his anymore.

I didn’t know if it was true. Or if I just didn’t want to be weak enough to let him keep winning.

At last—gods, at last—I managed it. A shallow sip. Just enough to wet my tongue.

It shattered me.

Heat detonated in my chest. Light burst behind my eyes—bright as starlight cracking over black water. Her. Every breath of sorrowed lilac, cavern water, ghost grass, frost, flooded me, bright and pitiless.

A soft, wrecked sound slipped out. Half-moan, half-sob.

And instantly, I wanted more. Needed more. I drained the vial, licking it empty.

Then I turned to her. Still. Peaceful.

My body moved on its own. Crawled closer. My mouth parted, fangs throbbing, breath catching on the raw scent of her blood. It called to me like divinity, sweet and devastating. Just a bite. Just—

Then she stirred.

No.

Her eyes opened—dark, calm, seeing right through me. Even now, she didn’t startle.

“You’re in pain again,” she murmured.

I couldn’t answer. Couldn’t force words through the thick snarl of hunger and shame.

“The vial’s empty.”

My chest heaved. I was trembling everywhere as if I might shake apart.

“Do you want to bite me?”

The question ripped through me. I hesitated—then nodded. Helpless. Hollowed out.

She studied me for a long time, eyes tired but clear. Then she reached into her pack, flipped a coin once, and caught it. Didn’t even look.

“Why not ask?” she said softly.

I sagged. Shoulders crumpling. “I moved on my own. I wasn’t going to hurt you, I just—”

But my throat locked around the truth. That no deer, no polite little vial, could ever matter again. Only her.

She tucked the coin away. “Fine,” she said. Simple. Terrifying. “Just a taste.”

I moved like mist. Slow. Careful. Reverent.

My hand found her shoulder. I waited.

She tilted her head and bared her throat. Her pulse fluttered there—quick, high, fragile. My own slow, undead heart lurched, tried to match it, stuttered again. Her warmth pulled me like gravity.

Too little, too late. For both of us.

I pressed my face into the curve of her neck.

And it was there. Gods. Even under the crushed fern and rancid tallow, she smeared on us, it was there. Her.

Cold cedar. Juniper. Wilting lilac. Cavern water. Sun-warmed iron. Sorrow braided into breath. Always the same thread—leading me out of death, toward some fragile dawn.

My fangs ached. I opened my mouth—

And the First Rule roared back, savage and absolute. It was no whisper. It screamed through my bones.

NO. NOT THIS BLOOD. NOT EVER. OBEY.

My limbs locked. My body jolted like I’d been struck. My breath shredded in my chest. I felt his ghost hands on me—thumb pressing under my jaw, ready to snap it.
Good boy. Kneel.

But she was warm against me. Her scent tangled around the panic, tangled around the leash. Her pulse was terrified—but alive. So alive.

I clung to it. Pushed forward an inch, then another. Every part of me howled to stop. To run. To obey. But I held.

And I bit—

Her skin parted under my teeth and I almost sobbed. Her blood flooded my mouth—cold first, like biting frost-cracked berries, then thick, bright, ruinous. It was icewine over ash, salted enough to taste like a promise I’d never keep.

It was sorrow made flesh. The sacrament of a martyr. The best thing I would ever taste.

I drank. Slow at first. Awed. Her blood was a world I thought forever barred. Sunlight. A hand pulling me from dark. A memory of laughter. Everything I had ever loved. Everything I had ever lost.

This was a mistake.

Because I wanted all of it. I wanted to drain her dry. My arms locked, crushed her to me, pinned her down. A ragged moan ripped from my throat—shameless, hungry. I had never known pleasure like this. I needed more. Gods, I needed everything.

Then—

A memory. A scaled hand gripping mine. A girl’s face—human, hopeful—pulling me from dark. Her hush in the crypt, steadying my panic.

No.

I tore myself away with a broken cry. Her blood slicked my lips, her heat still burning in me. My body trembled, caught between ecstasy and horror.

I braced for her shove, her curse, her to finally recoil from me.

Instead—

She touched my cheek.

“Good,” she whispered, thumb brushing my jaw. Warm. Steady. Terribly kind.

Then she lay back, calm as if we hadn’t just stood at the edge of oblivion.

I sat frozen. Shaking. My breath came in thin, wrecked pulls.

Then, like a thought surfacing from some deep dream, she asked, “Was it worth it? To live four more days?”

My throat closed. I nodded. Couldn’t speak. Because the truth was too raw. Too monstrous.

And then—gods—I wept.

Not from shame. Not from fear.

But from wanting. From the savage, tender realization that I didn’t just want to escape him.

I wanted to live.

Truly live.

 

Notes:

Thank you for staying with me through their mess—through the jagged edges and quiet mercies.

I’d love to know your thoughts, your gasps, your heartbreaks. Comments are a lifeline. 💔🖤

Chapter 17: The Place Without a Name

Summary:

In the place behind the eyes—behind the body, the calm hands, the careful breath—she waits.
Not cold. Not absent. Just watching.
Tonight, she lets herself be seen.

Notes:

This chapter is different.
You’re not just reading Elenya’s thoughts anymore—you’re meeting the part of her that’s been watching all along.

This is the true POV of the one behind the calm hands and careful voice.
The one who built the fog.
The one who survives so the rest of her can live.

Elenya’s True POV

---

The fog folds over me like a cathedral.

Not blank. Never blank.
It is crowded with echoes—splintered faces, childhood dust, bone fragments, hands that are mine and not mine.

Each breath stirs the fog into stained glass:
Red for hunger.
Blue for prayers.
Green for the moss I once pressed to a split lip in the dark.

I built this place.
I honed it.
Each veil, each curling wisp, a safeguard against the rawness beneath.
A sanctuary.
A guillotine.
A mirror pressed too close.

I do not dream in the fog.
Not really.

It isn’t sleep. It isn’t silence.
It is the hush between—
Where my pulse doesn’t echo, and the breath of the world turns its face from me.
It is salt and ash and wool.
It is safety, stolen.

Sometimes I call it a sanctuary.
Sometimes it becomes a god.
But also: bone.
Also: mirror.
Also: cradle.

A prism that bends pain into colors too bright to bear.
And here I am.
The one who keeps the prism turning.

The others see a woman with steady hands.
Mercy built into wrists that never tremble when stitching flesh.

But that is only the shape I wear—
The hand on the blade.
The foot on the road.
A puppet, lovingly tended.
Necessary. Functional. Fragile.

I stand apart.
Inside the fog.
Inside the unmade sanctum.

From here, I see every thread.

I watch the little one—my own mouth, my own skin—move through this broken world.
I watch her endure.
I watch her care for the vampire with the red-lit eyes and wolfish hunger.

And I feel it all—
Every needle of horror, every tender slip of awe—
Just at a distance.
Safe behind the glass.

I have always done this.

You have read her story through my eyes.
She is mine.
I am hers.
We are a chorus.

But this—
This is where I live.
And tonight—
I weaken it.

I do not use the words.
I do not light the incense.
I simply call Him:

Friend.

Words are too small.
In the fog, sound is geometry.
Light, confession.

The fog listens.
Peels back.

It aches to keep me.
I ache to stay.

And Ilmater arrives like He always does—
Wordless. Waiting. Weightless.

He does not part the fog.
He illuminates it.

The fog shudders.
Folds back on itself like a heart unlearning how to beat.

And there—woven into the warp and weft—He stands.
Watching.
As He always does.

He does not step forward.
He does not reach.
He simply is—
Threaded through the air like old light.

“Little one,” He murmurs—
And it is not a sound.
It is a tide against my ribs.
It is heat where I thought I’d gone frostbitten.

I should kneel.
But this is my fog—my cathedral, my cage—and here, I stand sovereign.

He doesn’t look for me. He watches.
I flicker at the edge of His vision—
Always a little too far.
A coil of smoke.
A shiver with a pulse.
A half-face made of light and memory.
The shape of want, unformed.

My own voice fractures.
Echoes.
Shatters itself against the facets of the fog.

I turn—though there is no body to turn.
Only the shape I keep here:
Half-light. Half-scar.
Woven from all the lives I have survived.

“You still come, even when I give you nothing.”

“You are not nothing.”

The fog ripples.
It turns warm where He stands.
It does not like Him.
It cannot devour Him.
But it remembers Him.

“I bring you into this place, and it costs me.”
“It thins the veil. Makes me feel too close to her. To it all.”

“Then why invite me?”

I reach out—
Fingers of smoke and blood and memory.
They tangle in His radiance.

It does not burn.
It mourns.

“Because you are the only one I trust to see me.”

And this—
This is the truth of it.
The truth I never let the little one say.
Not to the vampire.
Not to herself.

I am not cold.
I am not numb.

I feel everything she feels—
Magnified. Kaleidoscopic. Agonized.

I simply keep it contained.
Otherwise we would die from it.

He stands close.
Closer than breath.

“This mission,” I murmur.
“It endangers the fog.”

He is the only one I ever let in here.

The body is quiet, on the outside.
Laid by the fire, pretending to rest.
But inside, it paces.

It keeps thinking of the vampire again.

And if he bites—
He’ll come here.

“That’s what I wanted to talk about.”
“I can’t keep this up if he gets in.”

“It is choice, beloved. Always choice.”

My shape flickers.
I become the girl in Menzoberranzan—
Bloody knees. Tongue bitten through to keep the scream in.

Then the woman in the cottage—
Mixing herbs with hands that remember the whip.

Then only fog again.

“Choice,” I echo.
“And if I choose wrong?”

His hand—
So vast it has held multiverses, so tender it once cradled my sobbing breath—
Settles at my back.

“You have chosen wrong before,” He says gently.
“And yet I am here.”

A hitch in my pattern.
A stutter of color.

My fog stretches wide—
Coiling through memory and spellcraft and skin.

The dissociation is layered.
So layered that even I forget, sometimes, where I start.

“I made this place to survive. I am the one who survived. She—”
I point somewhere at the outline of the body.
“She’s the one who learned to keep moving.”

“I know,” Ilmater says.

“Then why did you give me his thread?”
“I already told you.”
“Tell me again.”
“It is a hope. Not a test. Hope for you to keep yourself.”

I pause.
I remember what it cost to build this fog.
How long I clawed at the inside of my own mind, pulling the walls together, willing silence into being.

I remember the last one who got in here.
He was a vampire too.

He found this place for less than a second—
And nearly killed me.
He made me vulnerable to the spider song.

“You hate the fog.”
“No,” He replies.
“But you don’t control it. It controls you.”

“And you don’t have a sanctuary?”
“I do.” He nods.
“But mine doesn’t lock me in.”

He moves through the mist like an answer.
A shape of warm starlight and deep mourning.
His light does not burn.
It brushes me—gently—like breath on raw skin.

“If I leave it—” I begin, shaking.
“If I step out—
I will hear her.”

“The spider?”
“Yes.”
“Then don’t step out all at once.”

The fog trembles.
I do not.
Not yet.

“She’s bugging me,” I murmur.
“The body. Keeps saying I should go check on him.”
“So go.”
“If he bites—he’ll come here.”
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to let him?”
“I want you to keep yourself.”
“That’s what I’m doing!”

My voice cracks through the fog.
It doesn’t echo. It folds.

Ilmater watches.
He does not flinch.

“Are you afraid of him?”
“No.”
I pause.
“Yes.”

I turn.
I’m smoke again.
I am always smoke.

“Because he might make me want.
Not just to heal.
Not just to endure.
But to keep.
To hunger.”

“And I have spent my whole life fearing that if I want, I will become—”
“—the wound,” He finishes.
Soft as dust.

I collapse then.
Or seem to.
My shape folds in on itself.
A thousand petals wilting.
The fog is wet with salt.

“I don’t want to be the wound anymore.
Nor the blade.”
“I know.”

He gathers me.
Without arms.
Without need.
Just gathers.

And in this fragile place—
Inside the fog that is my greatest magic and deepest fracture—
He steadies me.

Not by banishing the fog.
But by reminding me it is mine.
I shaped it.
I can reshape it.

“You are lost,” He says again.
“And so is he.”

I want to believe that.

I let my edges solidify.
A little.
Just enough to stand.

“Have you ever let your fog down?”
“Once.”
“What happened?”
“When it was all said and done, I could only become the god of suffering.”
“Do you regret it?”
“Never.”

We stay like that.
Breathing each other’s ache.

Then He says:

“The coin landed not on biting.”
“As I meant it to.”

Still—
I hover.
I remember the sound of the vampire’s voice.
The way it trembled when he said he wanted to live.

The fog loosens, just slightly, around my edges.
I peek.

“Just a quick look,” I whisper.
“Maybe.”

The fog parts at my ankles. Not gone—never gone—just thinner. Like breath on glass.

The body stirs. The vampire is there.

He is kneeling.

Head bowed.

Mouth near her skin.

Near my skin.

I do not scream.
I do not vanish.
I reach—

Just barely. Just once.

He’s so close.

A flicker—
Not of thought, but of instinct.
Of that old compulsion, buried in the marrow.
The one that knows what comes next.

Then—

Fangs.
Skin.
Heat.

He bites.

And for a second—only a second—
I am eighteen again. 
Pale hands slamming me in the dark.
Breath like rot.
Pain. 
A mouth like a wound, like a promise.
A moan that shivered with cruelty.

The fog screams inside me.
I brace for the spiral.
For the spider-song.

But—

This is not that.

This is different.

His moan is not cruel.
It is—
fragile.

He’s trembling.

I feel his hands—
Gripping my sides like the only real thing in the world.
His body curved over mine, shaking.

And I realize:
He is the one who is lost.
Not me.

The heat floods back.
Not pain. Not terror.
Just sensation.
His mouth at my throat, and he’s breathing through it, like it hurts to feel this much.
Like it’s more than blood.

Then—
He stops.

Suddenly.

Pulls back.

Breathless.
Shocked.
His mouth parted, wet, eyes wide—shining with hunger and something that might be horror.

He looks at me.

“Are you—?”
His voice breaks.

He doesn’t finish the question.

And before he can—

I reach up.
Thumb brushing the curve of his cheek, tender and human.

“Good,” I whisper.
It’s not about me.

It’s about him.

He flinches like it means more than it should.

And he—
He does not understand what I mean.

But he stays very still.
Like he’s afraid to shatter the moment.
Or me.

Ilmater weeps behind me.
His tears fall like stars through the fog.

Not because He pities me.
Because I chose

---

The body lays still.
Breath quiet.
No blood lost, not really.

But something was given.

And now—
I slip back.

---

The fog greets me like an old wound.

It does not part.
It takes me.
Wraps around me like a shroud stitched in memory.

Here, I flicker again.
Less than a girl.
More than a soul.
Still trembling with the echo of fangs, of breath, of wanting.

Ilmater is still there.
Of course He is.

He does not move.
He is the stillness at the center of the storm.
The pulse of grief made kind.

He does not speak at first.

Then—gently:

“Do you regret it?”

I think for a long moment.

The fog hushes around us, holding the shape of silence.

“Not yet,” I say.

And I mean it.

Then I smile—
A soft, shimmering thing barely shaped into form.

“It’s a beautiful thread you gave me.”

He bows His head.
And in that quiet motion is a thousand thank-yous.

“Thank you,” He murmurs. “For helping the child of the night.”

My shape shifts.
Sits.
Or seems to.

I fold my hands in the mist and look down at what might be my knees, what might be the shape of sorrow.

“Is it possible,” I ask slowly, “to bring him in?
Into the fog. So he can hide too.”

A pause.

Then, softly—

“You are already doing it.”

I shake my smoke-head.

“Not enough.
I’m not strong out there.”

The fog ripples with the truth of it.

“Then learn to control it,” He says. “And I will give you the cloak.”

That stills me.

“So you’re telling me—”
“Yes.”
“I need to face her. If I want to help him.”

The shape of the spider shifts in the distance.
No clearer. No closer.
But I feel her watching.

“You may be surprised,” Ilmater says, “how easy it is to refuse the spider-song once you turn to face it.”

“Easy?”
There is the faintest bite in my voice now.
A flare of old hurt.

“After everything?”
“You say easy?”

He does not correct me.
He does not defend the word.

He only answers:

“My mouth is sealed.”

That silences me.

Not in anger.
But in recognition.

Some truths are not spoken.
Even by gods.

Some songs must be sung—or silenced—by the ones who bear them.

I sit in the dark.

Then ask, not like a warrior, not like a martyr,
but like a girl:

“Would you hold me?”

And He says—

“Always.”

And He does.

Without arms.
Without shape.

But I feel it—
The divine weightless warmth of being known, without being asked to become.

Notes:

The fog is Elenya’s greatest act of self-preservation.
She built it to survive enslavement, god-touch, and grief—a literal, magical dissociation where her truest self hides from what the world can’t hold.

Chapter 18: Where the Fog Thins

Summary:

It wasn’t submission.
It was usefulness.
For once, she’d done something that worked.
That helped.

Notes:

We’re diving into a more intimate look at Eleyna inside the fog — the place where the fog-self keeps its secrets, fears, and old spider-song curses. Expect layered introspection, shifting identity lines, and a few revelations she’s not ready for.

Also, a chunk of academic necro-vampire nerdery: comparing old Thayan treatises, elven physiological folklore, and the practical ethics of using Astarion’s suffering as a data point.

Eleyna's POV

---

The fire had burned low, glowing red into the stones. Smoke gathered thin along the narrow cave walls, curling like breath held too long, carrying the scent of scorched pine and bitter resin in lazy, tired eddies. Elenya sat cross-legged beside it, hood down, fingers stained with ink, lips dry and faintly cracked.

She hadn’t tranced.

The scroll she’d been translating still lay open across her knees—part old prayer, part protective incantation, rendered in sharp Undercommon calligraphy. The letters were long, precise, deliberate. Even after all this time, she favored the language for her writings. Not out of any fondness. Perhaps because it was the first true piece of knowledge—of power—she ever stole. Or was ever given.

She’d been kept ignorant and illiterate for so long. Then, one thin afternoon, the boy who would become a monster spent a single evening teaching her the alphabet—so she could fetch him the books he wanted, so he wouldn’t have to bother. That afternoon—those uneven symbols scrawled across rough hide—became the first steady drum of liberation. A key that opened a world of lore and story, of magic and beauty, of lands where she might not always be no one. Where she could be not nothing.

That battered letter chart was the foundation of everything she’d become. Maybe that was why she still wrote in Undercommon, carving meaning into the tongue of her first prison—and first revolt.

The transcription had taken hours. The elven runes were intricate, more art than script, though the spell itself was elegantly simple. Her notes in the margins were uneven, the ink blurred where she’d leaned too close, shoulders tight, breath shallow.

She was tired.

She closed the scroll slowly. Reverently. And just… sat.

The ache behind her eyes pulsed, not from lack of sleep (she was long accustomed to that), but from a quiet bleed beneath her skin.

---

So…

Astarion bit her.

Well.

She offered, and he did.

No big deal.

He hadn’t taken much. Barely enough to leave a mark. Nothing like the last time. Nothing like them.

For all she’d dreaded it, in hindsight it almost felt like a non-event.

But she still felt it. The hollow in her limbs, her pulse crawling slow, everything just a little out of focus.

She could have cast Lesser Restoration. Cleared the exhaustion, patched the fog. She didn’t.

Not out of stubbornness. Out of discipline.

Save your magic, she told herself.
He’ll need it more.

She breathed in, let her eyes drift to the figure across the cave.

He lay perfectly still. As if sleeping with his entire body. Not trancing, not restless—just still.

She watched the line of his spine beneath his cloak, the way his fingers curled lightly against the dirt. Pale. Elegant. Too calm, like a marble effigy left in a long-abandoned temple.

He looks peaceful, she thought.

She remembered his face hours ago, how it changed when she offered her neck. It wasn’t seductive. It wasn’t masked.

It was need.

He needed it to happen.

They both needed it to happen.

To break a rule.

---

She remembered pretending to trance in her bedroll, secretly watching him with the vial. Saw him try—again and again—each time strangled by some invisible command, flinching back like a beaten hound. Each refusal lasting longer, each fear recoiling. The compulsion still there, but he was learning. Testing. Failing. Pushing.

Until he won.

When he drank, she felt it deep. Like a cord went slack inside her, the pull receding. Disappearing.

He felt safe.

He felt happy.

He wasn’t in pain.

She knew then it was only a matter of time.

She saw him licking every drop from the vial, eyes wide, face unguarded—almost boyish. And she understood.

Hunger was pain for his kind. How stupid not to grasp it sooner.

He looked glorious. Revived. As if the grave dust had been stripped from his soul.

Then he turned, and she closed her eyes.

Would the compulsion return if he bit her?

It would happen. She knew it. Felt it in her marrow.

Maybe she was being unfair. He wasn’t him. He wasn’t them.

She thought of the last time she’d offered such foolish mercy to a spawn. The last time she’d been bitten, drained, tossed to the pit.

No.

This needed to happen. She couldn’t stay mired in the rot of old wounds.

---

She felt it then—the pull. He needed more. It saddened her. She didn’t want him to suffer.

She felt him shift toward her.
She was—I was—

Afraid.

NO.

Never again.

She called me like a thunderbolt, and I called the friend.

She opened her eyes. Saw him, agonized, conflicted, staring at her like she was dying.

The friend nudged.

She said yes.

I would go.

The coin toss was rigged anyway. His compulsion was almost fully gone, but the leash still trembled in my presence.

---

He just held her—breathed her in—and bit us.

Then the pull vanished entirely.

He was shaking. Moaning.

Once my panic settled, it felt like draining pus from a wound—ugly, necessary, healing. We hunted his pain away.

Just peace.

Just happy.

When he pulled back, mouth leaving our skin, he didn’t speak. But we saw him. No predator. No cold gleam. Just worry, as if she’d given him something he didn’t know how to hold.

Maybe she had. Because she didn’t know what to do with it either. As soon as his fangs sank in, the fog had trembled.

Or maybe it hadn’t shattered. Maybe Astarion had simply stepped through, into that dim place where I stayed. Where sometimes Ilmater found me.

---

One thing was certain: during the bite, I could see him clearly.

And he could see me.

Even if he didn’t know what he was looking at.

His eyes were still on us—wide, fragile, rimmed with wonder. He was still trembling. His hands braced on our shoulders like he couldn’t quite trust the earth not to give out beneath him.

I didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Her breath came slow and steady through parted lips. Even with her pulse racing under her skin, she held herself calm for him. And a bit for me.

I felt the cold of his mouth fading from her—our—throat, the twin punctures already beginning to seal with blood.

His gaze darted to our neck. To her face. Then back to the blood on his lips.

He looked guilty. Like a boy who’d shattered a holy relic and didn’t know how to confess it.

I almost laughed. Almost.

Why did I ever think he would be like the other?

Instead, I reached up—slow, careful—and touched his cheek.

His breath caught. His whole body locked up under my hand.

So much fear, I thought. But so much wanting.

My thumb brushed the corner of his mouth, wiping away the last smear of crimson. It was intimate. Ridiculous, after everything. But necessary. A gentle coda to something far bigger than it should have been.

“Good,” I whispered. And meant it.

He was so good. He couldn’t see it. He thought wanting to drain me made him a monster. I knew that stopping himself was exactly what a monster wouldn’t do.

This one was good.
Not the good of soft things that never knew despair.
Not the good of the powerless.

No.

He was what could be good even when the world was bad.

I had to go back to the fog.

---

The word seemed to break something loose in him. His throat worked, but nothing came out. His eyes closed—brief, tight—then opened again, shining.

He let her go slowly, as if afraid he might drop her. Sat back on his heels, hands falling into his lap, fingers flexing helplessly as if still trying to hold on.

For a long moment neither of them moved. The cave was hushed, close with ash, old blood, damp stone.

Outside, dawn was starting to fracture the sky, thin beams cutting through cracks in the rock, turning the smoke to soft gold.

She studied him openly now. The faint flush along his cheekbones. The almost human pink at the tip of his ears. He looked less haunted. Less hollow.

He looked… real.

“Was it worth it?” she asked softly, breaking the fragile quiet. “To live four more days?”

His breath shivered out of him. He nodded. Couldn’t seem to manage anything else.

And then—almost unexpectedly—he cried.

Not the dignified tears of relief. Not the choking sobs of someone breaking apart. But slow, steady tears that simply fell. Like his body couldn’t hold the wanting inside any longer.

He pressed his palm hard against his eye. It did nothing.

Elenya didn’t reach for him again. She simply watched. Let it happen. Let him be here with her, without expectation or correction.

For just a heartbeat, she thought she might understand why Ilmater had led her to this. Why he’d tangled her path with this broken, starving creature.

Because underneath all of it—the coyness, the fear, the centuries of sharp and shattered hunger—there was something fragile. Something real. Something that desperately wanted to live.

Not just survive.

Live.

When the last shivers left him, Astarion drew a ragged breath and gave her a look so raw, so open, she felt it strike deep under her ribs.

She simply nodded. A tiny, conspiratorial tilt of her head that said: It’s alright. We’ll figure it out.

---

Now, he looked peaceful again. That made me happy.

---

I left the body on her own because she deserved better than me.
Could thrive better without me.
Could make things that mattered.

Me… as the friend said. I already chose wrong one too many times.
I’m too weak against the spider song.

Too tangled in old threads, too haunted by old hungers.
Better she builds her life without my weight pulling her under.

So I retreated deeper, wrapped tighter in the fog, hoping the silence would be enough.
Hoping that by stepping back, I was finally doing something right.

But I still wanted to watch her story — to see what she could become without my tangled threads.
What she might do with only the friend’s teachings, unburdened by my weight, free of the tidal wave of memories and the spider’s rot.

She soared high.
Saw the world.
Helped.
She mattered.
She hunted suffering like it was prey, and each time she brought mercy down upon it, I felt it echo even here, deep in the fog.

It was beautiful.
It was everything I could never be.

---

Astarion stirred slightly then, the faintest twitch of breath.
She looked away, quickly—first to the fire, then back to him, then back to the fire again. Anything to distract herself from her own thoughts.

But they circled anyway. Always back to him.
To how she used to press me about him.
How he pushed her to. How he tore into the fog itself, clawing at it while I was busy wrestling down the spiders that roamed there. While the webs wrapped tighter, choking the fog, choking me.

He wanted to see her bleed.
No—that wasn’t quite it.
He wanted me.

I hated him for it.
And understood him completely.
He was all venom and empty threats that day, his words crawling like blades over old scars, cutting open places long sealed.
Faces blurred together then: the ones who inflicted the wounds, and the ones who were the wounds.
No. I don’t want to see him.

She flinched inward, remembering that fight—when he demanded we leave. Gods, it still rang through her jaw, her spine, her chest.
His voice sliced right through the fog, clean and cold.
What a prick.

She hadn’t been surprised he lashed out.
What shook us was how much of it landed. How much broke through even the fog, all the way to me.

You think pain makes you holy.
No. But it does make me.

You see a broken toy and call it sacred.
No. But I see a broken toy and call it purpose.

---

Is it so wrong to see someone’s pain? she wondered.
Even when they don’t want you to? I echoed back.

Neither of us had the answer.

We’d both known this mission would crack her open, spill too much of me into the world. She knew I would surface eventually. I didn’t want to. Who would ever need me?
I was no one.

No one needed a no one.
No one loved a no one.

...That might not be true.
Because we both knew the friend. Trusted him.
I think—no, I know—he loved me too. Not just her. He never treated us as two.

And I... I think I loved him back.
If that was love.
I’m not sure what love is, not really.
But I loved the threads he gave me, the pull I sent to her. Those threads were all that ever drew me out of the fog. Kept the body existing.
And she liked the pull—it kept her moving, kept the spider song at bay for both of us.
We found peace together in the friend’s light and his gentle hands.
I liked him watching me.

---

The friend’s mercy was supposed to be boundless.
But lately she was beginning to suspect there were strings. Tight ones. Knotted around my wrists.
Maybe that’s what the threads really were.

Damn him.
It annoyed me.
He could’ve at least given us a manual—or some simple fucking instructions.

Instead all she had was that feeling again: that familiar thrum in the back of her throat, the taste of iron like tears never shed. Like a god watching from behind a cracked wall.

He’s still with her, I thought.
Still apologetic.
Still happy I stepped out.
It reassured her.
But it only grated on me. Because I knew he was hoping—waiting—for me to change.
That was never the pact he and I made.

Why does he hate the fog and yet love me?
I am the fog.
Or at least, it’s mine.
It’s how I keep myself.
Isn’t that what he wanted?
I am keeping myself.

But he doesn’t know.
Can’t see inside it unless I let him.
No one can.

He doesn’t see the web tightening, the spider still lurking. Thinks it’s just memories and old threads I’m hiding from.
He doesn’t see what the fog keeps locked away.
The magic. The curses.
Some from the spider. Some older still.
I can’t untangle them—not yet. So I stay hidden.
So they don’t unmake me.

I am keeping myself, you idiot.

---

She touched her neck gently, feeling the bite beneath her collar—mostly scabbed over now, though the nerves still sparked and tingled.

It had felt... intimate.

But not in the way she’d expected.
It was like being cracked open in just the right way. Like wrapping a shivering soul in a warm coat during a blizzard and watching them finally stop trembling.

It wasn’t submission. It was usefulness.
For once, she’d done something that worked.
That helped.

Because after that, the thread stopped pulling.
The suffering eased.
And his leash quieted.

Helping.

Gods, that was a drug all its own.

---

We both knew it then—the pull that first drew her to him hadn’t faded.
Not even after everything.
If anything, it had grown louder. Since Baldur’s Gate.

Since his sire’s leash began to tug at him.
The fog—I—could see it clearly now.
Since I came out. Since he drank from our blood.

That ugly, jagged red link branding his soul.
The fog gathered around it, the little bit I’d let seep into him ever since they started running. Through each of her wards, each of the friend’s blessings—I tried to give him something of me.

To help, in the only way I could.
Because the fog is all I have left.
All I am now.

Just the fog.
My magic’s in it.
I’m in it.

So I help with it. But he kept consuming it.
Especially to drink.
To run.
He needed more.

---

I wanted to help the vampire.
At first, just because he was another thread.
That’s all I have here—threads the friend gives me in the fog.
Something to hold.
Something to keep me existing.

But the more she pestered me, the more twistedly funny it became—watching her try to care for such a prick.

And the more he poked at the fog, stirred memories, pulled at old webs... the more he annoyed me.
He was difficult. Not just a thread anymore.

Still, I sent the fog with her magic to steady him. That’s why the body was so tired—I was draining her. But I wanted to help. At first, he was too unstable for his own good. I thought maybe it would anchor him, the way it did her.

Then I realized—he was hiding from something that had its fangs buried deep in his very being.
I knew that feeling far too well.

So I sent more.

---

And since I went out—truly out—to let him bite and drink, I can see his leash now.
The fog in my blood is inside him, pooling around that leash.

I don’t like leashes.
So the fog doesn’t either.

It would be simpler if he could come here. Really come here.
No leash can reach this place.

But few can ever come here.
The friend once told me that if I learned to control the fog, he would give me the cloak—teach me how to hold it tight, how to shape it.

Maybe then I could do more than hide.
Maybe then I could truly keep him safe.

She stood. The ache in her joints pulled her attention back to her body. Good. She welcomed it. Pain, at least, was honest.
She was silly that way. I like her. I like the body. The me without me. 

Hunting pain yet needing it. 

---

Her boots scraped the edge of the cave as she stepped toward the mouth, blinking into the daylight.

Then her eyes drifted back to him.

Still asleep. Still unmoving.

But lighter somehow. Something in his brow had eased since the night before. The fear was still there—just buried deeper.

There is something to be done, we both thought.

She watched him for another long moment.

Then whispered, without quite knowing why,

“I promised to keep you away from the monster.”

I agree, I thought.

I promise it too.

The words felt dangerous, even here, even alone.

She hadn’t meant to promise. But I did.

Because if I am to keep from becoming a monster myself, I can’t let this one suffer just so I can hide.

He needed help.
She couldn’t do it alone.

But she had.
Because she had me.

Ignoring both of them—him, and her—just because I was afraid... that would be cruel.

So I promised.

And promises bound us tighter than any oath ever could. Not because of Ilmater. But because of who we are.

She shouldn’t have done it.
Neither should I.

But it was too late now.

---

Back to the vampire.
Astarion.

How does one break a vampire lord’s hold over his spawn?

Everything she had read insisted it was impossible. The bond wasn’t a spell. It wasn’t a curse.

It was blood—blood and self, twisted together, a thread of being braided into another.

She exhaled through her nose and leaned back, stretching the tight ache from her neck.

The Nondetection spell she cast each morning—careful, meticulous, laced with old shamanic rites—could never touch something like that. It might cloak him from scrying eyes, blur his trail through the Weave. But not from Cazador’s call. Not if the bond still held.

And yet…

Astarion had resisted. Again and again. Even fed, even pressed close to her skin.

Why?

Was it the fog I gave him? She didn’t know what the fog truly was. Neither did I.
She didn’t know I’d been seeping it into her spells, into her wards, into her hands when she laid them on him. I didn’t want her to know.

But was it really what weakened the bond? I wondered.
She pondered too, unaware how our thoughts circled the same fragile question.

So I stayed silent.

Or had Cazador simply not called yet?
That, too, was possible.

She didn’t like that answer.
The vampire lord was too quiet, too still. And quiet things were rarely harmless.

Her eyes flicked to the fire. Astarion lay curled beside it, cloak draped over his shoulders, hair spilling over his brow. Still in trance. Still and silent as a statue hewn from cruel, ancient hunger.

He had given consent—dry, formal—for some research. Enough to sketch his symptoms, to build a case.

She pulled out the vampire recovery journal.

If he agreed to share even fragments of this with scholars, or to publish it under strict anonymity, it could draw funds. Enough, maybe, to challenge a vampire lord.

Pull #421.

It didn’t feel right anymore. But at least she would keep his name and his master’s name from the records. let's go with patient

So she wrote carefully, meticulously—every detail of his condition, the rules he lived by, the leash on his soul. Every change she saw, in body and in behavior.

Field Notes — Patient Case #421
Day 23

Subject: Male vampire spawn, under the dominion of a known vampire lord (identity withheld).

---

Summary of condition:

• Subject is a vampire spawn, sired approximately 160 years ago.
• Historical feeding pattern restricted by sire: limited to sporadic consumption of dead vermin. No known intake of fresh, living blood from thinking creatures prior to recovery.
• Recently recovered from prolonged interment lasting over a year, a punishment enforced by his master.
• Displays profound signs of starvation, physiological fragility, and trauma-related behaviors consistent with long-term deprivation and psychological subjugation.

---

Notes on sirelink:

• The blood bond is reinforced by a series of four explicit, verbally encoded compulsions:

  1. “Thou shalt not drink the blood of thinking creatures.”

  2. “Thou shalt obey me in all things.”

  3. “Thou shalt not leave my side unless directed.”

  4. “Thou shalt know that thou art mine.”

• Observations indicate potential loopholes:

  • Subject did not technically leave the sire’s side; the sire abandoned him in the grave.

  • Enforcement of Rule 4 appears strongest, evidenced by profound physiological and emotional distress when confronted with its breach.

• Rule 1 was broken earlier today after multiple failed attempts. The precise mechanism of its collapse remains unclear. Potential contributing factors:

  • progressive weakening due to regular feeding;

  • interference by external magical constructs

  • Distance and/or lack of renewal and reinforcement

  • psychological override triggered by necessity or opportunity.

• Rule 2’s redundancy raises suspicion: explicit orders to “obey” layered upon the fundamental compulsion to obey may indicate either obsessive control tendencies on the sire’s part or an attempt to forcibly renew the bond’s potency.

• Rule 4 seems less practical and more emblematic of the sire’s pathology—an expression of sadism and possessive mania—but ironically exhibits the deepest hold.

---

Feeding hypothesis:

• Preliminary data may suggests adequate feeding—specifically on sentient blood—may erode passive compulsions or at least dilute their immediacy.

• Since consuming fresh blood, subject has demonstrated:

  • increased vigor, physical coordination, and alertness;

  • sharper reflexive responses and enhanced supernatural faculties.

• Ongoing observations are necessary to determine whether regular intake of fresh blood from thinking creatures weakens the passive compulsive grip.

---

Cognitive & behavioural observations:

• Exhibits pronounced startle reflex, guilt-laden self-monitoring, and episodes of abrupt emotional release (crying, dissociation).
• Alternates between hyper-vigilance and moments of almost childlike wonder or relief.
• Shows subtle but increasing autonomy, particularly after feedings.
• Continues to respond to gentle reassurance and permission-giving behaviours.
• Noted to maintain prolonged eye contact with the donor post-feeding, as if seeking unspoken confirmation of wellbeing, safety or acceptance.

---

Recommendations for continued study:

• Maintain detailed logs of feeding intervals, blood sources, and subsequent behavioural or physical changes.
• Evaluate the possibility of carefully staged exposure to higher-tier compulsions to observe the threshold of resistance.
• Avoid direct confrontation with Rule 4 triggers until more data is secured; emotional destabilization poses a risk to both the patient and the observer.

---

Addendum:
Name and identity of subject and sire withheld for ethical and practical reasons.
Notes cross-referenced with literature in the upcoming research dossier. 

So now, she had to begin her proper research dossier.

Bibliography first.
She opened a new journal and turned to the second page, writing carefully at the top:

Working Bibliography — Vampirism in Faerûn
(Compiled from personal studies, field encounters, and institutional archives in Baldur’s Gate)

1. Necromancy of Thay (unknown)
2. The Book of Night (unknown)
3. Tome of the Stilled Tongue (unknown)
4. Van Richten’s Guide to Vampires (Ravenloft origin)
5. The Necrologium (elven origin, possibly mythic)
6. The Curse of the Vampyr (anonymous, modern)
7. The Red Testament (House Z’ress Aleanrahel, Lolthite priestesses)
8. Hollow Mirrors: On the Nature of the Vampyr (Red Wizard Hazlik)
9. Sunward Prayers for the Night’s Children (unknown)
10. Anatomie du Sang Maudit (Mulhorandi origin)
11. Whispers from the Lifeless Choir (possibly elven in origin)
12. The Pale Curse: Recognizing the Signs of Vampiric Affliction (Sister Maelthra, House of the Healing Dawn)
13. Blood and Bone: A Layperson’s Guide to the Undead (Willough the White, Sage of Scornubel)
14. When Shadows Feed (Anonymous)
15. Ten Ways to Kill a Vampire (Bregan Ironfoot, retired adventurer)
16. Of Night and Hunger: Vampires in Song and Story (Ilwenna Val’Sharn, Bard of Evereska)
17. Saints and the Sired: Martyrs Who Fell to Vampirism (Archivists of Lathander’s Dawnvault)
18. The Unseen Invitation: On Glamour, Gaze, and Will (Drennel Kort, Psion and Mind Healer)
19. Black Veins and Bitter Wine (Nessa Daerlane, apothecary of Arabel)
20. The Midnight Guest: Vampires in Urban Faerûn (Professor Larl Greystone, University of Neverwinter)
21. Spoken Soft, Died Fast: Folk Defenses of the North (Compiled by the Winter’s Wardens of Silverymoon)
22. Vampires and the Divine: A Theological Inquiry (Cleryn of Candlekeep)
23. Feasting on Fear: Feeding Rituals of the Undead (Vezhalos of Amn)
24. Echoes in the Coffinwood: Vampire Activity in Cormyr (Lady Amelindra Duskrose)
25. Shadow-Sired: On Vampiric Possession and Infiltration (Arcanist Yilrin Sar)
26. The Blood Ledger: Known Vampire Lineages of the Sword Coast (Clerks of the Hall of Records, Waterdeep)

She retrieved the bundle of books she’d purchased in the Gate from her pack with deliberate care, setting each one down on the stone floor like laying out bones.

Twelve in total, gathered in a single frenzied morning beneath Baldur’s Gate’s shifting skyline — from back-alley stalls, cloaked booksellers, half-curious clerics, and one very nervous apothecary who wouldn’t speak until coin touched his palm. Even a tower archive had contributed, grudgingly.

She spread them across the flattest stretch of stone. Their pages were still creased from heat and travel. Some smelled of mildew, others of sulfur, old ink, or cheap oil. A few were already marked up in tight script — not hers, someone else’s, decades or centuries old. That, too, made them precious. The past always left annotations.

She sat cross-legged beside them, ink-stained fingers hovering over each spine, sorting them not by subject, but by reliability — by flavor of truth. She let out a sigh, low and tight. Then she opened her new journal to a clean page and wrote with steady hand:

Acquired Volumes –

• The Curse of the Vampyr (annotated, partial)
• Ten Ways to Kill a Vampire (practical, combat-focused)
• Black Veins and Bitter Wine (alchemical potential)
• Feasting on Fear (unsettling but observant)
• Of Night and Hunger (bardic framing — cultural comparisons)
• Blood and Bone (simplified, useful for lay interpretations)
• Sunward Prayers for the Night’s Children (fragile — handle with ritual gloves)
• Vampires and the Divine (excellent for theological integration)
• The Pale Curse (diagnostic base)
• The Midnight Guest (urban infiltration — cross-reference behavior)
• When Shadows Feed (mostly folklore — verify patterns)
• Anatomie du Sang Maudit (dense, slow translation in progress)

And beneath it, another heading:

Outstanding Sources

• Necromancy of Thay — Restricted. Possible access via Candlekeep or intermediary Red Wizard contact. Stolen over a century ago. Dangerous.
• The Book of Night — Sealed. Rumored held in the Oghmanyte Black Archive. Verification pending.
• Tome of the Stilled Tongue — Possibly retrievable through infernal cult remnants. Avoid unless desperate.
• The Necrologium — Fragmentary references. Seek in Silverymoon or elven sanctuaries.
• The Red Testament — Known Underdark location.
• Hollow Mirrors — Philosophical treatise from Thay. Check eastern trade routes or exiled scholars.
• Whispers from the Throatless Choir — May exist in bardic circles or among Evereska’s records.

Remaining texts — Most likely tracked through Candlekeep holdings.

Candlekeep would have to be the next waypoint — once she secured him. Even if her name wasn’t quite her own anymore. Even if the scholars there fussed and fussed.

They held at least five of these missing volumes. Possibly more, if she dared flatter the Keeper of Tomes. She didn’t relish it, but there were too many gaps, too many unknowns — especially now, with him below, curled in that impossible posture, not quite sleeping, not quite trusting her.

If she was going to help him — truly help him — she needed more than a way to bandage a predator. She needed to understand the very architecture of what he was. The rituals that held him together. The ones that could break him apart.

There might also be secrets buried deeper — in Thay, in the Warlock’s Crypt, in Menzoberranzan itself.

It might be smarter to aim for the Crypt first, since it would surface nearer.
Still risky. Almost as much as Menzoberranzan.

No one, she thought bitterly, had a better anatomical grasp of vampires than her old masters.

A sigh escaped both of us.

Menzoberranzan would be hard.

---

The sun still rode high when she began sorting her notes. It was the safest time.

Two leather-bound travel journals lay open on the rough table, each a chaotic living record: loose scraps of parchment tucked between pages, sprigs of dried herbs pressed flat like fragile green veins, charcoal sketches of sigils and wards from a dozen cultures. The margins bloomed with cramped side notes in multiple tongues—some in Common, others in Elvish, a few rendered in the curling strokes of Undercommon.

Beside them rested her first purchase of the day: a slim, dark volume bound in cracked red leather — The Curse of the Vampyr. Bought that very morning from a traveling book peddler under Baldur’s Gate’s bustling awnings. It still smelled faintly of mildew and pipe smoke. Her new dossier was nearby, where she scribbled idle phrases just to keep the ink flowing.

---

Harken close and beware the Vampyr.
Beware its cold beauty. Beware its charm. Beware its curse.
Above all, beware the pale noble, for the Vampyr cannot bear to be of the common folk.

How doth one protect from the beast?
Walk not in the blackest night, for the Vampyr loves these nights more than any other.
If you must walk, do so by the light of our moon and take care.
Carry the blessings and marks of your God at all times.

But remember: your home is your fortress, if protected well.
If you hear a knock in the night, be wary. Let no stranger into your home.

If it be a friend, look upon them. Do they seem pallid and wan?
See you any mark upon their neck? Any dirt upon their clothes?

Unless their need is dire, turn all away but the most trusted.
And if the Beast finds a way into your hearth, flee. Leave love and family behind.
You will not save them if you stay.
You will not see them again.
But they will see you—pale and smiling, calling them into the night.

---

Charming, she thought dryly.

---

She turned first to her older notes. Her fingers moved with practiced delicacy, flattening each page, smoothing creases, pinning corners with river stones. This, too, was a healer’s ritual: organize the wounds before attempting to treat them.

Then she wrote at the top of a fresh sheet, in deliberate, careful script:

---

VAMPIRISM — AVAILABLE INFORMATION

---

Physiological notes, scattered across Faerûn’s wisdom

• From Rashemi hedge priests:

“Blood drawn from the throat heals faster than limbs. They do not favor wounds to extremities. Disabling legs may hold them longer than any stake.”

• A scrap of parchment in Orcish, found in the Evermoors:

“A vampire’s marrow drinks deepest. When starved, their bones feel hollow — brittle. Striking joints may shatter them when weak.”

• From Chult, hastily scribbled in a rain-smeared hand:

“Heat does nothing. Sun is death. Fire only frightens them if it might expose them to day.”

• A margin note in Elvish from a temple library in Silverymoon:

“Their breath does not fog, no matter the cold. Sweat never gathers. Useful for detection.”

---

Anthropological fragments — the stories around them

• A Moonshae bard’s account of coastal villages:

“Salt lines on doorsteps deter some. A local superstition or older truth?”

• From the drow city of Sschindylryn:

(Note missing — follow up with privious journal.)

• A scribbled note from Tethyr:

“A clan of halflings told tales of a ‘white guest’ — a vampire who once brought gifts each Midwinter, only to take a single life come spring. They spoke of him with fear and ceremony, not hatred.”

---

From The Curse of the Vampyr (preliminary reading)

“The vampyr knows no heartbeat. No breath. Their blood is but a conduit for magic. Drain it entirely and they fall into torpor, but even so, the mind lingers.”

So far, this appeared anatomically inaccurate — her observations of Astarion suggested the presence of a very slow pulse and faint respiration.

“When starved long enough, they become almost mindless, ruled by base hunger. Memory fractures. Language returns only after many feedings.”

This, at least, seemed consistent.

---

She underlined her final note:

Need to verify all content after summary directly with the patient.

By mid-afternoon.  She sat back, exhaling slowly. 

---

It would be hard—nearly impossible—to separate truth from rumor.
She knew that. Vampires drew stories to them like flies to carrion. They were creatures of myth as much as flesh, and so every old wife’s tale, every bard’s lament, every hunter’s swaggering boast muddied the waters until you could drown in falsehoods.

She needed something sharper than that. Reliable. Hard, clean, surgical.

But where in all the hells would she find it?
The thought of returning to Menzoberranzan iced her blood. The Warlock crypt lay three, maybe four days east—a secretive, century-old necropolis riddled with undead, locked doors, and whispering dark powers. Surely, she tried to reason—grasping at the fragile thread of hope—surely that would hold more truth about vampiric bonds than any nest of Lolth-sworn sadists.

Right?

But for now… the observations she’d gathered would have to serve.

She crossed to the far corner of the cave, knees creaking, and knelt. From her pouch she drew a bundle of incense—half-charred, bound in tarnished copper wire, pungent with old resins. She set it on the stone and struck a spark to its tip. Smoke rose thin and acrid, clawing at her throat. Her fingers lifted almost on their own, tracing the spider sigils across her sternum—sharp, curling lines burned into her memory long before she’d ever been free.

She hated this magic. So did I.

Hated what it was. Where she’d learned it. Who she’d learned it from.

But the spider could slip through cracks no divination could reach. It had once been another thread from the friend—another small pull to keep the body moving. Now, it was only necessity.

And right now, she needed eyes.

When her mind snapped into the spider’s body, the transition slammed into her. Suddenly she was small, quick, crawling—eight legs whispering across beams thick with centuries of dust and neglect.

She clung high in the shadowed rafters of a narrow stone room. Gilded sconces lined the walls, but their gold was tarnished, dulled by old air and older blood. The cold clung everywhere, heavy with mildew and the dry stink of old rot.

A dormitory. Barely.

Below her sprawled a space cramped enough for three, yet stuffed with five restless bodies. The walls pressed close. Wooden-framed bunks hugged the stone, draped in threadbare, dirt-smeared blankets that might have been older than the spawn themselves. The middle bunk’s lower frame lay stripped bare—no mattress, no sheets, just wood, hard and bare. Astarion’s place, she guessed, and the knowing crawled through her with unwelcome sadness. 

There was no basin here. No wash stand. No semblance of comfort. Only beds too thin, too flat, bearing dark stains where bodies had lain too long without feeding.

Astarion’s siblings—if that poisoned word could apply—clustered together in uneasy silence. Lantern light flickered, carving hollows under their eyes. They were wounded. Bleeding.

One leaned against a bunk’s rusted post, clutching his side. Petras. Fangs jutted from his split mouth, one eye nearly swollen shut, bruises dark across his throat and shoulder.

“The master’s locked us in,” he rasped at last, voice thick and slurred. “No more hunts. Not for marks… not for Astarion.”

Across from him stood a white-haired elf, sleek and sharp as a blade left too long in brine. Her expression filled with manic disgust. “So we’re all trapped in this shit hole until the little runaway mutt crawls back? Why should I rot here with the likes of you?”

Aurelia, the only one with hair not silver, sat perched on the edge of a bunk, arms wrapped tight across her chest. Her glare could have stripped bark from trees. “Feel free to take your complaints to the master, Violet. I’m sure he’d indulge his favorite, after all.”

That shut the elf—Violet up—but not entirely. Some fevered glint danced in her crimson eyes, something that might have been madness or just patience stretched too thin.

“No hunting means no feeding,” muttered a smaller figure at the room’s edge. A gnomish spawn, skin drawn tight, hands twisting nervously at his collar. “Not unless he decides otherwise.”

Violet rounded on him with a hiss. “Why? We haven’t done aanything. It's you two and Astarion’s fault. If you hadn’t failed to drag that idiot home—” her chin jerked toward Petras and Aurelia “—none of this would be happening.”

On the farthest bunk sat another figure—a half-elf woman with long straight  silvery hair and eyes like bruised rubies. Elenya recognized her, a shadow from that chamber of bone and steel, bound beside Aurelia and Petras under the skeleton’s chill grip. Now she looked the worst off, shoulders hunched, gaze fixed on something far past the walls.

The spider crept down the stone, silk glands pulsing. Elenya felt each delicate footstep, each tiny vibration, as if her heart were tied to the spider’s legs.

“Why’s he keeping us here?” the gnome whispered, voice nearly breaking. “Why not just send us out again? I don't want to starve again!”

“I don’t know,” Aurelia snapped. “I was a little busy bleeding out to ask follow-up questions.”

Violet snapped at him as well adding. " Would you stop your whining you bug. I've had enough of your voice for a full century already." 

Then the half-elf finally spoke. Her voice was low, hollow, as if echoing up from the bottom of a deep well. “He must be sending them. To punish Astarion. He knows how much he’d hate it.”

Them. The way she said it—soft, certain—landed like ice water poured down Elenya’s spine.

Petras let out a humorless breath, fangs peeking in a grimace. “Don’t worry, sister. Astarion will pay for this. One way or another.”

No, Elenya thought fiercely, even as the spider’s frail body trembled with her pulse. No, he won’t.

She willed her familiar onward. Find the master. Find Cazador.

The spider obeyed, slipping into a jagged crack in the wall and vanishing into darkness.
A clutch of cold slammed through her.

She gasped, lungs dragging for air. Her ears rang. Her neck itched with phantom legs. For a breath—just one—she could have sworn she heard hundreds of tiny claws scuttling across the stone behind her.

She spun, hand half-raised in a ward.

Nothing.

Just the cave. Just the quiet hiss of pine sap in the fire, the faint scent of char and old blood. Just the slow, even breath of a vampire who should not be alive.

She clenched her jaw. Drew the fog around her, tighter, thicker. Grounded us both.

The ache in her back. The dull pull in her neck. The grit of stone beneath her knees.

Real. Safe. Ours.

She fumbled for her flask. Water washed cold over her tongue, clearing incense from her mouth. When she looked again, Astarion was stirring.

He opened his eyes slowly, pupils narrowing to slits against the light. For a long moment he just… blinked. Stared at her, as if unsure she was really there.

Then, in a voice softer than she ever expected—almost fragile:

“You stayed.”

She nodded once, precise. Controlled. “Why would I leave?”

Astarion sat up carefully, each movement tentative, as if testing the hinge of his own bones. His shoulders rolled. A faint crack ran up his spine. He looked… different. Not relaxed. But less like a spring pulled too tight. Less ready to vanish.

She turned her attention to her pack, drawing out rations—thin slices of salted meat, hard flatbread, bundles of dried herbs wrapped in waxed cloth. Her hands moved by instinct, practiced from too many nights on too many roads. 

She ate in silence.

She didn’t press. Not yet.

They packed up in slow, measured silence. Astarion helped in small, careful ways — gathering her scattered notes, rolling up bedrolls with motions that seemed almost too deliberate, as if he were reminding himself how to move through the world. He didn’t meet her gaze either, and she didn’t push either.

When they finally stepped out into the narrow stone corridor that wound from the cave, the air felt close, stale from decades without fresh wind. Their boots made soft scuffs on the ground, echoing faintly. Moss clung in streaks along the walls, slick and dark. Every now and then, trickles of water threaded across the floor, cold and clean where it pooled in shallow dips.

He was oddly silent. Oddly calm.

Not like the first days she’d known him — all restless charm, brittle quips, a predator’s flash of teeth whenever silence threatened to reveal too much. Now he simply walked beside her, cloak gathered close, hands tucked beneath it. His eyes flicked occasionally toward the tunnel ahead, pupils wide in the dim, but there was none of the sharp edges that used to cling to him.

No tension at the corner of his mouth. No sly glances to gauge her distance.

Just… quiet.

It should have reassured her. But there was something about it — the careful calm of someone who didn’t want to risk waking anything that might still be sleeping inside his ribs. Or perhaps inside hers. He looked lost in thoughts.

At one point they passed beneath a low arch where old spiderwebs draped in sheets from the ceiling. Astarion ducked slightly, brushing stray threads from his hair. When his hand lowered, his fingers hovered near his throat, then dropped away like he’d thought better of it.

They kept moving.

Their steps found a cautious rhythm. She led, tracing a path through the shallow tunnels by instinct as much as using the map. He stayed half a pace behind, close enough that she could feel the echo of his body heat — strange for a vampire, but he was still warmer than the stone. Now and then their shoulders almost brushed.

At some point she realized he was humming under his breath. Barely there, a raw, tuneless sound. Like something he didn’t quite know he was doing.

She glanced at him. He caught her look, went stiff, then shrugged a shoulder and gave her a ghost of a smile. The expression fell quickly, leaving only phantom lines at the corners of his eyes. But he didn’t explain it. Didn’t cover it with words.

Good. She didn’t want him to.

So they kept on — through narrow arches, past veins of quartz that caught her torchlight and splintered it into pale shards. The air was damp, rich with mineral tang. Once she heard the distant tumble of water through rock, and paused just to listen. Astarion did too, tilting his head slightly. Their eyes met. For that heartbeat, it felt almost like standing with a companion, not a patient. Not a creature she was struggling to keep alive against gods and monsters and the echo of his master’s leash.

She started walking again. He followed.

Notes:

The deeper we go, the more it feels like Eleyna’s fog is both a refuge and a cage — full of half-memories, promises she didn’t realize she made, and that gnawing need to be useful at any cost.

Meanwhile, her research keeps stacking up, each page another quiet plea to find some way to break Astarion’s leash.

Thank you for being here.

Chapter 19: The Sting of Mercy

Summary:

Astarion drinks from Elenya for the first time, only to discover there is no freedom in forbidden hunger—only new chains forged of trust, guilt, and the bright taste of her blood.

They push deeper into the tunnels, hounded by old fears and fragile mercies, as Astarion starts to understand precisely how close he is to something.

Astarion POV

---

I’m going to unravel.

I know it the way one knows a blade’s edge by touch alone—no sight, no warning, just that intimate, slicing certainty.

Her blood still lingers on my tongue. The warmth of it. The way it clung to the back of my throat, sweet and metallic and that explosion of flavors, numerous, contradictory, She tasted like life itself.  Lifeblood was never more fitting of a term.

I keep replaying it—over and over, every cursed breath of it. Her heartbeat under my lips, fluttering softly before being forced to a strong yet steady calm. The faint tremor of her hands appeasing. How she breathed out slow, shallow, to keep me calm. She had been scared, for a moment. Then decided not to be. Held my sholders calmly. Trying to anchor me while I was seconds from tearing her open.

I almost did.

I nearly drained her dry. I felt the hunger rear up, black and monstrous, snarling to the surface. It wanted to swallow her entirely, Blood,marrow and heat and all that fragile strength she carries inside. And gods, it would have been so easy. A tiny shift in my mind, a slip of restraint, and she would’ve crumpled against me—empty, cold, another mistake staining these cursed hands. Another person who died for trusting me.

But then came the memories. I keep circling back to them like a moth that can’t help burning itself to cinders. How her eyes, the only constant in the thousands of skins she wears, caught the firelight, impossibly calm, earnest and, almost innocent. She always  looked at me like she saw through the bullshit. And she did most of the time.

The memories of her hand in mine, of her wrist in my palm hit me as well. 

I don't want her to die I think.

Even less now, after seeing her eyes after i fed. They were clearer than I’ve ever seen them. Alive. Fierce. More animated than I’d ever imagined she could be. I’ve looked at her a thousand times and never noticed that glint—like the fog dimming her gaze dispersed.

It should haunt me. It does. Because I know it was meant for me. She was trying to stay calm. For me. To keep me tethered so I wouldn’t lose myself. To show me ahe was fully present. Who does that? Who stares down a predator with such reckless, stubborn faith that it’ll choose right?

I don’t deserve it. Any of it. I can’t stop thinking how close it was—how close I was—to leaving her a husk on the cave floor, breath stolen, skin gone cold. How her body might have slumped against mine, how I might have cradled her afterward, whispering apologies into cooling flesh. Would I have wept? No, Begged? I don't think I would have. And it would have changed nothing anyway. 

But it didn’t happen.

It didn’t happen.

She’s still here. I can hear her soft movements by the mouth of the cave—rustling fabric, a faint cough. The scent of her drifts to me even now. Still so painfully, impossibly alive.

And I—?

I’m shaking. Quietly, carefully, so she won’t see. I’ve curled my hands into fists against my chest, nails biting hard into my palms. I can’t seem to stop it. If I look down, I’ll see blood welling there too. Another reminder of what I am. What I nearly did.

I thought I’d wanted freedom more than anything. To slip Cazador’s leash, to revel in the taste of choice. But this taste—her taste—it’s left me craving and terrified of my own mouth, of my own hunger. Terrified of what I might do if I’m ever allowed this again.

I can't help it now. 

I want this again. 

I crave this again. 

I hunger and hope for this again.

I close my eyes. See it all play back.

Again.

The little gasp she gave when I first sank my teeth in—half pain, half acceptance. And the flood of relief that wasn’t even mine when the leash inside me loosened, when the pain I’d carried for decades finally, finally ebbed. 

Her blood did that.

She did that.

Now we walk again. 

---

The tunnels narrowed again—low-ceilinged and damp, the scent of serpents and dust clinging to every surface. The stone underfoot had the texture of scales, polished smooth by generations of cold-blooded bodies slithering through.

We were taking the shallow serpentfolk tunnels now, weaving between the Trollclaws and the Troll Hills. They were mostly abandoned on this side—too narrow for trade, too winding for scouts. But she knew them. Of course she did.

Elenya had resumed her yuan-ti form now. Her movements were fluid again, her spine just slightly too long, her pupils narrow slits of perfect control. 

Ahead of me, she was pressing a handful of pungent roots against the wall, grinding them in tight circles with her wrist until they burst. The scent rose immediately—sharp, bitter, clawing at the back of my throat and making my eyes sting. Her fingers came away stained a lurid green. She hissed, either at the sting of the juices or simply in displeasure before offering me a share of the much to use myself. 

The “silent scent,” she called it. A clever little alchemical concoction to mask our trail from beasts and hunting parties—anything that might pick up the faint trace of sweat and blood we left behind. Effective, certainly. I couldn’t have tracked her by scent even standing two paces away.

But each time she did it, something in me coiled tight.

It scrubbed her away.

That subtle warmth of living skin, the impossible blend of herbs, soap, sweat, and something uniquely hers that had—gods help me—become almost comforting. Each time she smeared herself in that acrid paste, it vanished. Left only this biting neutral that made my nose wrinkle and my eyes water. It was like she’d disappeared entirely.

Of course I didn’t say anything. What was there to say? That I missed how she smelled? Even for me, that sounded absurd. It was necessary. But it soured my mood all the same as we moved on.

I hated how blank she smelled now. I hated how easy it was for her to slip into this—another shape, another mask. As if she wasn’t the same woman I’d just fed from. As if none of it mattered. She just moved ahead with casual ease, tail brushing against the stone like a whisper. Acting as if everything were perfectly ordinary. As if nothing had changed.

But everything had changed.

I had drunk from her.

Thinking blood.

Gods bellow.

A thinking creature.

I did it. I actually did it.

From a willing creature no less.

I disobeyed the First Rule.

And somehow—I’d been able to.

That alone should terrify me.

Cazador’s compulsion should have stopped me cold, should have frozen my throat and turned my limbs to lead. 

It prevented me from doing it in the tomb and I was mad with starvation back then.

But it hadn’t last morning.

Or, in a way, it did.

Did try at least. 

With the vial as well as her neck. 

But something had kind of shattered. The chain on my leash relaxed. A weakened link in the chain. A hairline crack, spidering out into places I didn’t dare look too closely.

It had let me choose. 

Why ? 

What changed between then and now.

Was it the distance? The regular feeding?

Or perhaps… she had changed something.

Her scent might have been masked now, but her the memory of it still hung heavy around me—that breath against the nape of her neck. It was calling to me.

I realized then, with a sick drop in my gut, that I recognized that particular thrum. The same delicate tendril that brushed against my mind when she healed me, when she warded me, when her fingers skimmed my skin in quiet reassurance.

Her. 

She’d been researching ways to free me, the idiot—of course she had. I’d seen her after my trances, hunched over a stack of books, ink staining her fingers, heavy bruises under her eyes. Always digging. Always deciphering.

Maybe ... Nevermind. 

I couldn’t look at it.

Not yet.

Because I knew in my marrow it was impossible.

I was his.
Would always be his.

Some things can only be severed by true death. His or mine.

But she was trying.

Maybe she found a way of weakening the leash.
Didn’t tell me about it before testing it to not raise my hopes up.

Of course she didn’t. Because she’s reckless like that. Because she’s stubborn, fragile, mortal—fool enough to dangle her throat beneath my teeth in the hope it might do some good.

I clenched my hands until my knuckles ached, until my claws nearly pierced skin. I didn’t dare call out to her. Didn’t dare tell her how badly I was coming undone. Because if I spoke, I might beg. For her to stop. For her to let me do it again. I didn’t know which would be worse.

So I followed, silent as the dead, and pretended that my world hadn’t tilted forever on its axis.

---

Meltdown aside,

I felt absolutely invincible. Her blood still thrumed through me—echoing down to my marrow. And now, I understood precisely why Cazador never let us taste scentient blood. There is no turning back from it. No forgetting. It wasn’t just warmth and nourishment—it was clarity.

Power.

It clung to my senses like perfume. I could still feel it humming in my veins, brushing against the inner walls of my skull.

Hers.

A living creature, with thoughts, dreams, history, sorrow—pressing against every hollow place inside me.

I had never been stronger. Never been happier.

Never been safer.

Because of her.
Because she gave it.
And more.

Gods—had I even truly thanked her?
No. Of course not.

Because that’s something only people do.

I watched her back intently as we wound deeper into the damp coils of the tunnel. The delicate ripple of her shoulders beneath scaled skin, the way her tail carved lazy arcs across the moss-slick stone—it all seemed unbearably casual. As if this was any other afternoon. As if, in the little more than a fortnight I’d known her, she hadn’t undone me entirely.

She was insane.

Completely, gloriously insane.
And I might have truly liked her for it—If I didn’t know better.

But I know better than get attached. 

nothing good comes from getting attached. 

last time it got me a year of entombment.

But as I watched, something snagged my attention. A subtle stoop to her shoulders. A tiny, telltale hitch in the rhythm of her steps. The yuan-ti form should have moved with effortless grace, each motion liquid and measured, yet she seemed… off.

My voice broke the silence before I could catch it, echoing strangely off the damp, curved walls.
“Are you alright?”

She didn’t turn. “Peachy!”

“I’m serious. How are you feeling?”

“So am I, Astarion. I’m feeling fine. Just a bit woozy.” She waved a hand, as though dismissing a buzzing insect. “You really didn’t take that much. Hopefully it’ll pass.”

“It will,” I blurted—too quickly. Too defensive.

She caught it instantly, her voice turning amused. “Stop worrying, that’s my thing.”

“I’m not worried.”

“Great then.”

We fell into silence again, footfalls muffled by moss and the strange, scale-like stone. But my thoughts wouldn’t quiet.

I should thank her, I realized.

Really thank her.

For what she gave me—her blood, her trust, her reckless mercy.

I enjoy her company all things considered that’s more than I can say about most if not all whom I met in the last 160 years at least. 

And I was grateful, in a way. 

She was clearly someone useful to have around. Someone I also enjoyed having around. I haven't done much to ingratiate myself to her really. Whatever I needed, I wanted, she offered willingly. Without much of convincing at all. And I just kept snarling at her like a barking dog really. 

Pathetic. 

Though, I did have my reasons. 

I doubted her intention. Couldn’t believe it was all as disinterested as she made it to be.

Who would go to such length to help a stranger, a monster for nothing in return ?

It was unbelievable. Still is!

But what does it matter? Whatever game she is playing, if she is playing one, is either too convoluted to guess in the first place or required me to be safe and strong. 

I don't even fully believe it anymore, that she is getting anything out of it. 

And if she is. 

Good for her I guess. 

Whatever she required of me can't be worse than Cazador.

She doesn't have it in her to be worse than him.

At least I don't think so anymore.

What I need is to fully take advantage of this opportunity. 

I thought her a naive idiot, I still stand by that in some aspects but, she is also extremely competent, well-travelled and ressourceful. 

This is the best chance of escape I ever had. To go somewhere even he can't reach. 

Whatever she require of me.

As long as I am not with him. 

As long as she keep treating me like this.

This is what I prayed for.

I shouldn’t squander it. I can’t keep antagonizing and mocking her. Refusing her help and being a liability. I shouldn't have given up on cultivating the relationship. I should have persisted, pivoted and tried different approach. Played the long run. 

Truth be told, I was releived she refused me but my pride has been hurt. I wasn’t in the habit of being refused nor dismissed this decisively. She did not even hesitate nor think about it. 

In retrospect, it did make sense for her to do so. 

I was a ruin, 

Covered in blood and dirt and gore 

Hardly the enticing figure. 

Even if I wasn’t. I can recognize how instable and weak I was that night.  I came out a bit too strong. A bit too desperate. 

Not my best performance. But still, being seen through so thoroughly didn’t sting any less. 

So I lashed out. 

And stopped trying. But I can't continue like this. One way or the other. I must secure this...this alliance ? Barely an alliance if one side doesn't contribute a thing to the other. 

I can also recognise with the new clarity given to me that my angle was misguided. What I need is not to entice her for a quick fuck. What would that do to me? Nothing. I need long lasting favor. I need her coming for more and more.

Sex is opening the door.

it doesn't guarantee that you would be allowed to move in.

I need to come up with an angle. 

Gratitude is a good first step. 

“That was a gift, you know,” I said at last, the words softer than I intended. “I won’t forget it.”

“Please do forget it,” she muttered. “You don’t owe me a thing.”

By the Nine hells, can she be any more infuriatingly obnoxious!

“I don’t like being in people’s debt.” I added in a neutral voice. 

She glanced back over her shoulder, eyes glinting in the dim. “I don’t like being repaid for things I chose to do.”

What do I even answer to that? Silence hung heavy a beat longer.

Then—dry as dust—she added, “How about making dinner from time to time?”

I blinked, thrown. “Darling, I’m a vampire. I don't really eat food and can hardly be trusted to make it. It all tastes like ash to me.”

“I don’t know if the food tasting like ash is necessarily a vampire thing. Might just be my cooking. Of all the skills I’ve tried to learn, nothing eludes me quite like that one.”

I laughed—too suddenly, too loud, startling us both. But gods, I couldn’t stop. This madwoman was seriously talking about cooking.

“You? Can’t cook?”

“I can cook,” she huffed, her tail giving an indignant flick. “It just all tastes bland and lifeless—or so I was told.”

I smirked, leaning into the humor because it was easier than the chasm yawning open inside me. “Ah. So it’s not your technique that’s the problem—it’s the existential despair of lack of seasoning.”

She shot me a sidelong look, dry and unamused. “Exactly. Nothing quite like a flavorless broth to steel the mind and remind one that joy is an illusion.”

“ Clearly but by the hells women that's absolutely depressing.” I let the smile soften, felt it settle warm over my features. “Still… I wouldn’t have guessed you a poor cook. You seem like someone who’d follow every recipe like a ritual. Measure everything just so. Whisper a little prayer over the pot.”

“ I tried to,” she said quietly, voice dipping low, almost lost to the cavern. “Before I learned that food means nothing if your body refuses to taste. Feels like a waste of time, most days—spending so long and so much effort just to make something taste slightly better. If it’s clean, fresh, edible… what’s the point of all that fluff? So I just tend to keep it simple.”

I blinked, throat tightening.

She didn’t elaborate. Just kept walking, tail swaying, head held high. A perfect, unreadable mask.

There it was again—that strange, sharp ache in my chest. The urge to say something true. To give her something that wasn’t a quip or a grin. Because I was starting to see the pattern—bland food, bland clothes, bland everything. Yet no shortage of coin according to her. A life stripped of flavor, not by poverty, but by choice. Or habit. Or wounds I hadn’t yet traced to their source.

Maybe that could be my angle. Hedonism.

“Well, most do it for pleasure,” I offered faking amusement.

“Seems frivolous.”

“Isn’t that the point of pleasure? To be frivolous?”

“Maybe…” Her tone was a delicate shrug.

No wonder, she refused my advance.

I chuckled faintly. “You know, you might be the only person I’ve ever met whose culinary failures are philosophical.”

“I’m special that way, I guess.”

A pause, deeper than the last. I let it breathe. Then said—slower, careful, almost afraid to puncture the moment: “You know, I think you’re wrong.”

“About what?”

“You can cook. You just… don’t bother to. Maybe it would help to have someone to cook for.”

" Well since my only company right now is a vampire with the inability to taste mortal food. I guess, I will continue to be a culinary failure "

I laughed again. A lighter sound than I’d made in… gods, how long? Since when did I laugh so much. "Fair enough!" I said breathlessly. 

She didn’t speak right away. When she did her voice seemed uncertain “And what about you?”

“What about me?”

“You said it all tastes like ash. So what’s the point of eating? You eat every time I offer you food.”

I shrugged, trying for nonchalance, though it didn’t quite reach my bones. “There isn’t one. Not really. It’s just performance." Like most of me "Something to do when I want to feel normal.”

“That sounds tiring.”

“It is,” I admitted, words scraping out raw. “But… less so now.”

She tilted her head, eyes narrowing slightly. “I won’t offer anymore, if you don’t want it.”

“I enjoy that you keep offering.”

Her mouth twitched—just slightly. A private smile, almost hidden. “I wish I could taste something you’d make.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. It’s ... silly. I just wonder what it would taste like. Is there any mortal food you do enjoy?”

“Liquids are usually fine. Especially wines. Liquors. But nothing tastes quite as good as blood.”

“Then how about Thay’s Ogrish Sangaria? You should like that.”

I blinked. “What in the Nine Hells is that?”

“Spiceroots-infused wine spiked with blood, if I remember right.”

“That is not a thing.”

“It very much is. Remember, Thay is crawling with vampires—and ogres don’t shy from humanoid meat. I think I even have a recipe somewhere in the pack. Want to try it? Using animal blood maybe ? Something we could both try.”

I stopped dead, staring at her. And then—slow, helpless, startled by how stupidly pleased I was.

“Yeah,” I breathed, the word catching on something tender in my chest. “Yeah, I think I would like that.”

For one reckless heartbeat, I almost reached for her hand. Almost. Instead I just watched her shoulders lift in a tiny, amused sigh.

The tunnels pressed on around us—cold, damp, treacherous—but for that fragile, impossible moment, it didn’t feel like we were running from anything at all.

---

These tunnels were different from the ones we’d taken to reach the Trollclaws—newer in their carving, but somehow less welcoming for it. The stone walls still wore the raw wounds of chisels, gouges left jagged and sharp, unsoftened by time or lichen. There were fewer of the meticulous maps and neat directional sigils she’d pointed out before. Everything here felt rushed, rough—like it had been hacked out by impatient hands with no love for the stone itself.

Veins of pale quartz threaded through the darker rock, glinting like old scars when our torchlight caught them. It was humid here—almost cloyingly so. A heavy damp clung to my skin, turned each breath warm and laden, as if I were inhaling steam. Water seeped from narrow fissures overhead, dripping at steady intervals. Now and then a drop would land cold on my shoulder or trail a slick path down my back. I couldn’t decide if it was refreshing or infuriating. Perhaps both.

Crude glyphs began to appear, carved at uneven heights. Serpentfolk script—quick, curling, arrogant slashes that boasted of territory, warned of collapses, or proudly proclaimed that certain passages were “trapped and secured against intrusion.”

Elenya snorted under her breath. “Half-lies. They usually are. If you want to keep intruders away, you give them three warnings for every real hazard. Makes them turn back—or at least slow down.”

Her tone was dry, almost amused, but her shoulders were drawn tight beneath her half-cloak of scales. Her eyes were in constant motion, pupils narrowed to precise slits that darted from seam to seam in the rock.

A clever illusion was only clever until it wasn’t. We both knew that.

And indeed, it didn’t take long before the first real threat revealed itself. A subtle depression in the dust, so shallow it was nearly invisible, but with a telltale looseness to the particles that betrayed something sinister below. Elenya pointed it out with a claw, guiding me around it.

“Pressure plate,” she murmured. “Likely darts. Coated in something that makes your lungs drown themselves.”

A hundred paces later brought us to a near-invisible trip wire, fine as spider silk, strung low between two rocks. Elenya hissed as she traced its length with the back of her hand, found the tiny notch in the stone that would have sent gods-knew-what slicing through the air. After some probing,  The line went slack with a soft twang, coiling harmless to the ground.

Later, with deft claws and a muttered phrase in that slippery arcane yuan-ti gibberish she read from the walls, she temporarily disabled a glyph hidden at the tunnel ceiling. The line went slack with a soft twang, coiling harmless to the ground

It was… strange, to walk so close behind her. To watch how easily she moved through all this death. Like she could smell it—taste it on the air. Maybe she could. Her steps were sure, her hands precise. Every little flick of her wrist or narrowing of her eyes had weight behind it.

For once, I found no clever barb to offer.
Because all I could think was that these tunnels were hungry. The walls themselves seemed to watch us, to listen. And if not for her, I might have been swallowed whole before I ever knew my feet were in the monster’s mouth.

Then, at a bend where the air grew suddenly colder, I found myself slipping past her. Taking the lead.
Because it was easy. Laughably so, with her at my shoulder.

Elenya pointed out each glyph, each smug little scrawl that signaled the range of a trap or the purpose of a false warning. The serpentfolk were bastards for this—leaving clever codes meant to confuse outsiders but which, in truth, only made their deathworks simpler to circumvent if you could read their script.

And I could. At least with her whispering at my ear, her voice low and hissing, telling me which curves meant poison gas and which meant spring-loaded nets, which meant stay low, which meant step wide.

It was almost intoxicating—this unspoken dance. With her murmurs guiding me, my hands found trip wires before my boot could snag them. I felt the subtle shift of tension under my fingertips and knew where to cut. Disabled counterweights by instinct. Marked the faint shimmer of tension runes so I could break them clean, watching the glow gutter out with quiet satisfaction.

Be useful, that is a good start after gratitude.

Being useful always helped.

Elenya seemed almost amused by my deftness, a small half-smile curling her lip once when I disarmed a particularly intricate cluster of pins with nothing but a knife tip and a slow exhale.

And I found myself… enjoying it. The tiny spark of thrill. The way we moved together through the bones of the earth like two predators sharing a silent hunt. There was a rhythm to it—step, whisper, cut, breathe. Her breath at my ear, my hand steadying on the stone, our shadows moving ahead of us in long, slithering shapes.

It was—if nothing else—efficient.
And darkly, quietly exhilarating.

Somewhere in all that hush and hazard, it struck me again how absurd this was. How this woman—this mad, sharp-edged, exhausted woman—had taken it upon herself to keep me alive. How she navigated poison plates and cursed runes for my sake as much as her own. How she masked our scent at the cost of her own presence. How she let me drink.

She should have left me in that grave.
She should have slit my throat while I still lay weak in her arms.

Instead here we were. Tangled up in each other’s survival.
Wading through the dark side by side.

And though the tunnels remained damp, oppressive, full of the quiet threat of ancient death, for a little while they felt almost bearable. Because she was there. Because she didn’t flinch from it. From me.

And I—fool that I was—realized I’d begun to dread the day when all these traps ran out. When there would be nothing left to keep my hands busy. Nothing left between us but the brittle silence and the question of what exactly I was meant to do with this monstrous, fragile thing blossoming in my chest.

Hope is shuch a tease.

The distraction we found near one branching intersection, was more then welcome.

Three bandits, two of which were humans and one halfling, huddled in the darkness, reeking of sweat, rott and blood. They were draped over themselves like damp rags, weapons nowhere in sight. One of the human had a leg torn open from mid-thigh to shin, the wound a blackened gorge crusted with filth, fever sweat gleaming on his brow. Around them lay five more bodies—already past smelling, mouths slack and eyes clouded. The other two were still breathing, but not well—both bore ugly slashes, blood oozing between crude wrappings.

The conscious human man jolted upright when he saw Elenya. Eyes wide, breath catching in his throat. His hand scrabbled uselessly at the ground, seeking a dagger that wasn’t there.

“By the hells—one o’ them came back!” he wheezed. His voice broke into a tangled string of delirious mutters, words stumbling over each other about being left behind, about his gang running ahead and leaving them to rot. About how they’d be nothing but lizard food soon enough.

Elenya hesitated.

I saw it. Not fear—never quite that with her—but a quick tightening around her eyes, the subtle flare of her nostrils. She was calculating. Measuring how best to approach without spooking him, how to do this suicidal mercy of hers safely.

I felt my lip tighten before I even realized it.

Idiot.

I leaned in close, pitched my voice low enough for only her sensitive yuan-ti hearing. “Don’t. Let them die. They’re bandits—they’d slit your throat for a copper once they could stand upright.”

She didn’t listen. Of course she didn’t. Instead, she turned and gave me a look—worse than disappointment. It was pity. Gods, I could have gutted her for it. My fangs itched to show themselves. I think I did snarl, just faintly.

She knelt. Began rummaging through her belt pouches, deft fingers scooping herbs, crushing leaves, measuring out powders with quick little taps into her palm. I recognized some of them—bitterroots to draw infection, feverleaf for heat sickness. Then a soft glow, faint as a breath, shimmered over her hand and sank into the man’s mangled leg, closing the wound. He gasped, eyes going wide, tears breaking through the grime on his cheeks.

I just stood there, arms crossed tight, feeling that hot coil in my gut—resentment, fear, something tangled between. Watching her work was agony. Watching her give them something I knew she just as easily given me—no, that was the agony.

When the feverish fool could finally manage words, he grabbed her wrist in trembling hands. “Look—look out by Winding falls,” he rasped, breath catching. “Lizardfolk. Hunting the tunnels. Hit our boys a days back. Took everything. And traps, so many traps the Snakefolk are...”

What an idiot!

She only nodded, calm as ever. No surprise nor anger. Just acceptance, like the world being creul was the sun rising—inevitable. Then he tried to push a silver ring into her palm. A sad little scrap of value, dented and thin.

“For the heal—”

She jerked her hand back sharply. “No.”

And then, insult to injury—she actually unpacked some of OUR own rations. A few neat little parcels of cooked meat, cheese and tart berries. Laid them in two bundles by his side with deliberate care. Not a single word to soften it. Then she drew them a quick map to the nearest exit with a bit of charcoal on a scrap of parchment —complete with distances and safe markers. Even gave them a health potions each and a tiny sack of her silent scent. So they wouldn’t be tracked. So they wouldn’t suffer.

My jaw clenched so tight it ached.

They tried to give her coins—pathetic, dull bits of silver that meant nothing. Again, she refused.

So I stepped in, pocketed them with a smirk that bared sharp fangs.

The way the bandit flinched back, eyes darting between my smile and my eyes then my hair, was almost worth the entire farce.

We left them alive, their pitiful thanks ringing in my ears like bile.
My feet hit the ground harder than necessary as we went on. Faster. I wanted it behind us. Wanted the entire sordid business to dissolve into the dark.

It took fifty paces before she finally spoke.

“You’re in a mood.”

“Oh, am I?” The words snapped out before I could temper them. I raked a hand through my hair, nails scraping too hard against my scalp. “Forgive me for not delighting in watching you bleed yourself out for nothing.”

Her brow arched. “Nothing?”

“Yes, nothing.” My voice climbed without permission, echoing sharp off the stone. “They’d have slit your throat for a stale crust a day ago. And here you are—healing and feeding them, refusing payment, drawing them a neat little map to safety like some selfless, sanctified—”

“Why does that angers you?” she asked, head tilted, tone infuriatingly level.

“I hate heroes,” I spat.

“I am not one.”

I laughed, though there was no joy in it. Just a brittle, splintering sound. “For someone who isn’t, you do a fair amount of heroics.”

“Not heroics, juste chasing pain.  Also, I told you. I do it for me. I don't leave people in graves.”

How dare she?! She is comparing me to those pathetic weakling vermins.

“It's not the same! You were talking about helping me.”

“So why is helping them any different?”

“Don’t be stupid, of course it's different. I don’t care about them. I only care about me.”

Great! Now I've done it.

So long for not antagonizing her.

I waited for the scoff. For the lecture. For the self-righteous tilt of her chin that would let me pivot into an easy sneer.

But instead, her answer was calm. Almost too calm.

“Fair enough. Valid, even. But, ... not caring about them doesn’t explain why you hate me helping them.”

I blinked. Nearly screamed, though it cracked in my throat. “You’re not just showing them the exit. You are stopping healing and wasting time, slowing my escape, using resources—things that could been useful to me.”

“Ah. I see. That’s a valid point.” Her voice was infuriatingly measured, almost thoughtful. “I am sorry! I will try to be as quick as possible from now on and I’ll also try to use no more than half of what I have, What would have been my share of our supplies to do that, going forward. Hopefully, that will make you feel better. Thanks for telling me. That was an oversight on my part.”

Is she stupid or is she doing it in purpose.

“What?” I asked incredulously.

“What what?” She answered confused.m.

“How does that solve anything?” My hands came up, half in a gesture of surrender, half because I wanted to throttle her.

“I already said it. If I am quick and only use up to half my stock. I wouldn't wate your time or ressouces. That way, your share of the supplies is never endangered. I will only use my part. I thought it a clever compromise. Why are you even more upset?”

“You buffoon,” I snarled. “That’s not what I meant—and it’s not what this is about.”

She studied me for a long moment, eyes narrowed to calculating slits. Then, softly, “Then what is it about?”

“It reminds me far too much of debts I can’t repay!” The words ripped out of me, unbidden. Ugly. They hung there, echoing off the damp walls, too raw to reel back in.

She scoffed—a low, almost amused sound—but when she looked at me again, her expression was so soft it hurt. A little sad. Like she understood far more than I wanted her to.

“Then don’t repay them,” she said quietly. “Not to me. Not to anyone. Just… keep walking with me.”

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. My throat felt too tight for it, a strange burning behind my eyes that I viciously blinked away. So instead I just walked—faster, deeper into the dark—hoping she wouldn’t see how close that simple mercy of hers was  hurting me.

After unending hours of navigating twisted, stinking bowels of the earth—dodging crude deathtraps, skirting Troll dens slick with offal, slipping past lizardfolk hunting parties with their bone-horn calls echoing down the corridors—we finally stumbled into a stretch of natural caverns.

The passage exhaled around us, widening abruptly into a raw, hewn vault of dark limestone. A chill rose from the stone, sharp and wet, curling up my spine. Moisture clung to every surface, beading on outcroppings of quartz like glassy pustules. The stale air tasted of rot and mold. It had a greasy weight, as though even breathing here risked swallowing down some small, squirming sickness.

Elenya paused near a pillar of stone that split the cavern like a rotten tooth. Her shoulders slumped—barely, almost imperceptibly, but I’d been watching her too long not to notice. She lifted her hands, murmured something under her breath. I felt the faint tingle of magic as her warding spells coiled over me again—securing the shadows around my presence, bolstering the fragile barricades that kept Cazador’s leash from tightening further.

She looked tired. Too tired. Shadows clung stubbornly beneath her eyes, and there was a slight tremor in the final gesture of her hand.

But she didn’t rest.
Of course she didn’t.

Once camp was laid—my bedroll unrolled, small fire coaxed out of smoldering pine she retrieved from the bottomless pack and fungus that smoked acrid and sweet—she simply handed me a blood jar. Her eyes flicked to mine for only a breath, unreadable, before she turned away.

She settled with her back against the cavern wall, legs drawn up, one hand cradling half a ration of cooked deer left from yesterday’s hunt. Was that really yesterday? The hours were bleeding together, churned up by the endless stone and dark. She chewed mechanically, as if only to keep her jaw from locking. With the other hand she carefully propped open one of the drow spellbooks we’d looted from the slavers bodies—pages cracked and ink faded in places where someone’s bloody thumb had long ago smudged the script.

Her pen scratched steadily, dipping into her own spellbook as she copied new sigils. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her snout dried from the cavern air and her scales were duller than ever before. Still, she kept on, scratching out lines of power that burned faint on the page before settling. I could feel the press of Weave threads slipping around us. Subtle. Dangerous.

I watched her.
Or maybe I stared.

When trance finally claimed me, she was still writing. Her hand cramped once, shaking, and she paused only to stretch her fingers before returning to her task—dogged, relentless.

My meditation took me back, as it often did, to the night of my death. Cazador’s wretched hand, skin like ivory soaked in winter’s chill, beckoning me into eternity. Promising liberation from death. Promising life. Promising eternity. Lies spun on a silken web. His face floated before me in memory, only half-formed now—like looking at him through Riverside fog, billows distorting those arrogant aristocratic bones.

I pushed past it. Forced my mind to a safer dream: the moment we’d finally emerged from the tunnels, days ago now. When the cave mouth had spat us out between the Field of the Dead and the Troll Claws. That first breath of clean air—so sharp it almost hurt. The night sky had flung itself wide overhead, endless and jeweled with stars. I could still feel it, that terrifying expanse. The giddy, childlike joy. The way I’d wanted to run until my feet broke, just to feel that blessed openness hammer into my chest. Free.

I lingered there as long as I could, hunting phantom deer, laughing at nothing.
Then reality pulled me out.

When my eyes opened, Elenya was slumped over her notebooks, cheek pressed to a scattering of papers stained with old wax and fresher ink. Her breath came shallow, lips parted. She looked... small, like that. Vulnerable in a way she rarely allowed.

This idiot!

I rose without thinking. Tidied everything—stacked her notes, carefully capped her inkwell. I coaxed her into her bedroll, maneuvering her limp limbs gently, like arranging some delicate offering. She barely stirred.

Not an hour later, she startled awake. I could see the residual confusion cloud her pupils, her hand drifting instinctively for a dagger that wasn’t there. Then the sharpness returned—too quickly—and she began packing up, brushing off any attempt I made to mention sleep.

The signs of her fatigue were piling up. The slight drag to her steps. The way she fumbled once with a strap on her pack. But she only set her jaw, tightened the lines of her mouth, and pressed on—leading us back into the tunnels without so much as a word.

The silence allowed me some reprieve in my thoughts. 

Gratitude and usefulness were a good first steps. Foundations really. I could take it from there to different directions. 

Last days observations confirmed what I was thinking. 

My angle has been a really bad one from the start. Whatever cheap thrill I was selling was something she will never buy. 

Hard to play the part of the dangerous lover and forbidden fruit to someone that served under nagas for six months just for their poetry. Or refused free services in pleasure houses because she doesn't ike their wages. 

She doesn't give into temptations. She is surrounded by thick glass walls. While transprent, they remain solid and impenetrable all the same. Whatever will make her tick would need to be an erosion. 

Slow and steady. Crack by crack

I don't like this. 

How does one seduces someone who not only doesn't want to be seduced but also see you coming from a mile away. 

One needs to be sneaky. 

There is clearly some angles to work here. 

She was too serious, Too studious, too hard working. Too selfless. Those types tend to be extremely receptive to pleasure. 

The only issue is their reluctance to indulge. 

Hedonism was a good angle for her. 

But only after the walls went down.

---

The passage we followed twisted like something gut-slick and alive. Its ceiling soared high, then plunged low enough we had to stoop. Fungi bloomed in wet clusters, pale as drowned corpses. Their caps broke underfoot with faint pops, oozing rank-smelling sludge. Every breath tasted of mold, meat left too long to spoil, and a faint acidic sting that clung to the back of my tongue.

After two hours of this, we found her next charity project.

It was a troll. Gods help us—barely more than a cub, still lanky and awkward, maybe the size of a large human adolescent. It crouched by a scum-slick pool, trying desperately to lap at the stagnant water. Its left arm was ruined—crushed to a pulp of greenish meat and splintered bone. Patches of raw skin smoked faintly where some powerful acid had chewed deep. Its ribs had caved inward. Nearby lay what must have been its mother: a hulking carcass blackened by fire, belly already stirring with pale wriggling things.

The young troll’s eyes flickered up. Green, glassy, wide with confusion and hunger. It whined, a low wet sound that vibrated in its throat, then tried again to reach the water—body trembling with the effort.

Elenya’s breath caught. I watched her slited pupils tighten, the faintest quiver tracing down her throat. Her fingers flexed—claws half-formed—before she forced them back.

She whispered, “An injured troll can scream loud enough to summon a warren if they’re near.”

I nodded, hand already on my blade. “Then let’s go before—”

“He’s just a child.” She interrupted mercilessly. 

I stared at her. Disbelief sharpened my voice to a hiss. “A child that would tear you apart for a taste of your liver.”

“Still a child,” she said again, softer. Almost to herself.

“I hate heroics.” I added half reaigned. 

This time she didn’t argue. Only looked at me, eyes dark and regretful. “I’m sorry. I will be quick.”

Then her shape melted. Bones stretching, skin flowing in a wet, stomach-turning roll. In seconds, a smaller troll crouched where Elenya had been—mottled green skin, long sad eyes. She even smelled wrong now, a musky scent that scraped something primal inside me.

My gut twisted. Fury and something like fear churned together. Gods above. Of all the idiotic, tender-hearted—

She approached the troll with slow, swaying steps, making soft, throaty clicks. I followed at a distance, blade still drawn, eyes darting to every crevice and shadow. Waiting for the ground itself to rupture into claws.

Elenya knelt beside the cub, murmuring something low in Giant. The child whimpered, pawing weakly at her leg. It made a sound that cracked in its throat—calling for its mother, surely. Broken. Hollow.

Her shoulders slumped as she studied the poor creature’s condition. She ran a brawny hand lightly over its brow, flinching as the acid still clinging to its skin burned her. Her nostrils flared as she sniffed the shallow pits scattered across the floor. She took its pulse, and her face darkened.

“Poisoned,” she breathed. “Darts in the ground—that’s why he’s not healing. That, and the acid.” She further examined the bludgeoning wounds on its face and side. “Hit by a boulder, maybe. Poor thing probably triggered every trap at once. The only reason he’s alive is troll regeneration—but even that’s failing.”

Her voice faltered.

“The wounds are too severe. And the blood loss... he’s dying. Slowly.”

A shiver passed through her massive frame.

“I don’t have the tools to detoxify him in time. Maybe if I shifted into the half-blood form—my metabolism might neutralize the poison. But it won’t act fast enough. The body mass is too big, the blood flow too slow. Pulse is already irregular.” She trailed off, eyes on the troll’s cracked jaw.

“Shit. The acid got into his system. Even if I clear the poison, the acid’s still halting the regeneration. Maybe I could shift into him—transfuse some of my blood. But that’s... risky. If only I could cast lesser restoration. I should’ve rested properly. My magic’s not back yet.”

The trembling started softly, just in her fingers.

“I need a neutral base. Or a potion of acid resistance. Something to balance the bloodstream. Without that, his body won’t regenerate at all.”

She began rummaging through her pack, movements growing more frantic with each moment. Hand after hand came up empty.

“Fuck. I don’t have anything strong enough. Magical healing would just prolong it. Maybe slow the internal hemorrhaging, but... not enough. Not for a body this size. He needs a real clinic. Intensive care.”

She was desperate now, tearing through her supplies, searching for something that didn’t exist. Then the troll coughed—and blood spilled from his mouth.

“No. No—one of his lungs collapsed. No, no, no—stay with me, big guy. Please, stay.”

She poured her healing light into him. As expected, it stabilized him—his breathing eased. But she saw it, and so did I: he was still dying.

“I can’t save him. Not with what I have.” Her voice was raw. “I should’ve brewed acid resistance yesterday. I had the ingredients. Why didn’t I prep stronger antitoxins? Relying on blood flow was a stupid assumption—stupid—”

She choked on it. Guilt swallowed her.

Then, after a few ragged breaths, she looked to the child. Spoke softly in Giant. The cub answered with a half-squeal, tears streaking through grime.

“This isn’t endurance,” she said. “This is just agony.”

And then—she began to sing.

Not a lullaby. Not a prayer.

A song carved from sorrow—low, rough, almost ugly. It scraped along the cavern walls, vibrating in my chest like grief made sound. The kind of song that settled deep in your ribs and ached without asking why.

She glanced at me, eyes heavy—older than stone.

“Do you want to help?”

“How?” My voice cracked, too harsh. Reflex, maybe. Old nerves.

But I steadied myself.

Be useful.

“Just watch,” she whispered. “Show him a friendly face.”

I swallowed hard. Nodded.

Gods, it was foolish. This was the kind of mercy that filled shallow graves.

But I did it.

I sheathed my blade. Softened my face. No fangs. No sneer. I stood beside her, close enough that maybe he’d think... we were something kind. Not a threat. Just something that stayed.

The poor thing looked at me scared. I forced a smile.

My throat burned.

Elenya pulled a small vial from her coat—clear, faintly shimmering with soft magic. She cradled the cub’s enormous, split jaw and murmured to him again.

He blinked up at her—rheumy, pained—drool slipping from cracked lips.

Then he drank.

He shivered. Took a rattling breath. Slumped sideways into the muck. Still.

Already gone.

Just dead.

I exhaled slow, steady. Didn’t know I’d been holding it.

She didn’t move at first. Just stared, hand still on his brow.

Then she leaned in, kissed the child’s acid-scorched head—tender, trembling. Her lips burned at the touch, sizzling audibly. My stomach turned.

Elenya stayed there, stroking his broad, steaming forehead. Then, without a word, she stepped back. Her body shifted—bones snapping, flesh reshaping into jagged scales and sinew.

She met my gaze through the gloom.

“Thank you for being here,” she said. Soft. Sincere. The kind of voice that left a scar.

I cleared my throat, looked away. “Still hate heroics.”

She smiled at that. Just a ghost of it. Wan and weary.

And somehow...

It made me feel even more undone.

It was abundantly clear now.

Whatever favor I thought to have earned with her were just the result of her infuriatingly bleeding heart. 

Of her mercy. 

This was not a performance. 

I hated it.
Hated how easily she gave comfort. Hated how her eyes looked at me after, soft, a little sad.

If I died, or Cazador found me, will she react the same? Another failed charity case? I hated it almost as much as I hated how she sees me now sometimes.

As though I was  something fragile she might mend. Was that what I was to her? Another maimed beast, limping on a chain, whining for scraps of mercy?

The thought crawled under my ribs and made a nest there—ugly and shivering.

The victim angle seemed less and less appealing by the second.

I didn’t want her pity. I didn’t want her soft hands treating me like I was glass. I wanted... gods, I didn’t even know. Something more practical, sharper. Complicity. Partnership. Not this aching sweetness.

But her words clung to me anyway—Thank you for being here. Like I’d done something worth the breath. Like I mattered for simply existing beside her.

And part of me, wretched and small, wanted more. Wanted her to keep looking at me that way, with that fierce, tender trust she offered even to a doomed troll child.

So I brooded on it, following her deeper into the tunnels—stone and rot pressing close, lapping at my heels—stewing in thoughts I couldn’t quite scrape out of my head.

What in all the hells was happening down here?

---

It wasn’t long before the tunnel dipped low again, the ceiling pressing down until even I had to hunch, shoulders brushing damp stone that left slick trails across my leathers. The walls were scored with long, ragged grooves, fresh enough that flakes of stone still clung to my fingertips when I touched them.

I frowned. Ran my claws lightly through the channels. They crumbled under the faintest pressure.
“Claw marks,” I muttered.

Elenya crouched beside me, her pupils narrowing to neat slits as she traced the grooves with a clawed fingertip. Her face tightened, mouth flattening into something grim. “These are hunting markers. Lizardfolk—likely a scouting band.”

“These kinds of raiders wait for travelers already tired, already bleeding. Easier prey.”

A cold finger dragged itself up my spine, not from fear of the lizardfolk themselves—but from the realization of how close we’d already come to being precisely that. Sapped by endless dark, picked raw by her small mercies, distracted by dead troll cubs and bandits and tender little philosophies. All of it leaving us soft.

Exposed.

I met her gaze. Her eyes were sharper now, narrow and glinting, shoulders squared into a ready posture. The tired droop was gone. Something inside her had locked tight, focused.

Good.
I didn’t want her tenderness. I wanted her edge. Her cunning. Her kill instinct.

I pulled my blade again, letting my grin curl up with fangs that barely touched humor. “Then let’s make sure we don’t give them the pleasure.”

---

Hours crawled past, every one of them thick with the smell of old blood and damp earth. We found no ambush—only its afterbirth. Mangled bodies left like trophies. Limbs contorted, half-consumed. Eyes staring glassy and accusing at the stone above them. The lizardfolk had been thorough, carving open bellies, twisting heads clean off shoulders.

The faint sour tang of fear still lingered, clinging to the tunnels like a stubborn ghost.

It almost disappointed me.
Almost.

---

Near a branching sinkhole where water pooled brackish and dark, the tunnel opened just enough to let us breathe without hunching. I was about to make some flippant remark—something to needle her calm, to distract from the endless crush of stone and the monotony of it all—when two shapes lunged from a shadowed side veil. 

One attempted to strike me but I was able to narrowly escape the strike. Eleyna was still concealed in the shadow of the tunnel mouth unnoticed. 

The first was a half-elf in battered leather, twin shortswords already up, eyes hard and bright with cornered animal panic. Beside him stood a dwarf, thick hands wrapped around a thunder mace that fizzed with restrained lightning.

Bothe smelled of blood and terror.

“Back off!” the dwarf barked as soon as Eleyna stepped in after me and he realized I wasn’t alone. His beard was matted with sweat, eyes rolling wild. “Both of you—hands where I can see them!”

The half-elf’s gaze slid straight to Elenya. His lips peeled back from yellowed teeth. “ Wait, this poor bastard,” he sneered at me. “Step away from the snake witch. Gods, she must have twisted his mind all up, hasn’t she? Drop your weapon. Now.” He snarled at her while pointing his blade toward her. Ignoring me to face the biggest threat. 

Oh! The irony.

I laughed. Couldn’t stop it—sharp, sudden, echoing off the damp walls. The tension needed somewhere to go, and it clawed out of my throat like a living thing. “You think she’s dominating me? Darling, if you knew half the truth—”

“Don’t mock us!” the dwarf roared, veins straining thick in his neck. His mace flared, little tongues of lightning licking up the haft. “I see her foul spells brewing already. Step. Away. Or I’ll smite you both so hard your ancestors will feel it.”

Elenya hadn’t moved. Her expression was still—almost bored—but her fingers twitched, curling like a cat’s claws around invisible threads of power. Her serpentine hood was fully flared up and extended at full width. I knew that look intimately.

She wouldn’t strike first if she could help it. But she was staying at the ready.

Always trying for the clean road. Always hoping for civility even in cesspools.

So I tried my own brand of civility—my own black charm. Tilted my head, let my smile glimmer with just enough fang to hint at possibility. “Listen here, truly—there’s no need for all this fuss. It's a quiet funny misunderstanding. We’re simply travelers—”

“Save your lies! I have no use to whatever you have to say witch thrall!” the half-elf snapped, taking a hard step forward. Desperation was making them reckless. I will enjoy gutting this one.

His blades caught some of the surrounding fungal light in cruel little flashes. “Get away from her or you’ll bleed with her.”

Well, I tried. 

“I’m afraid that’s not going to happen.”

Then the dwarf howled—a bull’s bellow—and charged. His mace crashed into Elenya’s shoulder in a burst of searing white, sending arcs of lightning skittering across her scales. She staggered with a sharp hiss, eyes flaring in pain.

Then the air dropped cold.
So cold I felt it bite into my skin like tiny teeth. She lifted one hand, murmured something in that sinuous arcane tongue of hers—high and cold and slicing. A wave of magic bloomed instantly, crawling over the dwarf’s shoulders, spreading down to the ground in lacy webs. His breath stopped, eyes bulging in terrified paralysis. The half-elf froze mid-lunge, lips parted in a silent snarl as the magic climbed his throat.

I stepped close, blades ready to carve them open, but her voice cut through—sharp and dark.

“No, please!”

Fucking again.

I glared at her. “Why not? They would’ve killed you.”

“Then let’s not be like them.” Her eyes met mine, bottomless and strange. “Not if we don’t have to.”

It made something twist under my ribs—ugly, tangled. I didn’t like it. Didn’t want to puzzle out why.

She leaned in close to the frozen pair, and started speaking in a low tentalizing, rhythmic voice while smearing something on her snout. A soft word spilled from her, glowing faint on her tongue. Suggestion, woven thick and velvet. “You will leave these tunnels,” she whispered, “go home, and forget you ever saw us.”

The dwarf’s face went slack. His mace dropped with a hollow clang that rattled the bones on the floor. Without a word, he turned and stumbled off, vanishing into gloom.

But the half-elf’s eyes flashed. I saw the twitch of his fingers, the hungry curl of a retailiation casting.

Too slow.

I lunged.

My teeth punched through his throat to stop him from speaking, hot blood flooding my mouth in a burst of salt and iron and terror. He gagged, steel slipping from nerveless fingers. I didn’t give him the chance to suffer—drove my dagger up under his ribs, twisted until I felt the heart tear open.

When I pulled back, breath sharp, I caught Elenya’s eyes. Not disapproval, not judgement. Guilt flickered there—brief, stark—before she looked away.

I stared at her, blood hot in my mouth, heart still pounding like war drums in my ears.

Why guilt?

I was the one who killed him.

He was about to strike her—again. She hadn’t even lifted a claw.

So what the fuck was she feeling guilty over?

“Don’t look at me like that,” I said, voice low, rough-edged. “You weren’t the one who did it.”

She didn’t answer.

Her gaze lingered somewhere just past me, lost in the flickering fungal light and shadows. Her hood had fallen flat again, her body hunched ever so slightly—as if the magic had drained something deeper than strength.

I kicked the half-elf’s body aside with a quiet grunt and wiped my blade on the edge of his jerkin. “He was going to kill you.”

Still nothing.

The silence pressed harder, stretching taut between us like an old wound.

“He was going to kill you.”

I repeated it again, firmer this time. It didn’t sound like justification. It sounded like fact. Like law.

Finally, she spoke. Quiet. Careful.

“I know.”

Her eyes met mine again. Not angry. Not sorrowful, exactly. Just... tired.

“But that doesn’t mean I wanted it. They were scared out of their wits.”

I frowned. “He made his choice. They could have remained hidden innthe first place but even after.You gave him an out.”

“I know that too.”

“So what’s the problem?” I gestured at the corpse, frustration mounting. “You didn’t kill him—I did. He was seconds from casting. He saw you beg him to leave, and still chose blood. What more did he need to prove he wasn't worth saving?”

Her throat worked around something unsaid. She looked older suddenly. Raw. Not in the way warriors get raw—like exposed nerves under steel—but the kind of raw that bleeds quiet.

“Everyone's worth saving. It just doesn't mean I can save everyone.  I keep thinking…” Her voice cracked slightly. “If I’d spoken differently. If I hadn’t released the hold person assuming the suggestion would go through. They were both pretty bangged up maybe sleep would have worked. He was a half-elf, not immune to magical sleep.”

“No,” I snapped, harsher than I meant. “Don’t. Don’t you dare make this your fault. Don't stripe away their choice.”

She blinked at me. Just once.

I took a slow breath, tried again.

“They came at us. You stood still. You de-escalated. You cast Suggestion instead of anything lethal. You chose mercy.” My hands curled into fists, slick with blood. “They tried to kill you anyway. YOU SAID BEFORE THAT IT'S NOT ABOUT FIXING PEOPLE. You said you were giving people the choice. You need to accept it when the chose wrongly.”

The silence after that felt colder. Not in a cruel way—just... hollow.

She crouched by the body, not to loot this time. Just to look.

Not at his face, but at the angle of the fingers. The half-formed somatic gesture frozen in death.

She sighed. “You’re right.”

I should’ve felt satisfied.

I didn’t.

She rose again, slower this time, and met my gaze with eyes full of something I couldn’t name. Not grief. Not softness. Something worse.

Resignation.

“You’re right, it's still sadden me all the same.” she said again.

That’s when I understood.

She wasn’t guilty because of what happened.

She was guilty because she still felt sorry for them.

Because even now, after everything, she still wanted to believe people could be better.

Gods, it made something twist inside me. Something bitter and aching and tender.

I looked away first.

“Let’s move,” I muttered. “Before the other halfwit comes back with reinforcements.” I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand. “Still hate heroics,” I muttered.

---

Together we rifled through what they left behind: two half-spent healing draughts, a scorched map of surface trade routes, a locked silver box that yielded under my claws with a satisfying little snap. Inside—stacks of coins, neat rows of them, glinting invitingly. And a black iron signet ring etched with a flying serpent.  Zhentarim’s unmistakable insigna.

Elenya’s face went still. Too still.

I held it up between two fingers, let it spin a little. “Well. Isn’t this an interesting complication?”

She didn’t respond. Just turned and kept walking. So I pocketed it, smirk lingering—thin, dark, hungry for what that might eventually mean.

I followed her—closer than usual.

Not because I had to.

But because she still believed in a world that didn’t deserve her.

And someone needed to make sure it didn’t eat her alive.

---

We found what those idiots had been so desperate to keep from us fairly soon.

The tunnel spilled out into a broad cavern with a low, oppressive ceiling. I could taste the air immediately—sharp and metallic on my tongue, heavy with something that set old instincts clawing at my spine. This wasn’t just rot. It was wrong. The kind of wrong that made the little hairs at your nape stand on end and your pulse kick up without reason.

The cavern floor was chaos. Crates and barrels lay tumbled, burlap sacks split open with dried beans and powdered spice spilling like entrails. Corpses sprawled everywhere—Zhentarim smugglers with their black-stitched clothing slashed open, lizardfolk bodies leaking blood from cracked chests, even two serpentfolk with fangs bared in lifeless sneers.

A slaughterhouse masquerading as a hoard.

So much plunder was scattered—jewelled bracelets still sticky with blood, trade silks in vibrant colors slashed by claws. Elenya actually let out a soft, disgruntled sound.

“This is going to be an absolute nightmare to loot and catalogue,” she muttered, arms crossing over her scaled chest.

I raised a brow. “Ever the scholar. We’re knee-deep in bowels and you’re thinking about ledgers.”

“How do you know what usable,  sellable otherwise. Forget bulk selling. Whatever was here was either stolen or obtained in less than honorable ways. It’ll come up in local records. Insurance claims. Missing manifests. Then come the assassins, hired by merchant guilds trying to reclaim lost property.” Her eyes darkened, scales catching the dim torchlight. “Loot like this doesn’t stay buried. It breeds more bodies.”

I gave her a crooked grin. “So pragmatic. Almost enough to make me think you care about consequences.”

She didn’t dignify it. Just sighed and started flipping through a stack of moldy ledgers, nose wrinkling at the damp rot.

I drifted further into the cavern. Between two crates of moonstone ore and a fallen pillar, I found a wall that didn’t look quite right—rougher, uneven, like a mouth pressed shut. I laid my palms against it. The stone felt strange, faintly warmer than the surrounding rock, as if it remembered hands long dead. A gentle push sent a muted crackle through the wall. Stones shifted and sighed, giving way with a reluctant groan. Dust poured down like a dying breath.

A narrow passage yawned open, swallowed by a blackness so thick it felt almost viscous.

“Darling,” I called, voice pitched low with delight, a conspiratorial thrill threading through me. “Come see what your luck’s found us.”

She stepped up beside me, candle held high. The tiny flame wavered, painting hollows into her sharp cheeks and catching glints in her eyes. Her brow furrowed as she took in the lintel, dark with age and webbed with faint carvings.

Her breath caught. She leaned forward, hand rising almost without thought, tracing trembling fingers over ancient sigils cut deep into the stone. They were jagged, harsh marks, more gouges than script. Old blood had once filled those lines—long since flaked into black crumbs.

“What is it?” I asked, my grin already spreading, hungry for whatever dark little history we’d stumbled upon.

“Blood sigils,” she whispered. “Old. Bhaalite.”

I smirked, biting back a laugh. “Only you could stumble into a murder shrine by accident.”

She didn’t rise to it. Just closed her eyes, murmuring low words that coiled through the air like smoke. They felt wrong here, out of place, fragile against the thick rot that seemed to pulse from the stone.

"Why is a follower of the Crying God praying to the previous Lord of Murder?" I asked, voice bright with mischief, hoping to pierce the heavy air with something sharp.

She turned to me so fast the candle nearly guttered out. Her eyes were intense, pupils blown wide, hyper-focused on me like prey caught in sudden torchlight. “I am certainly not praying to that. It’s not even a prayer to a god. I am calling to the nature spirits to purify the space. It’s an old r— you know what, nevermind. You’re just messing with me.”

I let my smile go sly and wolfish, baring teeth. “I don’t know, darling! You seemed particularly reverent when looking at the symbol earlier. Is that what it all was? Are you a murder acolyte trying to find a rare sacrifice for an unholy ceremony to resurrect a dead deity? What a tragedy! Is that truly what awaits me?”

She rolled her eyes so hard I thought they might stick. “Of course I would be reverent. These probably date from before the Time of Troubles. Look at the script—it’s the old graphy sigil, before Cyric killed Bhaal. Before he ascended and took the murder domain. This place is older than most. Older than you can easily grasp. Cyric was rumored to be tied to the Zhentarim—most Zhents still whisper prayers to him. Bhaal was struck down near Boareskyr Bridge. Meaning near here. This could have been where his last avatar laired before dying. You don’t understand the historical significance.”

“Oh, forgive me, scholar of butchery,” I teased, but more gently now. Her hands still shook.

Inside, the narrow passage funneled us into a squat, vaulted chamber. The ceiling hunched low, pressed by the weight of centuries, thick with soot and calcite drips. In the center squatted a black altar, its stone cracked by time and heavy use. Dark streaks ran from its basin down to the floor, where old offerings had crusted into vile mosaics.

Bones lay scattered in little heaps—some piled with care, as if once part of deliberate patterns. Skulls peered from shadowed corners. A ribcage leaned drunkenly against the altar, like some grotesque trophy, half-consumed by mold.

Elenya moved with caution I’d never seen from her. She knelt by a burned pile of parchment, lifting a fragment that crumbled around her fingers.

“Ritual notes,” she breathed. “Incomplete. Someone tried to destroy them in a hurry. They were desperate.”

I swept my gaze around the room, my earlier bravado ebbing. The air pressed close, thick with something that itched at the inside of my chest. A smell lingered—old blood, stale sweat, the ghost of rot. It clawed into my nose until I nearly gagged.

“Going to be disappointed if we can’t summon a blood wraith or two,” I said, voice low, trying to drag us back into safer territory of sarcasm.

“Don't jinx it.” she snapped. It wasn’t anger that bit through her tone—it was fear, small and brittle. Her eyes darted to the dark, as if half-expecting it to open its jaws.

I opened my mouth for another barb, but it died. Even I could feel it: the subtle pull in the marrow, the hush that asked for offerings. This place wanted something. It wanted us.

Elenya tucked the fragile scrap into her notebook like a sacred relic. Her eyes met mine, and for a heartbeat I saw something deeply detached—shadows that didn’t belong to the flickering torchlight.

"Would you mind giving me some time to record everything. I know I said I wouldn't waste time but this is a significant discovery?" 

That really startled me. I said that as a passing barb to hide my petty an irrational annoyance but she had taken it to heart. She is asking for my permission like I could say no. 

"Knock yourself up darling. This is certainly more entertaining than nursing bandits back to health." 

She simply smiled. The same smile I seen all those night ago. The night she told me about her shapshifting. That little bruised thing that soothed me. 

Then, she started scribbling and sketching furiously. Her eyes scanned the chamber meticulously. She looked absolutely engrossed. It suited her. 

She later stood, turned, and started toward the back of the cavern.

I followed close. Truly close. Close enough her shadow wrapped around me, and I was glad for it.

Elenya paused once. Her shoulders shuddered. Then she drew quick, frantic sigils in the air—warding marks, old shapes that sparked faint silver before fading. Her hands trembled so hard I thought she’d drop the candle.

I pretended not to see. She pressed the last shape against my shoulder, and it sank into me with a shudder of cold, her renewed Nondetection wrapping tight around my heart.

Something watched us here. Not eyes—the stone watched, the water listened, the cavern itself felt awake and lean and starved. It wanted.

A shiver traced my spine. My throat bobbed, dry.

Then her hand rested on my sleeve—just a ghost of pressure, warm through my coat. Enough. Enough to remind me what was real.

Her voice came low, steady, almost fierce. “Not yet. We’re not through it yet.”

I nodded. Took a breath. Let her shadow lead me deeper into the dark.

The tunnel twisted on, carving deeper into the earth through carved stairs until the air itself seemed to stiffen — thick, unmoving, heavy with something that hadn’t breathed for a centurie. Then it opened, almost reluctantly, into a low, vaulted room.

A bedroom. Or what passed for one in a sanctum devoted to murder.

A vast bed dominated the space, the wood nearly black, its posts carved into cruel shapes — bodies knotted around knives, mouths gaping in agony or ecstasy. The remains of a velvet canopy drooped in rotten tatters. The mattress was covered in mold-clogged bedding streaked dark with old stains that needed no imagination to name.

A broad desk sprawled nearby, buried under heaps of ledgers and parchment rolls, some tied with sinister little cords sealed by what was unmistakably dried blood. Ornate jars of dark powder and stoppered crystal vials lay scattered among scraps of bone charms and knives with channels designed to carry blood straight from throat to altar.

It smelled faintly of iron and rot, layered over with a cloying sweetness that might have once been incense. Now it simply smelled wrong — like breath stolen from dead lungs.

Elenya moved forward as if in a trance. Her eyes went wide, bright, fevered. She began to pull objects free with hands that trembled, but not from fear.

“Oh, look at this…” Her voice was breathless, tight with something too sharp to be wonder. “These ledgers — lists of names. Mortal names. Entire family lines documented, dates of birth and death. Notations on how and where they were slain. Trophies written in neat columns. This… this is how Bhaal ensured his dominion and divinity . Not worship but ritualized sacrifice from the faithful and fear of the rest. Each act of slaughter another knot tied around the world’s throat to remind it who held the blade.”

She tucked them carefully into her pack — not gentle, exactly, but methodical, greedy in a way that was more disturbing for how cold it was.

She moved on, digging through stacks of parchment and pulling free heavy tomes bound in cracked leather, some scrawled with cruel sigils that bit at the edges of my vision. “Sacrificial rites… old unholy scriptures in the dialect priests would kill to recover. Some of these are pre-Time of Troubles treatises on murder as a cosmic force, long before Cyric stole the domain.”

Her fingers traced across a smaller pile — loose pages in ink that had bled like fresh wounds. She went still, then carefully lifted them. Her mouth parted. “Notes. Not by a scribe. This is his hand. Bhaal’s own. Contemplations on the necessity of murder — not just as chaos or cruelty, but as the ultimate act of will. The only true dominion one mortal can hold over another. His personal philosophies on why slaughter is sacred.”

She laughed, short and sharp, almost a bark. It held no joy, only a dark delight. “Do you understand? This is history stripped of all the squeamish lies. The god of murder laid bare in his own words.”

She crammed them into her pack too, moving on to snatch up small rare objects and arcane instruments: a silver bowl etched inside with concentric grooves, likely for catching blood in precise rituals; a set of delicate glass vials stoppered with wax so black it swallowed the candlelight; a cruel little dagger whose blade was etched with prayers that twined like living worms.

Near the bed, I found a small coffer. I cracked it open to reveal a ring set with a jagged shard of crimson crystal that seemed to pulse faintly. It felt almost hot when I lifted it, as if it remembered the life it once drank.

Elenya’s eyes flared. “I would advise against using anything enchanted right away. Especially rings. Could be cursed or designed to bind. I’ll have to study its resonance later I can tell you what it does ”

She tucked it away, almost reverently.

I turned back toward the bed. Something caught the edge of my boot — a hollow thunk. I nudged aside a filthy tangle of once-fine blankets, revealing a bundle wrapped in stiff, decaying cloth. I crouched, peeled it back.

A dagger lay revealed. No — not a dagger. A blade. Its hilt was bound in dark leather cracked with age, run through with veins of red that looked disturbingly like dried blood. When I drew it out, the blade itself devoured the candlelight, darkness crawling along its edge like oily smoke.

Elenya sucked in a harsh breath. “That’s… I don’t know what that is. This is heavily enchanted but also warded against divination."

She shivered, eyes bright. “I’ll need time to test it. To see what it still remembers.”

I held it a moment longer, feeling something in it — a subtle, eager tremor, as if it waited for a command. Then I slid it back into its scabbard and tied it at my belt, ignoring how the shadows seemed to lean close when I did.

Elenya finally stood still, her pack now grotesquely filled with ledgers inked in blood, unholy scriptures, sacrificial manuals, rare instruments of vile rites, and even personal musings penned by Bhaal himself. Her hands were still trembling, her breathing shallow.

I couldn’t hold it in any longer. “Why?” I asked, voice low, a bit raw. “Why are you so enraptured by all this? These are the private relics of a god who made murder his art. These records exist only because entire villages were butchered. Why carry these nightmares? I know you enough to know that murder doesn't seems to be an interest of yours.”

She turned to me slowly. Her expression was almost soft — but her eyes glittered like cold glass. “Because I like knowing things. I like uncovering truths no one else see. I enjoy mapping every secret this world tries to bury. Not for power. Not for sanctimony. Just… because discovery matters. Because understanding matters.”

She smiled faintly, sharp and bloodless. “Even if what you learn is monstrous.”

I let out a quiet, breathless laugh, dark and hollow. “A scholar of monstrosities then.”

She inclined her head, eyes still locked to mine, unflinching. “a scholar of everything.”

So we turned from that room — the last lair of the god of murder’s avatar — with its private ledgers of slaughter, its sinister arcane relics, its whispered philosophies of the blade. Her pack heavy with history. My hip heavy with a blade that felt like it still longed to kill.

The cavern watched us go, the stone whispering soft approval, as though it were pleased someone still found value in all that lovely, ancient death.

As we left that Bhaalite rot-hole behind, the tunnels changed. The walls darkened, bearded with fine moss that drank the sweat from the stone. The air thickened, took on a wet chill that sank into my bones. Somewhere ahead, I could hear it: the Winding Waters, rushing unseen through veins in the rock, whispering in a voice that wasn’t quite language, wasn’t quite nonsense—just sound that beckoned the mind to lean closer. To listen

Went back to the hideout and proceeded to meticulously loot every thing. And together, we walked on.
Deeper into the whispering dark.
Where even the stones felt like they were waiting.

Hours later—gods, it felt like an entire lifetime clawing through damp, strangling dark—we finally stopped. A shallow alcove tucked behind a crooked seam of rock. Dry enough that our packs wouldn’t soak through on the ground, hidden enough that nothing could slip up behind us without scraping claw or boot against the rough walls first.

Elenya ran her hand along the stone, eyes slitted. Seemed satisfied. “Four hours,” she rasped, voice rough with exhaustion, “by my estimate, to the tunnel’s end.”

She didn’t say what we both knew—that four hours might as well have been forever in these depths, with our nerves raw and bodies flagging.

We set down our burdens. Or rather—I dropped mine, let the packs slump to the stone in a graceless heap. She eased hers down with painstaking care, lowering herself by degrees like every inch hurt. Which, given how she moved, it probably did.

Elenya hissed through her teeth as she stretched out her leg, clawed fingertips digging lightly into her thigh. The limb had been dragging slightly since the last cramped passage, where the walls had tried to strip skin from our shoulders. I’d half-expected her to try concealing it, to hide the weakness behind that sharp little tilt of her chin. But she only grunted when she found a position that didn’t tug at the ache.

Then—gods, ever the fool—she rummaged in her satchel for food. Came up with a small packet of travel rations that looked like they’d been trampled by a mule: shriveled roots, a wedge of hard cheese so dry it might splinter teeth. When I wrinkled my nose in open disdain, she actually snorted. A soft, breathless sound. Then pushed two small jars of deer from yesterday’s kill into my hand like it was the most natural solution in the world.

I unsealed one. Took a mouthful.

Foul. Absolutely wretched. Thin, lifeless, a metallic tang like licking rust from the edge of a blade.

Well that's not true.

I may have been a bit spoiled if one were to be honest.

This was Ambrosia considering what I used to feed on in the palace but still, compared to the vibrant heat of her blood— the careful, tremulous gift she’d let me drink from her throat—this was filth. I grimaced, wiped my mouth on the heel of my palm, swallowing against a rising curl of disgust.

She didn’t comment. Didn’t even look over. Just leaned her head back against the cavern wall, eyes half-lidded and distant.

So I watched her. In the low flicker of the tiny lamp, her face was all strange angles, shadows caught in the hollows of her cheeks. I watched the slight tremor in her hands when she pulled out that battered little journal, the careful way she opened it so the spine wouldn’t crack further. Watched how her breath sometimes caught, like she had to consciously remember to keep pulling air into her lungs.

Saw her shoulders slump when she thought I wasn’t paying attention. Just for a heartbeat, the exhaustion too heavy to keep shouldered.

And for a moment—a single, utterly foolish moment—I felt something twist painfully tight inside my chest. Something old and raw. Like being starved in a different way.

I think I actually liked her. Gods help me. Liked that strange, sharp mind of hers that could drift from blood rituals to trade ledgers in a single breath. Liked the mad courage that made her soothe dying trolls and bandits alike. Liked the way she looked at me—not like a monster, not like a tool or a game or a mistake that needed correcting—but like someone real. Someone who could still matter.

I cared a bit, maybe. Already too much.

Though I’d never use those words. Couldn’t shape them in my mouth without choking on the taste.

So instead, the truth snagged in my throat, barbed and ugly, and came out warped. A dry little scoff. A shield to keep from flinching.

“Next time,” I muttered, words pitched low, “try not to limp so obviously. You’re going to ruin my vacation.”

She huffed a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a groan, eyes scrunching up in that tired way. Didn’t even bother a retort. That alone should have worried me, should have made me needle her sharper, drag her back to her usual bite.

Instead, I found myself lowering down beside her. Closer than I needed to. Let my shoulder brush hers, felt the faint radiant warmth of her even through the grime and sweat and iron scent of blood. A stupid comfort. A dangerous one.

We sat like that for a while. Let the silence stretch, not empty but… filled with something else. Something that was neither relief nor dread, but its own brittle truce.

Like maybe—despite these death-soaked tunnels, despite heroics and old gods whispering in stone—maybe we were still here. Still trying. Two wretches side by side in the dark, daring the cave to keep them.

I almost reached for her hand. Almost.

But I didn’t.

But something kept pestering me.

I pushed up on my elbows, ignoring the way cold stone bit into my spine. “Darling,” I drawled, careful to keep my tone lazy, almost amused, “either you’ve taken up brooding to compete with me, or there’s actually something wrong. You have been quiet all day. Or at least quieter. What's on you mind? Did you maybe regret—”

Her eyes flicked to me—sharp, brittle—and she exhaled a slow breath. “No, it's not that... I just, I used the familiar again, a couple of times… while you were resting.”

“Of course you did.” I tried for a smirk. It didn’t quite land. “I’d be offended if you stopped spying on my dear family on my behalf. But tell me, little dove, why hide it until now?”

But she didn’t return the smirk. Her gaze slid away. “I am sorry, I didn't mean to withhold the information. I guess I was trying to make sense of it. I also saw some pretty disturbing things. The spawn that came after us were being tortured by a skeleton, and then yesterday... I saw what I think used to be your sleeping chambers. The other spawns were there. It gave me a lot to think about. I am not necessarily used to be assisted by the poeple I help. So I tend to forget to updat you when Iam still processing." She said face appearing genuinely apologetic.

Not being used to receiving assistance, huh? 

Interesting.

After twoo deep breaths, she added. "And… I heard something.”

That woke me fully. I sat up, heart ticking a little faster. “Tell me.”

Elenya’s hands were laced tight around her knee. She uncurled them slowly, like prying open reluctant claws. “ Your siblings.” Her voice softened on that last word, but not with fondness—more like handling something fragile and infected. “They were ordered to remain in the palace, starving, until you were brought back. No hunting for marks, nor you.”

My stomach dropped in a slow, sick lurch. " Not even to bring him marks to feed on?"

She nodded.

"That doesn't make sense? Why would he just let me go, and he never stopped the hunt?"

"That's the thing i was trying to make sense of. On top on not liking seeing them get tortured and forced to starve"

I fully rolled my eyes at the notion. The six other spawns could all rott for all i care. The number of times they ratted me out. Objectively, I knew they had no choice and I gave out almost as much as I took but... but what ?

She inturepted my thoughts by adding "One of the other spawn, half-elf female with long hair and soft features said he is sending 'them' after you because he knows you will hate it".

What was Dal talking about.

Who are them ?

My breath hissed out between my teeth. “So he’s sending someone . After me. That's what Dal said ? Did she when or how.”

“No. She didn’t say exactlywho either.”

“But not the spawn. Not my brothers and sisters.” My voice cracked a little on that, forced too low. “Why? Why them instead of us?”

Elenya’s pupils narrowed, reflecting the lamplight into cruel little slits. “I don’t know. But it’s strange.”

“Very.” I rubbed a hand over my mouth. My mind felt like it was picking itself raw, scraping along edges of old dread. “He could’ve pulled me back, Elenya. If he wanted. Just as easily as he did them. That leash has always been there, sunk deep into the rot of me. So why—why let me run? Why send strangers now? I know that the order through long distance can be resisted. But he hasn't tried at all since the gate.”

Her claws flexed on the stone, faint scratches etching under her fingers. “I thought about that too. Either he can’t pull you. Or… he’s choosing not to.”

“That’s worse,” I snarled before I could stop myself. The words snapped out sharp enough to startle her. “I’d almost prefer he still had that power—at least it would make sense. But if he’s letting me run, letting me think I’ve slipped the collar, only to tighten it later—”

I broke off. My hands were shaking. I curled them into fists, nails biting deep enough to ache.

A moment passed. Then I felt her hand on mine. Careful, light. Not pushing. Just there.

Her voice was calm, but not soft. “We’ll figure it out.”

I stared at our hands. Pale, cold, blood-streaked against her rough scaled skin. Gods, she didn’t even flinch anymore. And I hated how much comfort I found in that.

Then I squeezed her hand—once, almost harsh, like I was afraid I’d break if I tried gentle—and let go. Pushed to my feet with all the casual arrogance I could muster, because anything else would’ve shown too much.

---

I woke to find her already awake. Not unusual—Elenya seemed to survive on scraps of sleep these days, driving herself by sheer, merciless will. But this time, she wasn’t hunched over her notes or mixing that foul scenting paste.
She was just… sitting. Legs drawn up, tail curled loosely around her ankles, staring at the wavering lampflame. Her face was stiff, shoulders tight in a way that made every scale along her neck stand out.
And so we packed up camp. Left the flickering lamp behind to sputter itself out in the dark, and stepped back toward Troll hills—together, wary, and already bracing for the next shadow waiting to tear us apart.

Notes:

Writing Astarion’s conflicting joy and disgust—his realization that someone’s willing trust can be even more terrifying than a master’s leash—was incredibly satisfying and agonizing in equal measure.

Chapter 20: Where the Cold Follows

Summary:

A negotiation with lizardfolk becomes a stage for old arrogance and older fears, while sharp questions draw blood neither of them meant to spill.
They emerge into frost and fragile quiet, chased by dreams that taste of rot and questions neither of them are ready to answer.

Would you bleed for him still?

Notes:

Eleyna continues to be her own brand of exhausted martyr with questionable self-preservation instincts, while Astarion proves that sometimes the sharpest claws are wrapped in silk.

Eleyna pov

---

As they ascended toward the Troll Hills, the tunnels grew narrower and slick with damp moss. Their breath fogged in the chill, even his, curling like little ghosts between them. And with every step, Astarion grew grumpier—sharp sighs, impatient little huffs, dramatic rolls of his eyes whenever the incline grew steeper.

She tried to ignore it. Failed.

“You’re still limping,” he said abruptly, voice sharper than the stone underfoot.

She froze mid-fold, halfway through tucking a stray length of rope back into her pack. Her shoulders tightened. “I’m fine.”

“Did I—?” he started, then hesitated, unusually awkward.

"Did you what?" Her tone was clipped, defensive.

“Is it… because I fed from you? Or the dwarf last night? When he caught your shoulder—”

“No,” she cut in, sharper now, almost a snarl. “It’s not the bite.  I am just tired, and I guess the dwarf attack was harder than I thought. Didn't heal fully yet.”

He fell silent, eyes narrowing, and for a moment, she thought that was the end of it. But of course not—he never could leave well enough alone.

“You didn’t heal yourself nor sleep,” he accused.

“Neither did you.” She answered.

“True,” he allowed, with a careless shrug that tried far too hard to be graceful. “But I’m an undead elf. I’m allowed.” His smirk was brittle and didn’t reach his eyes."Trancing isn't as necessary as it used to, and the half-elf blood healed everything."

"Wait, so blood not only sustains you but heals you as well ?' She added fascination barely hidden.

He sighed heavily before answering, " Yes, it does, as a matter of fact, as a spawn, that's the only way I can heal on my own, I mean outside of magical healing. My body needs blood for me to regenerate, otherwise my wounds remain open and my injuries intact." he then looked at her pointedly and added, " But, do not think you can change the subject on me like that, little love. There will be plenty of time for you to satiate your morbid curiosity about vampiric anatomy, for now, you need to stop this before becoming a liability." 

His words somewhat stung. She muttered something dark under her breath and swung her pack off her shoulders, shoving it at him. “Carry the supplies.”

It wasn’t really a request. More a weary order, a push to get him to stop needling her.

To her surprise, he didn’t quip or scoff. Didn’t let it tumble to the ground in some petty display. He just took it. Adjusted the strap with a short nod and settled the weight against his shoulder without complaint.

That, too, was new.

Something tight uncoiled in her chest at the sight. It almost frightened her more than his biting grin ever could. They walked on, boots scuffing over damp stone. His footsteps behind her were steady, quiet—almost considerate, as if he was deliberately adjusting to her slower pace. Which only irritated her more. Because it made the twist of guilt sharper. Because it was easier when he was cruel. Easier when he was all fangs and hunger and selfish little barbs. Easier not to think about how tender he could be, when he forgot himself.

So she didn’t thank him. Didn’t glance back. Just kept her eyes on the faint slope ahead, shoulders tight, pretending the small mercy of him carrying her burden didn’t matter. But the truth was, it did. 

---

In the last stretch of the tunnels before the climb to the surface, the air began to shift. It thickened with a new musk—heavy, faintly sweet, tinged with swamp rot and old iron.

Eleyna paused mid-step, forked tongue flicking twice. She tasted it. Lizardfolk. Recent. A cluster, close enough to catch the residual swirl of their pheromones.

She considered shifting. A simple Lizardfolk form— scales, slightly stockier build, split snout. But if they were of the Bluefeather clan or some minor tribes, her knowledge of their dialect and gestures and history was thin at best. Easy way to stumble straight into suspicion or worse meet a rival clan.

She decided against it. Better to hold her current yuan-ti form, one older and broader in diplomatic reach. She focused and forced the shift to her eyes. Pain flooded her. But increasing her serpent like figure meant increasing her status. Her eyes ached and resisted but finally settled in that golden hue.

Without breaking stride, she turned to Astarion, voice dropping to a whisper edged with command.

“Hide your weapons. Pull your cloak close. Make it look like you’re… freight.”

He raised a pale brow. “Freight?”

“Like something hauled, not strutting on its own power. Try to look subservient. This needn’t turn into a bloodbath. Please!”

“Oh darling,” he purred, lips curling in dark amusement, “how can I say no when you beg like that? I’ll behave—you have my word. Plus, I am not relly inclined to end up as lizard snake as you are in no state to fight. ”

Her answering glare promised she’d hold him to it.

From her pack, she pulled five necklaces, each hung with different sigils and teeth. Symbols looted from a dozen mercantile caches and dead smugglers’ belts. She selected the jagged serpent medallion for herself, tucking the rest away in easy reach.

Then she deliberately dropped all pretense of stealth. Her claws scraped across stone with each step. Let them hear. Let them prepare.

Somewhere ahead, a hush of low voices shivered across the tunnel walls. Words in liquid, raspy lizardfolk cant.

She steeled herself—and with a flick of her clawed hand, unfurled the faint shimmer of a protective fog, layering new wards over old. Then she walked forward tall and proud, every scale a deliberate display of languid, confident threat.

Twice she flicked her tongue again, tasting each individual scent signature—marking who was older, who was restless, who was cautious. She tapped the center of her scaled chest once with an open clawed hand, tail lifting in a loose, idle curve that signaled calm. Not rigid, not braced to strike.

A generic greeting among lizardfolk, signaling she bore no immediate harm.

In perfect lizardfolk, she then called out—voice pitched low and resonant.

“Your scent is known. I show no fang."

That translation ring had been worth every coin she’d spent on it — and then some. More than any steel or spellblade she’d ever laid hands on.

She had never understood why so many people were eager to empty their coffers for enchanted weapons that only ever added a paltry edge of damage, or offered some flashy but situational flourish. They’d gleefully bankrupt themselves for a blade that might sear a few more inches of flesh, or for a bow that whispered through fog a little truer — all the while sneering at items like hers.

But a ring like this? It could slip her through knots of tension that would have otherwise ended in blood. It could turn enemies into wary allies, shift suspicion into deference, buy time, spare lives — her own most importantly — and sometimes open doors barred by entire centuries of culture and clawed mistrust.

It made her world broader, safer, infinitely more survivable.

Yet somehow, most souls couldn’t see the value in that. They’d rather dump fortunes into brute means, chasing the thrill of combat, the quick solution of violence, the illusion of safety at the end of a blade. Fools.

She’d watched enough adventurers die with their priceless, gleaming weapons clutched useless in cold hands to know where true power lay. Not always in cutting deeper — but in never needing to draw steel at all.

A pregnant pause followed her greeting, thick with the scent of tension—like iron just before the forge hammers fell.

Then, slowly, five shapes unfurled from the gloom. Three hulking lizardfolk in heavy plate stepped forward first, their armor daubed with crude ritual etchings — jagged depictions of hunts, duels, victories, all caked in old ochre and ash. Their movements carried the ponderous certainty of creatures who had earned the right to wear such burdens.

Flanking them were two leaner scouts draped in scaled leathers, sinewy tails twitching in restless arcs behind them. Recurved bows hung from their claws, half-drawn by instinct alone. Across each chest ran a slash of red-dyed baldrics, vivid against the greens and grays of their hides. Fresh pelts of some marshland beast dangled from their belts, tufts still clinging as if confused by their new fate.

They fanned out with slow precision, a semicircle of cold eyes and slit pupils locking on Eleyna and her supposed captive. Their nostrils flared, tasting for lies, for weakness, for any excuse to let the tension break into crimson consequence.

Their markings, the red-dyed baldrics, the ritual etchings, even the audacity of their patrol so close to these old serpent tunnels — it all screamed Red-Fur megatribe.

Probably hunting, or staking fresh claim on new trails. The Red-Fur were infamous for pressing their territorial lines a little farther each season, pushing lesser clans to heel under Redeye’s sprawling dominion.

They carried themselves like predators on a sanctioned errand: wary of stepping on some ancient coil's tail by accident, but confident that if it came to violence, they'd have the right of steel and claw.

It made Eleyna’s gambit all the better. In this corner of the world, nothing was more efficient than a hunting party from Red-Fur — unless it was the faint possibility that inconveniencing them might disrupt Redeye’s carefully spun designs.

For all their ferocity, the Red-Fur were no mindless raiders. Redeye himself was almost unnervingly reasonable for a lizardfolk warlord — a lich-king whose ambitions ran on trade pacts and territorial alliances as much as on war. His clans thrived because they understood profit, diplomacy, and the long hunt far better than most warm-blooded nations gave them credit for.

Which meant Eleyna didn’t need to cow them with threats of violence. She only needed to spin a fair enough story, give them a thread that wouldn’t snarl in their chief’s greater tapestry. No hunting party worth its scales would dare compromise Redeye’s plans over the matter of two passing captives. Not when they could so easily be woven into the tribe’s interests with a single well-placed token and a promise of tribute.

Eleyna dipped her head, only slightly. Respect, not submission.

The largest stepped forward, throat swelling.

“Warm scales, coil-kin. This trail is Red-Fur hunting ground. You carry prey or captive—or you guide it through the tunnels? Speak your claim, hiss-blood. Else we test your throat for truth.”

A smaller scout’s head tilted, eyes a bright, suspicious gold.

“Hollow-fang here brings pink-flesh through our rivers. Is it tribute? Or wriggling meal? Our chief takes share of all that bleeds here.” 

Their throats rattled together—a soft, synchronised vibration. Ready. But not yet drawn.

Eleyna’s hood rose a fraction, a dry amusement playing at the edges of her long mouth. Her tongue darted again, tasting the stale nerves underneath their attempts at bravado.

“Warm scales, indeed” she replied coolly to the largest.  “I wish no steal. But do well to remember whose tunnels these truly are. Look there—”

She gestured with languid, disdainful precision at an old rune half-consumed by moss. The curling sigil of the Great Serpent, gouged deep into stone long before any of these scouts had hatched. Above were also cravings of Ssethian worship. The lizardmen bristled, tails curling. Yet each of them looked—begrudgingly—where she pointed. Recognized the old mark. Knew the weight of history, even when pride bucked against it. Eleyna gave a slight shrug, like oil slipping over wet stone.

“These are the underways of the Slitherer Supreme temple. No tribute is taken from the favored of his coil on their own land."

Eleyna’s hood lifted further, fanning slightly — not quite a threat posture, but unmistakably regal, a serpent’s deliberate reminder of where its fangs lay. Her golden eyes narrowed, slitted pupils fixing on the smaller scout who’d dared name her hollow-fang.

“Cold-wits,” she echoed, the word drawn out like a delicate taste, as if rolling a morsel across her tongue. “Little mud-lurker who thinks his first shed makes him cunning. Do you even smell how raw your scent is? How your fear leaks out between your scales?”

She tilted her head then, a languid, almost sinuous cant that made the rows of her throat scales ripple faintly. Her voice dropped to a low, rolling hush, like the dry rasp of leaves before a snake struck.

“Your mighty Redeye alone lifts you above the crawl-stalkers that snap at carrion. Dares grant you right of speech, trade, iron, and sends you forth with his name so you do not embarrass your kin by dying on a stranger’s tooth. So be wary, scale-gnasher, of calling hollow what coils wiser and older than your clutch’s memory. For it is not just my venom that would find your throat wanting—these tunnels still remember the songs of Sseth. And they have long memories for insults.” 

At the same moment, her clawed hand twitched beneath the folds of her cloak, shaping a precise sigil. A quiet syllable of power slipped past her fangs — Major Illusion.

Along the ancient carvings of the Great Serpent behind her, faint lines of phosphorescent green abruptly crawled to life. The moss and cracks seemed to glow from within, flaring in slow pulses that mimicked the breathing of some slumbering colossus. For an instant, the runes all but writhed — a whisper of ancient magic on the cusp of awakening, as though one wrong word or hostile act might rouse the tunnels themselves to vengeance.

Eleyna stood very still, letting the illusion play across her scales, a faint half-smile curling her lip. Her hood shadowed her eyes, giving her voice an eerie depth when she finally spoke again — this time in Lizardfolk cant, dripping with cold amusement.

“Test me if you must, mud-kin. But know it is not only my coils you tempt to stir.”

She let the silence stretch, coiling cold and tight around them, savoring the way several of the scouts dropped their gazes, tails twitching low to the stone in unconscious apology.

Only then did Eleyna’s posture loosen by a fraction. She flicked her tongue again, tasting the subtle shift — wariness, yes, but also the resigned relief of creatures realizing a challenge had not been fully taken up.

“Still. Since you are kin to the mighty Red-Fur — whose chief’s cunning is spoken of even in the whisper-halls of Serpent-Hill — hear this well.”
Her voice coiled through the air, smooth as oil across wet stone.
“I bring this elf as a gift from my masters. A token in answer to Redeye’s own summons for new trade. Attend your duty. Keep your master’s peace intact. My passage need not tangle your ledgers with needless debts — nor risk his displeasure.”

There was pride in her bearing, unmistakable. But it was the pride of a python lazing in the sun, not bristling for a strike — regal without overt challenge. Deference balanced on the edge of disdain. A line only the practiced could walk.

The largest scout slithered closer, plated scales rasping against one another. His breath smelled of old fish and damp fur, the rot of last hunts still clinging to fang and throat. Slit-pupiled eyes narrowed, weighing her from hood to claw-tip.

“Show coil-mark,” he rumbled at last. “Words crawl easy from forked mouths.”

A smaller scout with wicked cranial spines snapped his jaws once — a sharp, punctuating threat that made droplets of saliva patter against the stone. Beside him, a younger hunter slithered forward with jerky eagerness, tongue flicking rapid darts through the air.

“Trade?” he hissed, voice pitched to uncertainty’s edge. “With elf-meat trailing your leash? The scent of blood lies thick. Many speak of serpent favor. Many shed lies as easily as old skin.”

A third scout, his scales marked with cruder scars, clicked his teeth together in restless warning.

“Proof, scale-sister. Or a name we can carry that does not shame our chief’s ear.”

Eleyna’s golden eyes narrowed to predatory slits. The faintest shift of her hood shadowed her expression, hiding the dangerous curl of her lip. Slowly, with a languid arrogance born of old temples and darker prayers, she drew forth a pendant from beneath her cloak.

It was a jagged medallion, wrought in convoluted coils — the crest of some minor naga house weakened by time or enemies. She did not know it, which meant they almost certainly didn’t either. It had come off a dead yuan-ti priest’s neck in the hideout, still stained with old blood when she took it. Perfect. Untraceable.
And so very believable.

She held it out. Not offering it to their claws — simply letting it catch the cold torchlight, so they could see each twist and thorny flourish of the ancient glyphs.

“Here is your proof,” she hissed, voice dropping to something dark and syrup-slow. “Do you dare sniff it close, or remember your place?”

The pendant swung once between them, heavy with silent threat. The scouts’ eyes tracked it in uneasy synchrony, frills and crests subtly flattening. Even the bold young one withdrew half a pace, his tongue curling back into his mouth.

Eleyna let the silence linger, savouring how it pressed against them like coiled muscle — the unspoken promise that one wrong question might see it all snap tight around their throats.

The largest scout hesitated, claws twitching.

Eleyna let her hood flare fully, casting her eyes into shadow. Her tongue lashed once, twice in disdain. Then she snarled—soft but cold as sliding knives.

“I have endured enough of this petty game — more than any halfblood’s patience allows,” Eleyna hissed, each word dripping with sinuous contempt. Her hood flared wider, casting deep shadows over slitted eyes.
“How dare you question my passage through tunnels my kin borrowed from the stone long before your egg-clutches ever knew warmth. I have been friendly — out of respect for your legendary chief, whose hunts even our temple priests whisper of. I have treated you with the honor due his death-magic.

But I will not bow my scales to mere hunting lizards. Least of all upon our lands.”

Her hand drifted, slow and deliberate, to the curve of her blade. Shoulders rolled with serpentine grace, like coils tightening beneath cold scales — a promise of violence should her patience be tested further.

“Would you insult him — and the sacred coil of Serpent Hill — by harassing an envoy traveling under trade accord? Be assured: he will hear of it.”

Silence slammed down around them, as final and sharp as a guillotine’s fall. The scouts shifted uneasily, clawed feet scraping against stone, tails twitching in the gloom. No doubt their minds raced, imagining the cold, pitiless judgment of their lich-king’s crimson gaze should such a slight ever reach his ancient ears.

At last, the lead scout’s frill trembled. He let out a long, rasping exhale, then reached into a worn pouch at his hip. From it he drew a thin strip of red leather, slick with years of oil and sweat, its surface etched with harsh draconic runes.

“Safe pass-mark, snake-sisters,” he rasped, voice grudging, claws splayed palm-up in a gesture of reluctant deference.
“Meant no steal — only guard clan. This is Redeye’s name. Wear it to your shoulder. No spear of Red-Fur strikes you so marked.”

Eleyna accepted it with a tilt of her snout that was all elegant disdain, draping it over her shoulder as though it were beneath her notice. Her tongue flicked once, savoring the faint musk of their awe and the bitter tang of fear still leaking from their pores.

“I will. And I will speak of how your spears nearly forgot Redeye’s cunning — that he strikes for profit, not for petty squabbles.”
Her golden eyes narrowed, a sly spark kindling there.
“Better you hunt west. Foolish drow crawl there with their chained thralls. And vampires’ servants and minions have been sniffing about.”

The youngest scout’s head twitched sharply, narrow pupils slicing sideways as his frill gave a nervous pulse.

“Cold-flesh fortress has been quiet for long seasons now,” he rasped, voice a wary hush that still managed to carry down the tunnel’s throat. “Why would bloodsuckers slink this far southeast again? Why come to the cursed river?”

Eleyna’s hood rose a fraction in cold amusement. “Cold-flesh fortress?” she drawled, letting the words linger on her forked tongue like something sour. “You speak of Warlock’s Crypt.”

A ripple of unease passed through the scouts at the name. The lead hunter gave a low, grudging click of his jaws.
“Aye. That carcass. Vault of Cold-fleshed elf-things with ash for breath and walking bones. Was long since we scented their hunts in the marches. Doors sealed tight as tomb-husk — no fresh trails, no scatter of prey bones. No flying bats and death riders. Many thought them dead, or fled back to deeper holes. Until…”

His tail lashed once against the stone, eyes narrowing.
“Until the caravans started crawling out. Painted wagons, sleek draft beasts, chests and strange goods heaped high. Not local trade — bore no marsh-marks. Banners, Red, we couldn’t read. Came up from the Cold-flesh Crypt roads, rolled right through our swamp paths, then vanished east.”

Eleyna’s eyes thinned to razors. Her hood rose fully, tongue flicking once to taste the storm of scents curling off them — fear, yes, but also a reluctant awe.

“Caravans,” she repeated, voice low and dangerous. “From inside Warlock’s crypt.”

The younger scout bobbed his snout in a quick, jittery nod.
“Truth. We watched from rushes. Cold flesh and skeletons, drivers and beasts, both with hollow eyes. Most were moving dead, not living. Mindless. Some could speak, we think. But all bore no hunt—scent, smelled of rot, dry stones, old bindings.”

Eleyna shifted, tail coiling tightly behind her. Her claws flexed once against her thigh.
“And they did not trouble your patrols? Made no demands on Redeye’s tributes or the lizard marsh's? No feeding on the way?”

The lead scout rattled his throat, grim.
“They paid passage. Fine gems. Little hassle for much wealth. Our chief said Take it — better fat tribute than fresh war with dead things too clever to stay dead.”

Eleyna exhaled slowly through her nose, studying them.
“And you let them pass. Again and again?”

“They passed three times only over two seasons. Each time heavy-laden, enough to buy a warband’s disinterest for moons. We watched them vanish east, toward moon-hills and soft-walkers’ lands.”

Eleyna tilted her head slightly, hood shifting with the motion — a subtle gesture that softened her silhouette just enough to feign courtesy. Her tongue darted, tasting the stale air, before she addressed the lead scout in a tone almost gentle.
“Then permit me a question, scale-kin — not to pry at your chief’s honor, but to safeguard it. Has Redeye struck a pact or trade with the cold-flesh crypt? I would not wish to test claws against allies of your mighty clan, should our trails cross.”

The lizardman’s nostrils flared. His claws drummed once against his spear, eyes narrowing in something between suspicion and reluctant approval.
“Wise question, snake-sister. But no. Chief Redeye keeps wide of that stone crypt. Says no clever hunter nests at the edge of another predator’s den. Never struck a deal but speaks of old bone-king with hate. We never needed a deal. Our hoards grow fat on our own kills.”

Eleyna’s mouth curved faintly, a thin, knowing smile.
“Reasonable. He’d hardly risk falling under the archlich’s thrall. While he may surpass him in overall might," Not true she thought, not by a million miles, but everyone loved flattery and reassurance about their leader's power. She continued, "Even Redeye’s death-magic would pale beside Larlock’s. Best let such worms gnaw themselves.”

At that name — Larlock — even the seasoned scouts stiffened. The smallest gave a nervous throat rattle, scales shivering along his arms.

Eleyna’s gaze sharpened, her tone light but with a hard edge beneath.
“And these caravans. Did you see any living among them? ”

The lead hunter’s tail flicked low.
“Sometimes. Cargo only. Bound. Thin. Mostly soft-skins — elf, dwarf, man. A few lizardmen, too. Bleufeather and blackscales weaklings. In chains or caged in iron. No cries — too drugged or broken to fight.”

A sour taste curled across her tongue. She smoothed it into neutrality, though her scales rippled faintly with tension.

“Useful to know,” she said distantly. “You’ve been most instructive. Be at ease. Your honor stands untarnished. My masters will remember your prudence. I will speak well of you to your chief upon reaching his court. What name does your hunting band carry?”

The lead scout’s frill twitched, unsettled yet clearly flattered by her poised courtesy. He puffed his throat, tapping twice against his chest baldrics, claws clicking on the fresh pelts.
“We are hunting band of Bone-Trail, under claw of Grashk of the Third Brood. Speak that. Chief Redeye knows worth of Bone-Trail might.”

The smaller scout hissed in satisfaction, pride flashing in his eyes, though the rest remained wary of her icy grace.

Eleyna dipped her head just enough to acknowledge the boast, her hood relaxing a fraction.
“Bone-Trail. Grashk’s Third Brood. I will see it carried true — in breath or in ink. Should our paths cross again, may it be under calmer banners.”

She let her tongue flick out once more, savoring their mingled relief and pride, then turned with a subtle snap of her tail, posture regaining its lazy, deadly confidence. Astarion fell in step behind her, mouth slightly crooked in a small, tense smile that promised he’d found the entire exchange entertaining.

As they moved off, she heard the scouts shifting, low voices rasping in their guttural cant. Words like sharp-tongue serpent and crypt-curse wanderer threaded among grudging respect that might one day feed their campfire boasts.

And so Bone-Trail’s name joined the quiet ledger Eleyna kept in her mind — a living map of threats, alliances, and fools, all waiting to be twisted by the right words.

---

They’d gone another dozen winding paces before Astarion abruptly stopped and caught her wrist. His claws were light on her skin, but there was iron beneath it — a predator’s grip dressed up in careless grace.

“Well,” he purred, mouth curling into that dangerous, amused shape that promised trouble, “that was… thrilling. Care to explain what in the Nine Hells just happened back there?”

Eleyna blinked at him, her tongue flicking out once in pure instinct. “You mean with the patrol?”

“Yes, darling—the patrol,” he drawled, voice rich with mock patience. “You slipped into that charming hissing dialect, they nearly voided their scales, then gave you a gilded free pass. I don’t speak your delightful swamp tongue—so humor me. What exactly did you say?”

She stared at him, silent for a long, cool heartbeat. Then she let out a sigh sharp enough to cut stone. “Everything necessary to make sure we didn’t end up decorating their cookfires, obviously.” 

"Which consisted of?"

She rolled her eyes with all the disdain she could muster, sighed through her fangs, and recounted the entire exchange — verbatim. Every rasp, every coil of threat, even the part where she’d implied their chieftain’s disappointment might come down on them like a storm of fangs and shadow.

When she finished, he arched a single silver brow. “How, precisely, did you know about their chief?”

She tilted her head, the gesture sinuous and snake-sharp. “How in the fuck do you not know who they work for?”

He blinked. “Pardon?”

“They were armored — proper steel plates etched in ritual hunts, not scavenged trash. Their baldrics were uniform, dyed red, and cut to match. That’s Redeye’s mark. The Red-Fur megatribe is leagues ahead of the local fen clans technologically and organizationally, precisely because of him and his trade. Everything about them stank of his order. He has been a legend on the Marsh before my birth.”

His grin sharpened. “Brilliant. But what if your mighty old Redeye had already shuffled off to join the grand choir of swamp worms?”

A short, humorless laugh broke from her. “No chance.”

“Oh? And why’s that?”

“Because Redeye is a lich, Astarion.”

He froze. Then his face split into a delighted, utterly unhinged grin. “A lich? A lich-lizard-king? That is spectacular. We just browbeat the scouts of an undead giant gecko.”

Her mouth twitched — the barest slip of amusement threatening the razor calm of her features — but she refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing more. “He’s not just a lich. He’s a witch doctor, a shaman, a ferocious barbarian warlord, and reportedly a divine champion of Semuanya himself. The oldest and largest known lizardfolk by far. Records claim he was slain three separate times by rival tribes and adventurers, only to rise again. He’s the reason the entire marsh hasn’t splintered back into a hundred feuding clans — he even manipulated a black dragon to wipe out his last serious rival. He is one of the main reasons peace is maintained with Daggerford. So I repeat my question: how the fuck don’t you know who they were working for?”

Astarion simply stared, red eyes wide, lips parted as though to speak — then he abruptly threw his head back and laughed. It was bright and wild, echoing down the tunnel’s slick stone throat until it sounded like half a dozen dark, mirthful spirits laughed with him.

“Gods,” he finally wheezed, clutching lightly at her arm as if to steady himself, fangs flashing in an irreverent grin. “I’d call you a wonk for knowing all that, but watching you lie and snarl and drape yourself in serpent arrogance over those poor overgrown newts was… well. Incredibly attractive.”

Her hood snapped flat to her skull, an involuntary flare of irritation. Thank all the old, new and other gods that her yuan-ti form couldn’t blush — else he would have truly gained the upper hand. She clicked her teeth together in a brittle staccato that echoed like breaking glass, then spun on her heel to keep walking. 

“That’s rich. Not a week ago you called this form ‘freakish.’”

“Oh, come now.” He followed effortlessly, steps too silent for the scale of his amusement. His eyes sparkled, smile turning sly and just shy of cruel. “Did that wound your tender sensibilities? That was before I discovered how enthralling your terrifying confidence could be. And the hood — truly, it’s quite fetching when you’re furious. Though,” he mused, tapping a delicate pale finger thoughtfully against his lip, “I do rather prefer your more conventional… travel suits. Easier to toss about, don’t you think? But this could do. I am nothing if not flexible with my preferences.”

She clicked her teeth together, the brittle snap loud in the tunnel. “I am not"

He laughed still, eyes full of mirth and enjoyment, before adding, "Don't be ridiculous, darling, I am everyone's preference." 

What was happening? His flirtation was not new by far, but this felt strange. It was usually calculated. Manipulation and intent are barely hidden under the surface. This looks spontaneous.
Joyous. 
Yet still disinterested. 
Yet still practiced.

“Keep flattering yourself.” She added with half the severity she usually displayed. 

Astarion, to his credit, appeared to brush the comment flawlessly. His grin widened, and he added, "Oh, sweet thing, I would really prefer you start doing it. Almost two fortnights together and you've yet to acknowledge the tarrasque in the proverbial room. One can only wonder why. " His hand came up and traced the side of her jaw. "Are you afraid to admit it?"

She narrowed her eyes. “What tarrasque in the room? Admit what? What are you rambling about now?” Something is different yet the same. 

“Well, obviously — how beautiful I am.”

This is the second time he has raised the issue of her not acknowledging his beauty. Curious indeed, “I’m ignoring you.”

“As you always do.” His sigh was extravagantly wounded; he pressed the back of his hand to his brow in mock agony. Then, quite without permission, he closed the distance again, his arm brushing hers, voice dropping to a velvet murmur.
“It’s cruel, really, the way you refuse to melt even a little. Most would be halfway to breathless by now, given such proximity.”

“Which is exactly why I’m not,” she spoke, tail coiling tighter.

“Oh, is that it? Am I too much of a rake for your delicate sensibilities? Would you rather I make you feel special? Whispered eternal love and devotion to your ears ?”

She tried to taste truth on him — the subtle shifts of scent, the muscle flickers at his jaw — and found nothing clear. It wasn’t quite a lie. But it wasn’t honest either. And tellingly, there was no raw, coiling desperation behind it. No true lust either. Just the same elaborate theatre he wore like fine silk. Perhaps it was harmless, like the way he forced down mortal food and pretended, chasing the ghost of some lost normalcy.

She relaxed before adding, “No. It would be much of the same." She tried to imagine it for a moment. But love was as difficult for her to imagine as it was to understand. She continued, "I wouldn't know what to do with those any more than you would."

He looked at her curiously as his nose burried in the crook of her neck and took a tentative whiff of air before answering, " Then what is it, darling, that is keeping you from me. I'm always up for learning how to further woe unsuspecting souls. Any critiques ?"

Somewhere in there was something true, she thought. A little insecurity. Is that why he wanted her to comment on his beauty? It made sense to her then. If he was made to believe that was his value. refusing to acknowledge it could be destabilizing to him. More reason to never acknowledge it. She can't be reinforcing this.

She fully settled her tail and answered simply, "It’s more about the fact I have no taste for fantasies — and you’re clearly putting on a show.”

“Mmm.” His red eyes glittered. He tilted his head in a way that should’ve been innocent, if not for the sharp canines peeking over his lip. Then his hand found the small of her back, just beneath the edge of her cloak — a whisper of cold digits against sensitive scales above the base of her tail, not quite a caress, not quite a threat. “Am I? Hm. Not really.”

And that, truly, was what left her most uneasy. Fair to say, she liked him, so did I. Respected his cunning, even relished the dry venom of his humor. But it never spilled into desire. Not from us, at least we thought. It only made him harder to read, harder to keep at a clean distance. Less as an objective, more… an entanglement. It frayed our objectivity.

Sometimes we thought he might even enjoy our company more than most, if not all, who crossed our path did, beneath all that barbed showmanship. That chilled her far more than his teeth ever could. It meant that this idiot is toying with something to break it even though he doesn't want it to break. 

Still a prick.

Astarion was studying her sidelong, head cocked like a curious cat’s, his palm still resting on the small of her back, not moving, but insistently present. His grin turned almost rueful. “Truly heartless, aren’t you? A shame. You do coil so prettily when riled.”

Her hood lowered by slow degrees. Then, abruptly, I spoke — voice low and startlingly serious, slicing through their little war of barbs.

“How can you want it?” The question slipped out of me before she could stop it. “I know you don’t — not really. So why do you invite that sort of attention? How can you be comfortable with it, after what was done to you?”

He blinked — truly blinked, caught off guard. The playful spark in his eyes guttered. For a heartbeat, he simply looked at her, pale and raw. Then his mouth twisted into something small and brittle.

“Well, well, darling. Seems I’m not the only one who enjoys watching the other bleed.” His hand flexed slightly at her back, a subtle, almost defensive curl of finger. “What a sharp little dagger you have for probing.”

I had no quick retort. Our tongue flicked once, tasting the hush between all of us. Eventually, I looked away, voice dropping.
“I’m not trying to be cruel. I’m actually… impressed. That you can still stand to do it." I couldn't, I added in the fog, "Takes a lot of strength to dance around old wounds like that. Even… if it’s unhealthy.” Clearly, more strength than I have.

At that, he let out a startled, brittle laugh. His hand slid higher, trailing a careful line up our spine that was neither possessive nor tender, just seeking warmth, an anchor. Before settling at our right hip. “I don’t believe I’ve ever been accused of inner strength,” he murmured. “As for wanting it — oh, it’s not about that want. It’s about familiarity. A stage I’ve walked a thousand nights. I don’t have many cards to play, so I keep playing the hand I know — the charming, preening lover — rather than pause long enough to wonder what else there might be left. If anything at all.” His eyes glittered, far too bright. “Besides, most people never look closely at beauty. They’re content to be dazzled. Easier that way. Safer, in some twisted sense. And I do enjoy the chase, the game, particularly with you. How you are able to resist makes it all the more exciting.”

“What game are we playing then?” she pressed. His claws were still grazing her side now, dangerously gentle. “What do you hope to get from this hand?”

His smile returned, slow and sly. His right thumb went up to trace a faint arc just under the edge of her hood, as though to test how she might startle. But I was here, and the body was in the fog. “Where would the fun be in telling you, little dove?”

“Control, then. It’s about control. That's a steep price you are willing to pay for something you already have. ”

“Ah.” The word slipped out with a hush of breath, strangely soft, as if admitting something shameful. “And this is precisely why you’re so very dangerous. You see too much, little dove, and for all your talk about mercy. You never do the mercy of pretending you don't.”

My hood twitched while flattening against my skull. I looked at him for a beat before extricating myself from his grasp and starting to walk.  We went on for several paces, the tunnel swallowing our footfalls. His hand caught and let it there — a cold, careful weight. Water dripped distantly, a rhythm like a waiting heart.

Then I spoke again, voice barely above a whisper. “Is that what you want? Another liar? Pretending not to see the traps you are laying for yourself? while you pretend it is me you are hunting."

He looked at me, genuinely confused. " You don't see it, don't you. The flaw in the game: What if I said yes?”

His brow arched, breath catching faintly. “Yes?”

“Yes. What if I took you up on your… little game, accepted your offer? Do the mercy of pretending not to see. What if it stopped being a just performance, what then?”

He regarded me for a long, unreadable span. Then he gave a tiny, elegant shrug that didn’t quite hide how still he’d gone.

“Then it still wouldn’t stop being a performance. I’d simply oblige, play the next Act. Show you a night of passion. Consume you. See you getting lost in me. Give you something you’d remember. It would hardly be a chore, really. I’ve done far worse for people who deserved it far less. People who weren't You. You, I would relish in seeing you lose control.”

He doesn't see it, not yet. The same, I don't see mine. Why did the fog hurt me? Is that how the friend feels when talking to me? That's too sad.

“Why would you think I’d want that?” I pressed.

“Because, darling…” His grin returned, faint and knife-sharp, even as his nails rested against my pulse in mock casualness. “I don’t see what else you’d want, truly.”

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “I literally told you. Dinner. And you didn't get it. Why do you think I would want that for you?"

" What do you mean?"

" I don't want to be another of your willing victims — or worse, one of your unwitting unwilling abusers. I wouldn't want to see you do that to yourself. I think. Allowing this game feels wrong to me.”

Is that what I am doing to myself, becoming no one so that no one can erase me? I need to leave. I shouldn't have asked. her eyes dulled and looked into the crimson of his eyes before nodding. At that, he gave a short, startled bark of laughter, head tilting back against the tunnel wall. “Gods, you’re a vicious little thing. Almost makes me wish you did want me — at least then I’d know precisely what to fear.”

“You should fear plenty,” she muttered, though there was no true bite in it. Only tired amusement. Then, softer still: “But believe me — I’m not one of them.”

This time he didn’t answer. Just walked beside her in silence, claws still ghosting her scales like a silent question. His smile went small, strange, something fragile, trying not to splinter.  Astarion fell into step with predatory ease, still chuckling under his breath. His laughter had softened into something lower, richer — a sound that seemed to stroke against her scales, leaving the faintest tremor in its wake. His fangs glinted whenever he smiled, sly and knowing. If he noticed the way her tail had coiled tighter against her legs — defensive, uncertain — he had the good taste not to mention it.

Yeah, she likes him. I like him as well. 

Her hood lowered by slow degrees. She focused on the path ahead, counting her breaths, steadying the little tremor that still ran under her skin. Beside her, Astarion walked with a feline ease, pale and terrible and impossibly amused — a reminder that for all his laughter and silken charm, he was still a predator who had nearly drained her dry not two nights before. And so they continued, side by side through the dark — neither, each the other’s unsolved riddle, each unsure how deep the game might cut if ever truly played.

The tunnel turned sharply ahead, swallowing them deeper into the earth. And she let it, grateful for the gloom that hid her face from his searching, infuriating eyes.

---

They surfaced around early noon.

The sky was a muted silver, heavy with clouds that still clung stubbornly to the hills. Frost rimed the shadowed hollows, and the wind had the raw, knife-edge bite of a season not yet willing to yield. Eleyna stepped out first, bracing as it struck her, scenting pine sap and old ice.

It felt… cleaner here. Wider. The press of the tunnels had been so relentless she hadn’t realized how hunched she’d grown, shoulders drawn in tight around old wounds, breath shallow. Now, in the open, something unknotted along her spine. She straightened, tentatively, like testing a joint long unused.

She lingered there longer than she meant to. Eyes half-shut against the pale glare, letting the cold sting at the corners. The air tasted bright, almost painful on her tongue, like biting into a green apple. Then caution cut through wonder; she ducked back into the cave mouth, unwilling to tempt patrols or hungrier things that might roam these slopes.

Astarion had already made a small, tidy camp just inside the shelter of stone. Blankets laid out with surprising care, packs stacked by weight, a tiny cookpot set over a banked flame. It almost startled her, how practiced he was at this, as if the performance of normalcy mattered more to him than comfort ever could.

He was fussing with something by the pot, but his eyes lifted immediately, snapping to her with that quick, bright predator’s focus that was somehow flattering and unsettling all at once.

“Tired?” he asked, tone light, almost playful — but not quite.

She didn’t answer. Just let her pack slip from stiff shoulders and dropped heavily onto the nearest bedroll. Her legs felt like twisted wire, each muscle locked in some quiet rebellion.

Without speaking, she set to work. Her hands rose, tracing through the air, fingers carving old familiar sigils. A renewed Nondetection settled over him first — her silent promise that no stray hunter would find him by arcane means. Then Death Ward, laid like cold balm along the length of his spine. Her magic thrummed through the small space, dull and weary, but steady.

When she finished, she let the magic slip from her. Her bones shortened. Scales sank under skin with the faint, shivering pop of realignment. Until only a tired wood elf woman remained — hair a wild, matted halo, eyes sunken, movements careful to avoid jostling half-healed bruises.

Astarion watched it all with that same sharp-eyed amusement, lips quirking as if about to make some elegant insult. Instead, he simply said, “Is it safe yet to be rid of that dreadful scent of yours?”

She raised an eyebrow. “We’re near the surface. Should be fine. Why?”

“Magic it away for me.”

She rolled her eyes but obliged, murmuring the cantrip that stripped the sharp acrid overlay from the air. The change was immediate. The damp cavern suddenly smelled only of moss, old stone, and them.

Astarion drew in a deep, almost greedy breath. It was theatrical at first — then slower, softer, something in him uncurling as he did. The tension in his shoulders eased by a fraction so slight most wouldn’t notice.

“You hate the scent that much?” she muttered.

“It’s more that I… like your scent,” he said, offhand in that careful, dangerous way of his.

It made her pause. Truly pause. “Why?”

“The first thing I smelled out of that grave,” he said simply, not meeting her eyes, “was you.”

She blinked. “I’m surprised you’d admit to that.”

“So am I,” he laughed, short and sharp. “But I’d rather you know. So you don’t go hiding it when there’s no need.”

Something in her chest squeezed, awkward and uncertain. She tried for dryness. “You sure that’s not just the blood talking?”

“No. Or…” He tilted his head, fangs peeking in a thoughtful grin. “I don’t think so.”

Then his eyes narrowed, sweeping over her with that too-keen scrutiny. “Gods, you look like shit.”

“What else is new?”

He didn’t smile. Just studied her, eyes going flinty. “I’m serious.”

She didn’t reply. Couldn’t find anything to say that wouldn’t taste like either pride or pity on her tongue.

His stare sharpened. “Why didn’t you heal your shoulder? That filthy dwarf nearly cracked it through.”

She sighed, rubbing absently at the stiff joint. “Because I’ve used too much already. My potions are low. I’d rather keep what I have if something else happens. If someone else needs it.”

He went very still. Then, in a voice stripped of all his usual cruel lilt, he said, “The troll, the bandit, me — all worthy of healing. But not you.”

A startled, short laugh clawed up her throat. “No. Just… I can sleep this off. They couldn’t. And it’s my job to protect you.”

“Says who?”

“No one. That’s just… what I do.”

His eyes held hers, red and luminous in the half-light, full of strange knots she couldn’t begin to unravel. “Heal it. Now.”

Her heart stuttered, betraying her utterly. Words crowded up — excuses, dismissals, small weary deflections — then scattered at the look on his face. So she sighed, set her hands against her own shoulder, and let the spell work. Bone slid back into its seam, muscle knitted, bruises sank into nothing. It left her dizzy. Lighter.

When she looked at him again, he was smiling — not sly, not mocking. Just quietly, unsettlingly pleased.

It rattled her worse than any grin full of fangs ever had.

---

She bit into one of her tasteless rations, more habit than hunger. Dry root and hard tack crumbled like dust in her mouth, something to be endured, not enjoyed. Beside her, Astarion took one of the jars of blood she handed him, cracked the wax seal, and drank without ceremony.

It had become a rhythm: she offered, he accepted. Neither spoke of how foul it was, how thin and half-dead compared to what he truly craved. They both pretended it was enough.

She chewed, thoughts drifting. Running low on anticoagulants. If they stayed underground much longer, they’d need more. Was it even worth it anymore? Who was following? Who was hunting? The waste of it sat heavy in her chest, like stale breath she couldn’t quite exhale.

A shiver stole through her. She tried to hide it, inching closer to the small flame.

Then something warm and heavy settled around her shoulders. Another cloak — thicker, lined with the faint scent of pine, old leather, iron. His scent.

She jerked slightly, startled. “Thank you, but — you should wear it, it’s cold—”

“I don’t need it,” he said flatly. “I’m undead.”

“You don’t feel cold at all?”

“Oh, I do. Just… much less than you.”

“Then keep it. I can mana—”

“Bloody hell, just take it and shut up.”

She blinked. Heat rushed up her throat — stupid, unbidden thing. She tucked herself under the two cloaks with awkward care. “Sorry,” she muttered, muffled in wool.

---

Silence settled. Heavy, brittle. The fire crackled like it was mocking them. Why was this so difficult? Why did sitting here, shoulder to shoulder with him, feel more dangerous than all the monsters in the dark?

He cleared his throat. A small, painfully mortal sound. She almost laughed.

“Why,” he began, then stopped. She watched his face — the faint little flexes at his mouth, the way his hands twisted together and fell still again.

“Why do you do that?” he finally managed.

She frowned. “Do what?”

“That thing.” His eyes darted to hers, sharp and bright, then away. “Where you make yourself small. Or apologize. Or give away your only warmth like it’s nothing. Like you’re nothing.”

Her stomach twisted. She shifted under the cloaks, tried for something glib that wouldn’t come. “Habit,” she said at last. “Survival. It’s easier not to be seen.”

His mouth twisted. “Even by me?”

Especially by you, she thought. But it rattled something loose in her chest that she didn’t want to name.

She forced a shrug. “You don’t count.”

“Oh? How devastating.” His voice dripped dry amusement, but the look in his eyes was far too raw, far too honest. “I rather hoped I did.”

She pulled the cloak tighter, fighting a shiver that had nothing to do with cold. Didn’t answer. Her throat had closed too tight.

---

A moment passed. The fire popped, sending a swirl of red sparks up into the stone throat of the cave.

Then he let out a long sigh — frustrated, resigned. And shifted closer. Their shoulders bumped. Not a careless sprawl. Not a calculated lean. A deliberate press of cold, undead body heat against her side, like he was grounding himself. Or maybe her.

“Just…” His voice dropped. “Next time, don’t apologize for keeping warm. Or for needing anything at all. I’d rather you not freeze to death. It’s terribly inconvenient for me.”

A breath she hadn’t realized she was holding left her. Her mouth tugged into something thin, wry. “Terribly.”

“Yes, well.” His hand twitched — like he might do something reckless, run it through her tangled hair. Then he just let it fall with a small, annoyed huff, tipping his head back against the stone. “There. Now it’s awkward again. Are you happy?”

For some reason, she almost was.

---

They sat like that, close enough their elbows brushed, the two cloaks a heavy muddled pile between them. The cave was still cold. The world outside still waited with all its knives and shadows. But just for that fragile little stretch of time, it wasn’t quite so unbearable.

Eventually, the silence turned companionable. Or maybe they were simply too exhausted to keep bristling. She leaned a little more into the pile of cloaks. He didn’t move away.

“So.”

He broke the silence after nearly an hour, voice light as frost, but his eyes were narrowed, studying her profile like a puzzle he hadn’t quite decided how to solve.

“That delightful little encounter with your scaly cousins left one detail rather dangling, don’t you think?”

Eleyna didn’t look up, keeping her eyes fixed on the fire ahead.

“Which detail would that be? They said plenty.”

“Oh, only the small matter of Warlock’s Crypt.” His grin was a sliver of knife-sharp amusement, too bright to be genuine. “What precisely is it? Some pleasant swamp resort with cryptic branding?”

She let out a short, humorless laugh.

“Hardly. It’s a city — or what’s left of one. Still standing in the Troll Hills. An old Netherese flying city ruin turned into a necropolis, now ruled by Larloch.”

Astarion tilted his head, frown deepening.

“Larloch… That name sounds irritatingly familiar.”

“It should,” she said, voice dry. “He’s an archlich called the Shadow King. One of the oldest non-draconic entity in Faerûn. It is also said that he is one of the most powerful mages. Older than most nations, he discovered the ruin in the Year of Sundered Webs,  almost eighteen hundred  years ago. Four centuries before Dale reckoning. Since then, Larloch established a necropolis in there and accumulated a vast collection of spells, magic items, and undead creatures to serve him.

When he became known as the Shadow King around the Sword Coast, Orbedal, the ruins he took over, was renamed Larloch's Crypt, which was later corrupted into the name Warlock's Crypt. By the last century, he was still ruling with around sixty liches and twice as many true vampires under his direct command, plus thousands of spawns, wights, wraiths, and uncounted zombies. Entire armies of undead. If the last records from seventy years ago are to be beleived.”

His crimson eyes went wide before narrowing to wary slits.

“That was seventy years ago.”

“Exactly. Plenty of time to create more — or lure them in.”

He let out a low, incredulous laugh. “And this… delightful crypt stands where exactly?”

“Troll Hills. The towers are all linked, rising like black talons over a spring so polluted it glows at night. Twisted streets, abandoned houses — though nothing there is truly abandoned. The undead lurk everywhere. Even the water pulses with necromantic energy, remnants of Larloch’s experiments.”

“Lovely,” he muttered. “And people still try their luck there?”

“Very Few. Much fewer return. Those who did over the millennia speak of lines of liches standing silent guard, of spellwebs spun between towers, trolls still serving at the gates. Hunting parties of skeletal giants riding monstrous bats patrol the skies. Inside the towers, there are layer upon layer of wards, curses, and spell traps. Larloch’s not the type to allow a vulnerability.”

His mouth twisted into a delicate sneer.

“So what does he keep for company? Still liches mostly?”

“Likely more by now. Plus wights, wraiths, crawling claws, skeletal monstrosities… possibly even fiends. He’s summoned kastighur demons before. And the trolls still serve, by most accounts.”

Astarion let out a breathless, almost hysterical laugh.

“A city of liches, vampires, demons, trolls — all at the beck and call of a mllennia-old archlich scholar of necromancy. Darling, you truly paint the most inviting travel posters.”

She ignored his mockery.

“It’s also a hub of ancient Netherese magic. Larloch isn’t just power-hungry. He’s a scholar, obsessed with undeath, with the Weave, with pushing magic beyond every known boundary.”

His mirth faded, replaced by incredulity. “Tell me you’re not actually contemplating going there.”

She hesitated, drawing her cloak tighter.

“I’ve… thought about it.”

He threw up his hands, nearly stumbling on the rocky path. “Of course you have. Why wouldn’t we skip along to the black heart of necromancy itself, rap politely on the door of a thousands year old mad lich-king’s fortress, and ask if he has a moment to chat?”

Eleyna’s voice stayed infuriatingly calm.

“If anyone knows how to sever vampiric bonds — if there are rituals, relics, spells that could untangle you from Cazador forever — it’s someone like Larloch. Or something buried in the Crypt’s vaults.”

He went rigid, the humor draining from his face.

“That’s suicidal.”

“I know.” Her eyes softened, weary. “But it’s also the best lead we might ever have.”

He let out a harsh breath, pacing a few steps ahead before spinning back.

“And yet you’d still do it?”

“It’s only a possibility,” she countered quietly. “Nothing decided. If there are caravans in and out, we might slip past the defenses, disguise ourselves among them. Move through without alerting the whole hornet’s nest.”

His ruby eyes flared. “You’d wager our lives on rumors of trade from a necropolis crawling with liches and corpse-mongers?”

She almost smiled ruefully. “Aren’t you curious? What could a city of undead possibly be trading for? Who trades with them? What bargains are worth risking such a place?”

“That’s exactly how fools die horribly,” he shot back, voice sharp. Then softer, almost pleading. “It’s still madness.”

“Safer for you, ironically,” she murmured. “Cazador would never risk it. A vampire lord like him? Far too tempting a prize for Larloch — powerful enough to be worth dominating, noticeable enough to be snatched up. You’re just a spawn. You’d disappear among a thousand lesser undead, beneath their notice.”

His mouth twisted. “How charming. Reduced to anonymous spawn-fodder for my own protection.”

“Better overlooked than coveted.”

He stared at her for a long moment, then gave a brittle laugh.

“Truly mad.”

“Which is why,” she said gently, “we don’t decide now. We’ll cross that bridge if we must. Until then, it’s only an option on the horizon.”

Astarion exhaled, tension easing just slightly. “All right then. If not liches, what’s the alternative?”

Eleyna glanced at him, her eyes a little lighter.

“We keep on to Daggerford. Rest, restock, pick up a special commission. From there, I can teleport us to an Ilmaterian sanctuary — far away, safe, well-hidden.”

His brow arched. “Why not just teleport there from Baldur’s Gate? Seems that would’ve saved us a great deal of trouble.”

“I needed something first — still do, It's a focus to safely reroute the public teleportation runes. It could’ve been crafted in Baldur’s Gate, but it would have taken another month. Too risky. So I ordered one to be made and delivered to Daggerford instead. It should be waiting.”

He watched her closely. “And this sanctuary… where is it?”

She gave a small, wry smile. “I can’t tell you.”

“You can’t—? What in the hells does that mean?”

“I had the high cleric there wipe the memory from my mind.”

Astarion gaped. “Why would you ever agree to that?”

“Because I asked for it,” she said simply. “I’ve pulled secrets from too many minds to trust that mine couldn’t be cracked. If someone came for me, wanted to know… better I didn’t.”

His look darkened, sharp with suspicion. “And if this cleric did other things while poking around in there? Rearranged more than your memories?”

Eleyna let out a dry, startled laugh. “Ilmater wouldn’t have let anyone of his harm me.”

“How do you know that?”

She met his gaze head-on, steady and quiet. “Because I trust him. He’s the only one I trust.”

They stayed like that for a breath, caught in something unspoken. Then Astarion scoffed, glancing away with a brittle smile.

“So, what is this miraculous hidden sanctuary?”

“It’s called the House of Mercy. Somewhere along the Sword Coast, but no one knows precisely where — that’s its strength. Hidden from scrying, from devils, from vampires. Even from meddling gods.”

He raised a hand, mouth twisting. “Darling, I hate to break it to you, but I am a vampire.”

“You’ll pass with me. Don’t worry.”

His eyes narrowed, suspicious. “And how precisely do you know that?”

She gave him a small, tired grin. “I just do. Can’t you trust me on this, at least once?”

He was silent, then let out a breathy laugh, fangs flashing. “Well. Either we dance with liches, or we trust your faceless, memory-locked temple of suffering. What delightful choices we have ahead.”

She only shrugged lightly. “We’ll decide once we reach the north of the Troll Hills. One step at a time.”

“Marvellous,” he drawled, falling into step beside her, voice thick with dry humour. “And here I was afraid this journey might grow dull.”

Eleyna gave him a sideways look, eyes warm despite the exhaustion.

“With me, 'darling', you’re in absolutely no danger of that.”

---

Later, when her body had nothing left to argue with. The ache in her shoulder, the bruises at her ribs, the subtle churn of magic half-burnt in her veins — all of it blurred into a single low hum.

She let her eyes close. Let her mind slip into that old brittle discipline. Breathe. Walk the circle. Step away from the body, into the quiet roads inside.

And for once — gods, for the first time in days — it worked.

She tranced. Properly tranced. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. Long enough that her thoughts grew soft, chasing phantom shapes through some moonlit grove that smelled faintly of cool stone and summer air. She almost thought she heard laughter there, low and bright and half-familiar — like the ghost of a life she might have had.

Then the world lurched.

Cold flooded my lungs — so sudden and sharp it was like swallowing ice splinters. The moonlit grove shattered, twisting into something jagged and wrong. Silver leaves blackened before my eyes, curling under the weight of slick, pulsing vines that crept across the ground, over the trunks, strangling everything bright. Their thorns scraped at my ankles, biting into flesh I could no longer quite feel.

At the center of it all stood a shape. Too tall. Too thin. Its shoulders were draped in something that might once have been robes, but they hung like rotted curtains. Its face was hidden behind a drifting veil of ash that poured steadily from where its crown should have been, spilling down in ghostly rivulets that caught on the thorns.

Then it raised a hand, and the ash sloughed away in a silent torrent.

Beneath it was nothing. Just hollow sockets where eyes should be, yawning pits of dark that wept some deeper, older blackness. A mouth carved into a void, lips neither open nor closed but forever on the verge of consuming.

“Do you even know whose will you carry?” it asked me.

The voice was made of smoke. It didn’t pass through my ears so much as swirl inside my skull, curling through every brittle crack, whispering secrets in tongues I almost understood.

I tried to answer. My throat clenched, strangling on breath that wouldn’t come. My tongue felt heavy, glued to the roof of my mouth by frost.

I couldn’t move. Couldn’t even shiver.

The thing leaned closer. Its breath hit me like winter, but fouler — the cold of dead lakes under moonless skies, laced with rot that crawled through my sinuses, settled behind my eyes. I wanted to retch but couldn’t even manage that.

“Would you bleed for him still?” it breathed, the words soft as a caress. “Even knowing what he will take in the end?”

Somewhere inside me, something howled. I tried to turn, to claw my way back through the tangle, but the vines surged up, coiling around my legs, my waist, my ribs. Thorns pierced my skin, sinking in deep, greedy.

The figure reached out. Its hand was wrong — more a lattice of bone and shadow than any true flesh. Long, skeletal fingers brushed my cheek.

And I felt it. Something inside me being drawn out. A soft, pitiful whimper spilled from my lips before I could choke it down. I heard my own voice, distant and raw, whispering:

Not yet. Please. Not yet.

Then — fire. Blinding, searing, ripping through me in a single incandescent snap. It tore everything away: the grove, the vines, the figure with its hollow eyes. It left me gasping, skin fever-hot and throat raw.

And in the echo of that ruin, I heard it — that same voice, curling around me like black silk.

No one. You are so much like him.

jolted awake.

My lungs seized, trying to suck down air as though I’d been drowning. The cave staggered into place around me in clumsy fragments — rough stone walls, the dying glow of our small fire, the faint crackle and pop that sounded unnervingly like bones.

Across from me, Astarion sat — still in trance, still and impossibly poised. Yet I knew with a certainty that made my skin crawl that he was aware of me. Watching in that way he did even when he pretended not to be. Even now, his presence pressed against my senses, cold and careful, like the breath of some patient hunter waiting for a wounded thing to flee.

I pulled the cloaks tighter around my shoulders. Forced myself to inhale, to exhale, each breath a ragged scrape against my ribs. It took far too long to remember how to keep doing it.

It wasn’t until that first true, shuddering breath rattled out of me that I realized my hands were shaking. Tiny tremors that made the fabric jump, fingertips pale and bloodless against the dark wool.

I stared at them for a long moment, teeth clenched so hard my jaw ached. Then I folded them into the folds of the cloak, hid them in the warmth he’d left behind. Pretended it was only the cold that made me tremble.

The taste of winter rot still clung to the back of my tongue. And somewhere in the hollow of my chest, that last question uncoiled again, soft as rot in old wood.

Would you bleed for him still?

I didn’t have the answer. I wasn’t sure I wanted to find it.

---

She started working on the dossier almost the moment she finished packing up camp. The faint lines of fatigue hadn’t even eased from around her eyes. By the time Astarion emerged from his trance — movements slow and feline, eyes still half-veiled by that silvery fog of undeath — she had already finished reading The Curse of the Vampyr, neatly cataloguing every fragment of useful information in cramped, orderly script along the margins of her battered notebook.

When he finally stirred, stretching with a quiet crack of his shoulders, his gaze fell on her — and immediately darkened.

“You didn’t rest again.”

She didn’t even glance up. “I did. Woke up, finished some reading,” she said, flicking the thin book’s spine with her nail.

“How was it?”

“Fully disappointing,” she said flatly. “A lot of fluff for very little substance. I’ve already flagged several inaccuracies — outdated superstitions, contradictory anecdotes. Mostly fearmongering, as these texts tend to be. But it’s a start. At least it gives us a map of common beliefs to work against.”

He didn’t answer right away. Just stood there, red eyes narrowed, studying her like he could see every frayed edge she was trying to hide. There was worry there, muted by the trance’s lingering stillness, but unmistakable.

So she did what she always did. Pretended it was nothing.

By the time the sun dipped behind the rugged slopes and the air sharpened with the promise of frost, she was laying out her spell components for the night’s march. They were high now, above most of the treeline, where only twisted shrubs clung stubbornly to life. The ground was littered with jagged scree and pale lichen, every step sending loose stones skittering into dark gullies. The wind cut cruelly across the exposed ridges, sharp with pine and distant snowmelt.

She found a hollow in the lee of a granite outcrop and sank to her knees. Her breath ghosted white as she laid out her small arsenal — chalk, knotted threads, a vial of her own hair bound with silver wire. Her dagger traced precise lines into the thin dusting of snow, carving tight circles that pulsed faintly where magic bit into the weave.

Astarion stood just behind her, arms crossed, cloak snapping in the wind. His expression was unreadable, shadows pooled around his eyes.

She began with the usual protections — Nondetection, then Death Ward. Her fingers mapped the glyphs across his forearms and throat, careful, practiced. The magic stung at her fingertips, thin and reedy. It wouldn’t hold as long this time. She felt it in her bones — like hauling up buckets from a half-dry well.

Still. It was habit. A gesture. A prayer hidden beneath neat layers of protocol.

Then her hand closed around her holy symbol — the carved pendant of bound hands, dark wood warm against her skin. The memory of fire slithered up her spine. That vision — that thing in the dark grove — still left phantom thorns lodged in her chest.

So she whispered the incantation for Warding Bond. The chain flared hot, then cold. Power threaded from her heart to his — invisible, but real. A subtle weight settled between them, a faint tightness in her ribs. His protection, anchored by her own lifeblood.

When she opened her eyes, Astarion was watching her, head tilted, fangs just peeking between parted lips. “That was different.”

“Just a precaution,” she said.

“What kind?”

“Guess.”

“Oh gods,” he drawled, pressing a hand to his chest in mock horror. “Are you tracking my mood now? Plotting how quickly I spiral into delicious angst?”

“No. All the diviners in Faerûn couldn’t untangle that snarl.”

A soft, low laugh slipped from him — almost enough to warm the frozen air. “I’m afraid to ask.”

“Then don’t.”

He narrowed his eyes, studying her. “That was a protection spell, wasn’t it?”

“Mm.” She didn’t look up, busy rolling the spare blanket.

“You don’t have to use magic on me, you know,” he said, quieter now. “I’m not so fragile anymore.”

“That’s not why I used it.”

“Then why?” His voice was careful. Almost too careful.

She looked at him over her shoulder, the wind tugging strands of hair across her mouth. “Because I promised I wouldn’t let him take you back.”

His breath caught — not a sound, just a tiny stillness that rang louder than words. His eyes burned bright, narrowed against the dusk. Then he looked away, jaw tight, like he wanted to argue but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it.

They climbed the final rise in silence, following a ragged switchback that wound through splintered boulders and half-frozen streams. Dawn was only a rumor behind thin clouds, smearing the east with bruised silver. The peaks caught what little light there was and shattered it down in cold lances, gilding snowcaps and leaving the valleys drowned in shadow.

Elenya’s joints screamed with every step. The cold had sunk deep now, gnawing at her bruises, her ribs, the old scar at her shoulder. Her breath rasped shallow — more frost than air.

Astarion glanced back every so often, pale and impossibly graceful even on the treacherous ground. “You’re limping again.”

“It’s nothing,” she muttered.

“It’s always ‘nothing’ with you. Until it’s something I have to carry.”

“You wouldn’t carry me.”

A wicked grin cracked across his mouth, though his eyes stayed too serious. “Oh, I absolutely would. And I’d complain the entire time. Make sure it was your most humiliating journey yet.”

She almost laughed. Almost. But her legs trembled too much, so she focused on the next rock, the next breath.

They didn’t have hours to waste. Just a shallow ledge beneath a jut of stone, half-sheltered from the worst of the wind. The ground was hard and littered with tiny shards that bit into her palms when she sat. Better than nothing.

She exhaled slowly, willing her heart to steady. The air still burned in her chest, sharp as knives. Her legs ached down to the bone.

Astarion prowled the ledge’s edge, peering down the slope with narrowed eyes. Watching for threats — or maybe just giving himself something to look at that wasn’t her.

She fished through her pouch. Crushed a packet of dried root between her fingers and breathed deep. The smell was harsh, bitter — almost medicinal — but it eased the tightness in her chest. An old habit. The scent cut through fear, grounded her.

When she looked up, he was watching her with an unreadable expression.

“What?” she rasped.

He lifted a pale eyebrow. “I was just contemplating how you always smell like one botched apothecary experiment away from permanent nose damage.”

She let out a small, exhausted laugh — more a huff. “Says the man who reeks of stale blood half the time.”

His mouth curved. “At least that’s charming in its own horrifying way.”

She rolled her eyes. But there was no bite.

They fell into fragile quiet. She leaned back against the stone, closed her eyes. Let the wind howl over the ridge. Grit occasionally skittered down, ticking against her boots. Somewhere far off, an eagle gave a single, echoing cry.

Astarion settled nearby. Not close enough to touch, but close enough that she felt the faint cool of him brushing her skin. It steadied her. Like leaning against a wall that wouldn’t give way.

Eventually he spoke, voice low, nearly lost to the wind. “Do you ever think about what we’ll do when all this is over?”

Her eyes cracked open. She considered lying, but she was too tired. “Not really. I try not to look that far ahead.”

“Mmm.” His mouth twisted faintly. “Probably wise. I just… wonder if I’d even know what to do with the quiet. With peace.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said, gently, and he almost laughed.

“No, darling. I suppose I wouldn’t.” A beat. Then, softer: “But maybe you would. You seem the type to find some crumbling tower and fill it with books. Or curses.”

“Or corpses,” she muttered.

He grinned. “Or that. As long as it’s scenic.”

Silence again. Her head drooped against the stone. Not sleep — just a fragile edge of rest. Enough to calm her pulse. Enough to let the ringing in her ears fade.

Astarion didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. But now and then his gaze flicked to her, sharp and troubled, before slipping away again. Watching for danger — outside, or inside.

Eventually she stirred. Flexed her fingers until the numbness ebbed. “Come on,” she rasped. “The sooner we keep moving, the sooner we find real shelter.”

“Eager to get back to nearly dying? How very you.”

She didn’t bother with a retort. Just smirked faintly, pushed herself upright, and gave him a look that said don’t lag behind.

His eyes softened by a fraction. Then he rose with that effortless, predatory grace, adjusted his cloak, and fell into step beside her.

Together they stepped out into the biting wind once more. The world waited — vast, cold, unkind. But for now, they faced it shoulder to shoulder. And just for this stretch of the trail, that was enough.

---

They had been traveling for nearly a moon now. If this kept up, she thought, soon they would reach the hills near the Warlock’s Crypt. From there, they could either risk a phantom steed to attempt infiltration or pick their way through the tunnels running under the old Trading Way, all the way to Daggerford. Neither route was safe. But at least they were choices.

Then—she stopped.

Her hand lifted slightly, only two fingers twitching. A silent warning.

“We’re being watched,” she murmured, voice barely more than breath.

Astarion froze beside her. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t question. Just listened, sharp as a blade.

He inhaled deeply, nostrils flaring like a bloodhound catching a scent. The motion was delicate but purposeful, almost eerie against the rugged backdrop.

“Powdered ironvine,” he hissed. His lip curled. “Gur. I’d know that stench anywhere.”

Elenya scanned the snow around them. The ground was hard-crusted, sparkling under the moon, unbroken by tracks. No shapes on the ridges above. No clear pursuit.

Yet.

“They’re far,” Astarion added, his red eyes flickering to a faint glow. “But closer than I like.”

Her gaze raked the treeline—gnarled evergreens twisted by wind and frost, dark green nearly black under the night sky. A branch moved wrong. A shimmer. Too still for a star.

She followed the line. A hawk. Circling, not diving. Watching.

A scout.

“Familiar,” she breathed. “Someone’s scrying through it.”

Astarion’s jaw tensed. “We’re being tracked.”

“Then we run.”

And they did.

She led him off the cut path, plunging into a slash of fractured stone she half-remembered from old caravan maps—a forgotten switchback that merchants had abandoned after too many wagons lost wheel or axle and tumbled into ruin.

It zigzagged down the mountainside in narrow scrapes, carved by centuries of runoff. Half-overgrown with brambles and low, creeping juniper that clawed at her legs. Loose stones skittered underfoot. Every misstep threatened to send them crashing through frozen underbrush and down sharp embankments. Elenya’s breath tore at her throat, raw with cold, tasting of metal and pine sap.

Astarion moved beside her effortlessly. Even uphill, even wounded, he loped like a wolf—sure-footed, almost taunting the rocks to slip. The climb was nothing to him. His cloak snapped around his ankles, pale hair catching stray moonlight like a banner.

They didn’t speak. Didn’t breathe more than they had to.

It worked.

Two hours later, the hawk was gone—vanished into the dark swirl of clouds above. The stench of ironvine faded to a ghost on the wind.

They finally stopped at a jagged outcropping—stone jutting out in the shape of a yawning mouth, mossy even under patchy drifts of snow. Elenya ducked beneath its looming teeth, pulling Astarion in after her.

A narrow cave opened there, cool breath flowing out to meet them. Damp, rich with the scent of old earth and distant rot. The walls glistened with fine sheets of condensation. Somewhere deep inside, water dripped, an echo soft but endless.

“Surface dwellers don’t come here,” she said, voice hushed. “Not on purpose.”

Astarion didn’t answer. But the way he exhaled—a small, unguarded slack of his shoulders—said enough. Even if his face refused to admit it.

Elenya dropped to the gritty floor, the cold stone biting through her leathers. Her breath shivered. Her hands shook as she traced sigils for Alarm, dust scraping beneath her fingernails. She laid down the weave with painful precision, though the magic clung to her reluctantly, dragging like wet cloth.

Her whole body burned. She’d pushed too far again. Spent too much again. The edges of her spellbook seemed to grow heavier by the day, its bindings biting into her shoulder like guilt.

Still, she cast Nondetection. Still whispered Death Ward.

It didn’t matter that she was dizzy. Didn’t matter that her skin felt clammy, too tight over aching bones.

He needed protection. She’d promised.

And she kept her promises.

Always.

Even when she shouldn’t.

He noticed. Of course he did. He always noticed.

“You’re pale,” he said at last. His voice was almost soft, but it failed to hide the strain. “More than usual.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.”

“We’re safe.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

She was too tired to argue, too hollow to spin lies that sounded right. Her shoulder throbbed from an old wound they hadn’t bothered to fully close. Her ribs ached with each breath, bruised by days of rough travel.

She sat back against the cold wall, rummaged for rations. The dried bread tasted like dust and old salt. Her stomach twisted at it. She forced each bite down with mechanical determination.

Then it happened—a brief sway, a flicker of dark across her vision. The cave seemed to tilt under her, the world dipping. She pressed her eyes shut, caught herself against the wall with a small gasp.

Just a dizzy spell. Nothing more.

But Astarion was there in an instant, cold fingers brushing her wrist. “You’re sick.”

“Just tired.”

“You’re burning.”

“I’ve had worse fevers.”

“You let me feed not long ago.”

“Yes.”

“And now you’re—”

She looked at him, weary rather than stern. Her voice was barely above a whisper. “You’re not why I’m sick, Astarion. I told you, I recovered the blood. This is just… tiredness. No rest, constant travel. Too much magic. This is not on you.”

That stopped him. He pulled back, blinking. For a heartbeat, his expression gentled, soft with something dangerously close to worry. Then it shuttered again, replaced by his usual cool scorn. He dropped down beside her, close enough that she felt the faint chill of his skin, but didn’t say anything more.

Together, they watched the cave wall. Watched drops of water snake down green-veined stone. Watched the world ripple with damp breath.

She shifted closer, not quite touching him, but close enough to steal a thin comfort from his presence. Her eyes fell half-closed, her pulse slowing just enough.

The mountain above them rumbled in the dark, a low groan of settling rock. Outside, the wind clawed past the mouth of the cave, dragging with it needles of snow that stung her cheeks.

Here, in this damp hollow far from any road, the world felt suspended — raw and secret, as if they were the last two souls left to haunt it.

Notes:

This chapter turned into an absolute monster — more than 30k of negotiation, uncomfortable truths, and cold shoulders that mean far more than they admit.

Thank you for reading their slow, messy attempts at… something like caring. Comments and kudos feed my cold undead heart (and motivate me to keep writing these two disaster creatures).

Chapter 21: Mine Until

Summary:

He told himself it was survival. Just another clever parasite clinging to the warmth that fed it. But in the hush between breaths, something uglier, older, more desperate unfurled.

Notes:

Vampiric hunger is not romantic here. It’s sharp, animal, sometimes cruel. That’s the point

Astarion POV

---

I didn’t rest.

But I tranced.

Or tried.

It was a shallow, stuttering thing — more habit than necessity. My mind refused to still itself. Thoughts crawled over each other like frantic insects, legs tangling, carapaces cracking, spilling memory through the gaps. I let it happen. Better that than sit in the dark cave alone, only the cold company of myself for solace.

When I finally stirred — minutes, hours later, who could say — she was still there.

Sleeping.

Truly sleeping, not trancing.

Her breath rose and fell in slow, uneasy swells. One hand twitched, fingers curling as though reaching for something just beyond her grasp. Her brow knotted tight, fine lines etching across her face.

Even her dreams seemed to deny her any peace.

It was… fascinating.

That’s the easiest word for it, though it barely brushed the surface.

Watching her like this — defenseless.

Mortal. All the fragility laid bare.

It made me itch. Made something low and old in me shift, stretch awake.

She flinched suddenly, some new nightmare clawing up her spine again.

What could be hunting her to this extent.

My fangs pressed against my tongue, that ancient instinct snarling to the surface. Her scent — faded from fever and exhaustion — still carried a ghost of copper.

It shouldn’t be calling to me.

Not with such force.

But of course it did.

I should have looked away. Should have turned to the ledgers we’d stolen, or that Zhentarim signet, or the endless churn of half-formed plans to keep us alive another week.
I didn’t.

Instead, I watched her.

Watched how her breath caught, how her cheeks stayed flushed and damp even in the cold. Every so often, her body twitched like her dreams were fighting back. She looked wretched. Small. Frail.

And I felt… wonderful.

There it was — the rot at the heart of me. The truth, stark and unbeautiful. My senses were knifepoint sharp, so much sharper than any mortal could be. I could hear the snow outside sighing under its own weight, feel the pulse of the fire as it snapped, each crack a small drumbeat I could count between her heart’s slower rhythm. Her pulse whispered to me even now — steady, faint, alive.

The ghost of her blood still lingered on my tongue.

Not just its taste. Its clarity. Its promise.
Cazador had starved us all into meekness, feeding on vermin was permission, a privilege to be doled out like scraps.

But her blood scorched like a wildfire burning a dead field swarmed with invasive weeds. It purified, destroyed, awoke and revived all the same.

It made me realize that I have never truly fed a single time in my undeath.
Never,

Never like this.

Never from someone.

Never from someone who offered it.

Like it was the most logical course of action.

She had offered,

She had fed me.

Her blood ….

Remade me

I was stronger now.

Well, It certainly was not just because of her blood.

The regular feeding certainly helped. My mind supplied.

But something in me, deep down ugly and twisted refused to acknowledge anything I tasted other than her blood as feeding.

Not even the half-elf.

I thought it was the same with all thinking creatures but, I was wrong.

While that idiot blood has been delectable. 

It just wasn't the same.

It may not be only her blood that made me stronger, but it DID make me too sharp and jiggered to ever be easy to chain. Too rapid to ever truly kneel.

That was the danger.
That was the thrill.

Because I remembered something else, too — I used to have a will.

Not just the will to survive. A will to be me.

To not be his.

She muttered in her sleep, voice low and wrecked.

A name? maybe, or maybe a curse in some obscure guttural voice she unearthed in some monster lair.

Her lips parted on a thin breath, the hand not tucked beneath her head flexing weakly against the stone, nails catching.

I have severely miscalculated the situation until now.
I could see it now crystal clear.

My mind has been broken. Hollowed and replaced by hunger and instinct. Barely a person.

I already thoughts so after feeding on her. But the last two days cemented the thought. 

I had to give it to the master. He had broken me with the tomb.

Truly broke me.

I do not know what would have happened to Astarion if I haven’t been unearthed. Or worse if I have been unearthed by him.

I spent a hundred and sixty years praying for a chance at escaping.

A year praying for release.

When it came, I spat at it.  Thrashed at it.

Was almost forced to seize it by her patience and compassion.

That alone made her a saint

Even my attempt at control of the situation were embarrassing at best.

Of course she saw right through them.

I was operating as if she was a normal person.  

Tried shallow seduction and threats.

How ridiculous in retrospect.

What type od normal person unearth a starved vampire on a regular night without knowing a thing about them.

Even my latest plans to manipulate her into pleasure. To appear grateful and useful appear to be misguided. 

Less so than the early attempts but misguided nonetheless. 

She does not trust me with her life because I am special. She just doesn't value her life much.

Not really. Not truly. 

She is not brave, she is fearless.

She wants to be relied on. She doesn't know how to rely on. Usefulness is something she crave to give not to receive.

So what next?

This was how I escaped the master or died trying. The taste of her blood solidified this certainty.

No going back.

I would live or die free.

Mouth still remembering her blood.

The taste of freedom.

I need to get in the fucking game. Because I almost lost her.

What if it ended?

What if she left?

The thought opened under my feet like a sinkhole. Cold, fathomless. I could see it already — her body crumpled somewhere in a dark ravine, that stubborn, maddening light gone. Her blood thick with death, turning sour in the veins. Or waking up and not finding her in her bedroll. Never to be seen again.

I’d be alone.

No — worse. I’d be alone knowing what it felt like not to be. Knowing there’d been someone who hadn’t took, hadn’t struck, used nor desired me. Who pressed her brow to mine and didn’t tremble. Who saw my monstrosity and then stayed anyway. Who gave me their blood. Gave me everything. 

My fangs scraped hard against my lip. Enough to draw blood.

Gods, what was I even doing?

Watching her sleep, waiting for her to wake and look at me in that bewildering way she sometimes did — like I was worth the ruin pumping through her veins.

Pathetic.

I leaned back, let my head thunk lightly against the cold cave wall, eyes tracing the delicate frost clawing its way across the ceiling.

And in that sour, thin place inside me, a thought whispered:
Please don’t leave.

Not yet. Not when I hadn’t decided what any of this was. Not when the thought of her slipping away — alone, empty, that promise to protect me outliving her own pulse — filled me with something disturbingly close to fear.

I settled in to wait.

Because apparently that’s who I was now — a vampire spawn waiting for his half-starved protector to wake.

What an absolute ruin she was making of me.

I spoke — just enough air to shape the words. A whisper against the stone.

“You really are the most ridiculous creature I’ve ever met.”

She didn’t stir.Even my latest plans to manipulate her into pleasure. 

“Not just the martyrdom. Or your bitter herbs and that appetite for rations no sane creature should tolerate.”

A pause. The fire’s light brushed her cheek, soft and uncertain.

“It’s the way you keep doing it. Feverish, drained, nearly collapsed. And then still, you give. Nondetection. Death Ward. Even now.”

A brittle laugh cracked free. It hurt, scraping its way up my throat. “I don’t understand you. Every time I think I might, you do something absurd. Something kind. And it ruins everything.”

The cave — as expected — had no reply.

“But for what it’s worth…” My voice faltered, fell to a hush so raw it barely existed. “If you die from all this… like a fool… I’ll drag you back just to kill you myself. I will bring you back to drain you myself. I swear it.”

Another silence. My pulse thrummed, uncertain, out of time with hers.

Then, so soft it was almost nothing:

“I don’t want to be alone again.”

I looked at her. At the faint crease in her brow, the way her dreams still fought her.

“I don’t want to be alone.”

And something twisted in me, ugly and cold. Pathetic. I’d survived solitude longer than she’d been alive. Let it warp me into something clever, calculating, cruel enough to endure.

So why did it feel like this — this fragile, ridiculous situation — mattered more than I thought it could?

Her words from last night gnawed at me.

She indeed sees through it all, the seduction. Just another performance, another glittering mask she called it.

And gods — was she right? That was the worst part. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anymore. It had been the truth for so long I couldn’t find the edges of it.

She doesn't think herself good enough to attract my interest.

Truth is I am interested enough. Maybe not in the way everyone is. But i want to know her. Secure her. 

Have her.

But when she asked how I could stomach it.

She saw too much.

Answer is I can’t, the idea of touching anyone again fills me with disgust.

But what choice do I have.

How does one gain control over another without hurting them. 

love and sex are the only cards I have.

I don’t know what it would be like if she had said yes.

Of course I’d wanted her dancing to my tune. Wanted her eyes on me. Wanted her choices to orbit me, not her broken god.

Her questions cut deep, but not like condemnation. No — she wasn’t judging me. She was just trying to understand.

And that stung more than any disgust ever could.

Why? Why did her quiet curiosity matter? Why did it not make me want to ripe her tongue for asking or gouge her eyes for seeing. Why did it feel like her seeing me — truly seeing me — was a sharper blade than any stake while still being the softest mercy of them all?

Why does she think herself so undesirable ? 

Why does she care about truly being desired? 

Does it really matter why I want to have her? 

Why does she say I am the one who would be hurt by this game.

I don’t understand this idiot. 

To the hells with it.

She needed to survive.

She had to.

Almost a month since she pulled me from that grave. A month of creeping over mountains, hiding from monsters, sharing stolen warmth by indifferent fires.

And I had never felt so alive. 

So confused.

I needed more if this.

What if she died? The thought persisted.

I swallowed hard, the taste of old stone and newer blood catching in my throat.

I didn’t want to think about it.
Didn’t want to admit that for the first time, the thought of losing someone felt like more than an inconvenience.

I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, head dropping into my hands. My nails dug lightly into my scalp — hoping the pain might scatter the worry, cut through the fog.

Then I looked back at her.
Slack with uneasy sleep.
As if she might slip away even now.

“I don’t want to be alone,” I whispered again, a little harder, like it might change shape if I forced it out enough times.

She will get better,
She has to.
She is just sick

Mortals are weak to diseases
She has been pushing. Too far, too much and too little rest.

She will wake up.

I needed to crack her open.
Keep her off balance so I wouldn’t be.
I couldn’t keep being the one staggering backward in this wretched dance.

She said she’d give me anything. Well, I needed something. 

Certainty, reassurance — proof that this was more than Ilmater’s charity project.

That I wasn’t just another divine errand. Another wounded hound to be pitied and patched up.

Because the truth — raw, cold, insistent — was clawing at me:

What if that was all I was to her?

Why did it matter to me? What else did I want to be?

So many desires I couldn’t understand.  

My instincts, honed under Cazador, wanted leverage. Wanted to be sure she needed me just as much as I did.

Why?

So I wouldn’t be the first to bleed. So she wouldn’t abandon me. 

What if her god disapproved of me? 

No! No, she wouldn't. She said she would never leave poeple in pain. And now i know she meant it. But, what if I wasn’t in pain? Wasn’t needing rescue. Then why the hell would I be needing her to begin with.

What more do I want?

I sat there a long while, watching the fire gutter and twist, shadows chasing themselves across her face. Her breathing stayed rough, catching now and then on some memory I couldn’t see. She looked fragile. Breakable. 

I had to watch her. What is something happened and her fever got worse.  It felt like she was mine to watch, mine to keep breathing.

That last thought startled me. Mine?
No, that wasn’t it — or it wasn’t supposed to be. I didn’t…But wasn’t that exactly what it was becoming?

Is that what I wanted? Is that why i was so irritated by the mercy she kept offering to wayward souls?

Because I wanted it to be mine

I tried to shrug it off, like a cloak too heavy on my shoulders. Surely it was simple. She was my lifeline, my protection, my only surety in this frostbitten wilderness. Of course, I wanted her alive. Of course, I was invested in her survival. Any clever parasite would be.

Yes, that's what it must be about. Needing her hands to heal my wounds or her spells to keep prying eyes at bay. It wasn't about her. Her stubborn will. Her steadiness. That absurd promise she’d made to keep me safe, even if it killed her. It wasn't because I wanted her to stay.

Maybe that's why it felt almost like possession. Not the soft, yielding sort of devotion mortals wrote tragic ballads about — nothing so sentimental. It was sharper, more coiled. Like something that had once kept me alive under Cazador’s rule was now curling around her instead. 

Every time she so much as swayed on her feet from fatigue, something in me bristled. As if the world had dared threaten a resource that belonged to me.

I would be a fool to think it was anything gentler. Wasn’t this exactly how Cazador taught us to guard our feeding grounds? Our precious lures? Ensure no one else touched them, keep them sweet and breathing and ours.

Really, who am I fooling here ?

I scowled, jaw tightening.

No — that wasn’t what this was. She wasn’t some trembling mortal I needed to soften before delivering to Cazador for Food. She was a blade in her own right, chipped though it might be. And yet…

I couldn’t help it. Couldn’t help the way I measured the shadows creeping near our cave, or how my ears tracked every branch break for a mile. Not for myself. For her. As if anyone or anything that dared to endanger her would be violating some unspoken boundary I hadn’t even known I’d set.

A boundary I did not understand myself.

If she knew how my thoughts tangled, would she run? Would she pity me? Or worse, would she keep offering that gentle understanding that burned like holy water in my veins? Gods, I didn’t even know if this was concern or some darker shape of ownership. The two felt nearly identical when you were made in Cazador’s shadow. Was I learning care? Or just repeating his lessons in a more palatable skin?

She murmured again in her sleep, rolling slightly toward me, cheek pressing into her folded arm. Vulnerable. Trusting. Not by choice — she was unconscious. But that didn’t matter to my monstrous instincts. They only cared that she lay there unguarded, and that was mine to watch over.

I dug my nails into my palm, forcing a faint sting of pain to keep my thoughts from spiraling.

Was this what caring felt like? A need to keep her close, to keep her breathing, to keep her herself — but also, unmistakably, to keep her mine? To keep her dependent on me in small ways, so I could believe I wasn’t the only one adrift?

I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore.

My whole life had been taught in the currency of leverage. Seduction, hunger, and ownership, the gaping void of powerlessness. Maybe this was how affection first rooted itself in a creature like me: tangled up with territorial instinct and thinly veiled fear. Was that monstrous?

Likely. 

I leaned my head back again, stared up at the frost-laced ceiling until my eyes burned.

She’d made me fragile in ways I couldn’t understand. I am too unstable. I hadn’t decided yet if I despised her for it or if it was the most exquisite cruelty I’d ever tasted.

But I did know this: if anything came for her now — god, devil, drow, even her own sanctimonious god — they’d have to rip through me first.

Because she was finally sleeping.

She was mine to keep alive until I decided otherwise.

---

She eventually woke.

A little gasp of breath, the soft shift of cloth, the faintest scrape of her boots on stone — and just like that, the cave wasn’t only mine anymore.

For one ridiculous instant, I was almost pleased. The hollow in my chest where panic had nested all night loosened, just slightly. Her eyes found me across the dying fire, tired but steady, and something inside me — something, cold, and usually indifferent — uncoiled by a fraction.

We were trapped until dusk. The sun too high, the snow outside too bright, glittering like knives. She didn’t complain. Neither did I.

Strange, another time, not so long ago, another place, I’d have clawed at the walls for the thought of being penned in. But now?

Now I almost liked it. Liked the hush of it all. Liked knowing she wasn’t running off to chase some half-baked crusade. Liked that for a few stolen hours, it was just the two of us, the crackling fire, and the brittle hush of winter beyond the stones.

She set about tending the small chores she could — adjusting packs, checking rations, scribbling lines into that battered book of hers. The quiet was companionable, unsettling in its comfort. I could hear every drag of her quill, the thoughtful little sighs she made when her mind snagged on a problem.

And I watched. Because, of course, I did. I was becoming quite practiced at it. Watching how she moved, how her shoulders bunched when she braced against a spike of pain. How she pressed her palm flat to her side and just breathed until it passed. How, when she forgot I was looking, her face went softer than I’d ever seen it — a fragile thing, touched by some distant grief.

Then, without warning, she closed the book and held it out to me. Her expression was carefully open. Inviting. Not pushing, not prodding — not yet.

“Ready to start engaging with this?” she asked.

I blinked at her. Then down to the pages.

Neat lists in her sharp hand. Columns of symptoms, little notes about hunger and thirst, scraps of speculation about how vampirism twisted the body. Observations of me. Careful, detached — almost clinical. And yet, somehow, I could see the undercurrent of worry threading through every line. The faint indent where her pen had pressed too hard. The little smudge where a hand had hovered, hesitated.

A different creature — a braver one, or perhaps simply a more honest monster — might’ve found it endearing. Proof that she cared enough to try to understand what exactly she’d dragged out of that grave. That she was trying to help.

But all I could see was the yawning promise of what it might unravel. The idea of cracking open the horror of what I was, letting her lay it out on parchment, dissect it, pity it, perhaps even recoil.

I have asked to be shown all of it.

I wanted to snarl at it. Wanted to snatch the book from her hands and hurl it into the fire. Better ash than the possibility of knowing too much.

I wasn’t ready to see it.

So instead, I did the one thing that felt honest.

“No,” I said. The word sat sour on my tongue. “Not yet.”

Her eyes didn’t narrow. Her mouth didn’t purse into some disappointed line. There was no judgment there at all — just a small nod, a quiet exhale, like she’d already prepared for this answer.

“That’s alright,” she said, so easily it made my throat tighten. “When you are.”

Just like that. No righteous speech, no coaxing. As if she genuinely meant to wait as long as I needed — as if my timeline mattered more than her curiosity, her god, her own caution.

Something hot and sharp twisted in my chest. Relief, of course — but also something close to fury.

Because how dare she make it that simple? How dare she give me space without punishment? Didn’t she understand that it would only make me cling tighter? That the more she offered without demand, the more tangled this became — until I couldn’t tell if what I wanted was her patience, her affection, or just the proof that I could still inspire devotion without a thrall’s collar.

I am already getting too tangled.

I think i am starting to understand that nothing binds harder than kindness with no strings attached.

I watched her settle back against her pack, book in her lap, and scratch another line of notes — as if my refusal hadn’t wounded her pride at all.

As it hadn’t delayed informations, i knew she wanted.

And I hated her for that, just a little.

Because it meant that when I was finally ready to look, to really look at what I was, I’d probably want her there beside me.

She turned away from me without a word, rummaging through her pack for fresh clothes — simple travel leathers, new bandages for habit’s sake, even though her wound had sealed a day ago.

I watched her go a few steps deeper into the cave, toward a shadowed corner where the stone dipped like a shallow bowl. Gave her a semblance of privacy, though not enough to stop me from tracking every breath.

Then she cast that little cantrip — prestidigitation — and the air changed.

Gods. Her scent unfurled all at once. Clean skin, the lingering ghost of fever, something sharper that had always been hers alone. Cave water, myrrh, Mint, Cold cedar. Juniper. Wilting lilac and night Orchids. Sun-warmed iron all heightened with the grim salt of sweat and blood whisked away, it bloomed, rich, fressweet rottingly sweet.

My mouth flooded.

I didn’t realize I was on my feet until the cold bit through my toes. My hands were already halfway to her shoulders, reaching without permission, without thought. Like some ghost had seized me. A puppet on strings, like those many nights when I had been made to stand obedient. 

Only there was no command this time. Only me.
And her.

She turned slightly, enough for me to glimpse the fragile curve of her throat, the flutter of her pulse just beneath skin still pink from recent mending. My fangs pressed against my lower lip, aching. That small animal part of me roared awake, slick and greedy.

Take. Sink in. Drink. Claim it so no one else can. 

I hovered behind her, breath shallow, the world blurring at the edges. Felt myself lean in, drawn like iron to a lodestone. My fingers hovered at her elbows, desperate to clutch, to hold her still. I could almost taste her already, phantom sweetness on my tongue. Pure. Alive. All for me.

It was nearly exhilaration, that rush. Not desire in any tender sense — not even just bloodlust — but a dark, snarling craving to possess. To drain her from the inside out. To prove something I couldn’t name.

I felt my fangs slide fully down, scraping against my lip until I tasted my own blood instead. It startled me enough to pause. A thin line of copper threaded across my tongue, sharp with my confusion.

What in the hells was I doing?

This wasn’t survival. I wasn’t even hungry. I had fed well these past days, once on her own willing offerings, no less. I should be sated. Content.

So why did every breath she took feel like it pulled me with it? Why did her heartbeat sound like a dare?

I stood there, half-shadowed, still as death, watching her tug and tie the last knots of her trousers into place. Her torso was still bare, if not for the tight linen breastband around her chest. Her scent was never stronger in my nostrils. My hands ached with the need to reach out — to steady her, or maybe to pin her. I couldn’t have said which. The thought of her slipping beyond my grasp made my insides twist with something far uglier than mere thirst.

I wanted her close. Wanted her dependent. Wanted her safe — but by my teeth, by my strength, by my will alone.

And I had no idea why.

Or perhaps I did. Deep down in the rot where Cazador’s lessons still lived, whispering that to keep something, you must own it. Chain it. Make sure it can never wander too far.

Gods, what was happening to me?

My tongue darted out, ran over one sharp fang. I forced myself a step back. Then another. The cold stone against my heels felt like absolution.

I needed space. Needed breath. Needed — somehow — to not ruin the fragile, ridiculous chance that was taking shape between us by giving in to every monstrous urge.

Her pulse sang into my ear,

Fuck!

Before I could even resist, my steps stopped, and my hand reached her left shoulder. I was about to yank her back, pin her to the cavern wall, and sink my fang in her neck.  It would have been worth it, I thought. But before I could, she glanced back over, her brow lifted in question.

"Are you alright, Astarion? You seem oddly quiet ?"

And just like that, the spell broke. My muscles unlocked. My claws uncurled. Shame flooded.

I managed a smirk. Something careless and shallow that hopefully masked the fever raging beneath my skin.

“Don’t mind me,” I drawled. “Just admiring from up close… with thoroughness.”

She huffed, rolled her eyes, and turned back to her pack — entirely unaware of how close I’d come to sinking my teeth into her simply because I could. Because some newly hatched greed had taken hold. 

"Well, do tell then, any complaints or insults about this travel suit then?" she asked lightly, hand deep in her pack. "You had many complaints about the Yuan-ti, and much to say about the human. But little was commented on the elf."

For a heartbeat, I just stared at her. The question felt harmless enough on its surface — playful, even. But it twisted under my ribs like a blade.

Ah, what an idiot I am.
Thinking of her like I could ever make her mine, when I don’t even know what “her” truly is.

I tried for levity. Smirked, though it sat crooked on my lips. "Oh, I do enjoy this form quite a bit. But it could always be better."

Her grin sharpened. “Racist prick! Well, if we survive, you may see it again another time. But it won't be of much use in the mountain pass.”

Then her body began to shift. Her shoulders hunched and cracked outward. Feathers erupted in glossy ripples across her arms, neck, and down her spine. Her shoulder blades split first, then extended from her back, pushing back on her breastband until a pair of massive wings unfurled with a low, leathery sound, stretching wide enough to nearly brush the cavern walls. Her head snapped forward, narrowing, eyes growing round and predatory, still that stormy ocean blue fogged gaze. Talons curled from her fingers, digging slight furrows in the stone.

An aarakocra.

My jaw went slack. I couldn’t have hidden it if I tried.

This wasn’t some mundane transmutation, it wasn’t just shapeshifting with clever rearrangement of bone and skin. This was an entirely new creature; she made wings of her shoulder blades and now stood there preening as if this were the most natural thing in the world.

Gods above and below. What are you?

She gave me a faintly smug tilt of her newly avian head, like she enjoyed my astonishment. Then, with a stretch that rattled my already frayed composure, she tucked her wings tight to her back and clicked her beak in something suspiciously close to amusement.

"Problem,' darling'? Not liking this one as well?" Her voice was the same. Almost. Just a bit breathier, threaded through with a trill that raised the fine hairs on my arms.

"Not at all," I managed after a moment, swallowing hard. "Merely... appreciating the versatility."

She laughed. A sound, bright, and reckless that bounced around the cavern walls, leaving my skin prickling in its wake. 

And something dark in me twisted tight. Because I realized with a kind of slow, creeping horror that I wanted to own this too. This strangeness. This hidden, shifting wildness. I wanted it turned toward me, for me — like some treasure hoarded under my claws.

Not just because it was useful, though gods knew it would be. But because it was another secret facet I hadn’t earned, hadn’t even known to want. And it made something vicious coil low in my belly, whispering that if I couldn’t have it, then no one else should either. “You’re full of surprises, aren’t you?” I drawled, though it scraped a little coming out — too hoarse, too raw. “How do people around you even keep track of all the lovely changes?”

It was meant to be teasing. Smooth, effortless. But it fractured on my tongue, cracked at the edges by something darker I didn’t care to name.

Her head jerked slightly, feathers ruffling, and for the first time since this ridiculous little display began, her playfulness slipped. Those round eyes went startled, then cold and detached again.

“They don’t,” she said simply.

It wasn’t even defensive. Just… matter-of-fact. Like telling me the weather.

My brow creased. “They don’t?”

“I told you,” she went on, voice low, eyes fixed on mine as if measuring something I couldn’t see. “Most people don’t take it well when they learn. So they leave. And the rest?” A faint, bitter tilt of her head. “They only know one face.”

Something in me — something sly and mean, older than any genuine affection—preened at that.

Better.

Good.

Let them all stay ignorant. Let this shifting, dazzling secret be mine alone to watch unfold. My claws scraped lightly against my palms, the small bite of it an anchor. I didn’t even realize they’d slid free again until I felt the sting.

Gods, what was wrong with me?

There was something snarling and raw. Something that delighted at the thought that no one else had seen her like this — this riot of colors and bones and wings. That if I clawed deep enough, if I stayed close enough, I might be the only one who ever did.

It was a selfishness so profound it startled even me.

She tilted her feathered head again, gaze raking over me. I half-feared — half-hoped — she’d see the ugliness twisting under my skin. That she’d flinch back and spare me the confusion clawing up my throat. But her eyes only narrowed, thoughtful, as if I were the puzzle here.

My fangs gave a faint pulse, eager, though for what I couldn’t even say.

I took a breath that didn’t quite steady me. “I wonder what the full extent of your shifting is, making your own wings is quite impressive,” I mused, forcing my tone into something cool, analytical — “Can you only take other faces, or can you… Modify them as well?”

Her beak parted in what had to be a grin. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Gods damn it, I would. I wanted to know everything. Every lie, every mask, every truth she tucked beneath her skin. Wanted to drag them all into the light — not to understand. But to possess. To have them catalogued, pinned neatly in place so they could never turn on me. So she could never turn on me.

It was absurd. Pathetic. I didn’t even know who she was. Not really. Didn’t know if there was a true face under all those shifting skins, or if it was all just mutable shadow. And yet I wanted it all the same.

She startled me out of it — my ugly, circling thoughts — with a quiet, almost embarrassed sound.

“Sorry.”

That single, soft word landed strangely. I blinked at her. “Sorry?” I echoed, my voice thin and slightly hoarse.

Her mouth tugged sideways, the faintest ghost of a wry smile. “For worrying you.”

I nearly laughed. The sheer absurdity of it — as if I was the one in need of careful handling. As if I weren’t the killer here, standing taut and greedy, half a heartbeat from pinning her against the cavern wall just to taste the thrum of her blood.

“Worry me?” I tried for something light, but it tangled in my throat, came out strained. “Darling, what on earth makes you think you—”

She cut me off with a look. Not a glare — nothing harsh. Just a quiet, steady regard that seemed to see more than it should. Those storm-ocean eyes, still the same in every shape she wore, narrowed faintly.

“You didn’t rest,” she said. Simple. Fact. “You may have tranced a bit, but not really rested. You were on edge the whole night. Even now… You keep looking at me like I might crack apart.”

My mouth went dry. I wanted to deny it. Wanted to mock her for her presumption, but the words refused to form. Because she was right. And I just realized it.

I had watched all night, terrified in some wordless way that she wouldn’t wake again. That I’d find myself alone in this cave with nothing but the echo of her warmth and the sour scent of her cooling corpse. It stunned me to see that truth reflected in her eyes. That she’d noticed before I did. It mattered enough for her to say something and apologize for being sick.

She tilted her head, her feathers raffling. “I’m fine now,” she went on, gentler, like she was trying to soothe a startled animal. “Truly. Shifting so drastically is only possible when I am in good shape… it takes effort. So don't worry, and I am not sick anymore.”

I kept staring. Searching her face for cracks, for some sign that this was bravado — that her strength was just another illusion like those feathers and talons.

But her eyes were still the same fogged, stormy blue they’d been when I first met her. Shapeshifter or not, that hadn’t changed. Neither had the way they softened now, catching the dim firelight as if to offer me a bit of warmth I didn’t deserve.

I didn’t know what to do with it. So I did the first absurd thing that sprang to mind.

I reached out, slow and almost clumsy, and laid my palm atop her head. Her feathers were silky soft, warmer than I expected. She froze under my touch, a tiny hitch of breath escaping her.

“Don’t do it again, then,” I murmured. It was meant to come out teasing, playful — a gentle scold to disguise the raw note scraping through me. But it sounded too low, too rough, more plea than command. 

“Alright,” she said. Simply. As if it cost her nothing at all to give me this tiny promise.

I let my hand linger a moment longer, fingers curling lightly in her head, anchoring me to something I didn’t quite understand. Then I pulled back before I could make more of it — before I could give in to the feral, possessive urge to drag her close and keep her there.

She turned away to finish dressing, shoulders relaxing as if a small weight had been lifted. And I stood there in the cold hush of the cave, my hand still tingling, trying not to dwell on the realization clawing at me from the inside out.

---

She fussed with her pack for a moment more, talons clinking faintly over the leather straps. Then she drew out that component pouch— the one she used for spells that always seemed to taste of secrets.

Without a word, she stepped closer. Her wings mantled slightly, half-hiding us both from the cave’s mouth, feathers rustling in a hush that crawled over my skin.

Her talons brushed my cheek — so lightly I almost flinched — tracing a brief, intricate shape in the air near my temple. Then down to my heart. Her eyes narrowed, focused somewhere just beyond me.

“Nondetection,” she murmured. The faint shimmer of magic pooled against my skin, then vanished, leaving only a soft weight behind.

Her claws curled lightly around my wrist next. Another murmur, this time threaded with that odd lilting trill she used only when spellcasting. “Death Ward.” A second warmth sank into me, coiling tight in my chest.

Then — a hesitation. Her eyes flicked up to mine, stormwater blue and wary. For a breath, she seemed on the verge of saying something. Then she just inhaled, whispered a third, softer incantation.

The magic that threaded into me this time was… different. Not the clean edge of protective wards. Something older, stranger. It settled against my bones like cool ash.

I caught her hand before she could pull away. “Won't you tell me what that last one is, or do?” I asked, voice low, too rough.

Her feathers fluffed at the neck — a quick, defensive bristle — but she didn’t meet my gaze. “Just… something to help. Reduce the harm that may be done to you. Trust me.”

Trust her. Gods, that was the problem, wasn’t it?

I released her hand, felt her claws slip from my grip. The warmth of the spells lingered, thrumming faintly under my skin like new, borrowed heartbeats.

And as she turned away to repack her things, I stood there in the hush of the cave, trying not to think about how easily I was letting her layer these bindings over me.

Trying not to wonder — not yet—exactly whose leash they might prove to be.

We spoke of the path ahead, voices low over the last crackles of the fire. By dusk, we’d head north again — skirt the mountain chain until it softened into hills and tangled woods. A slower route, but safer. Or so we hoped.

Safer from beasts, perhaps. Not from men.

I couldn’t help myself. My mind kept clawing back to the shadows we’d glimpsed last night — that hawk, circling just beyond arrow’s reach, never quite committing to flight or descent. The bitter scent of ironvine clinging to the air like a curse. And that foul, unmistakable tang that always gave them away.

The damned Gurs.

My throat closed up. The words scraped out, raw and venom-laced.

“It must be him,” I rasped. “Who else would rouse Gurs and put them on our trail? He’s sent them to finish what Petras and Aurelia couldn’t.”

She tilted her feathered head at me — curious, sharp. Her hooked beak angled slightly as she narrowed her dark blue-ringed eyes. “That’s a strange theory. The Gurs have been hunted and displaced for generations by monsters and settlers alike. Vampires too. They’re prime targets because no one mourns their absence. Authorities look the other way. People call them thieves and scavengers, but they’re not mercenaries — they’re survivors. Many of them become monster hunters because that’s the only path left to them.”

“You know nothing of them!” The snarl tore free before I could stop it, hot and hateful, curling in my mouth like spoiled blood. “They’re parasites. Treacherous little carrion birds. They’d sell their own kin for a handful of silver.”

Her wings gave a sharp, curt shake — feathers rustling like an unimpressed sigh. Her beak clicked once.

“Really? Again with this shit, Astarion?” Her voice dropped, dry and flat. “Racial and ethnic prejudice is a bit rich coming from a vampire.”

I bared my teeth. “You don’t understand anything. You don’t fucking know them.”

She didn’t flinch. Only made a soft, low trill in her throat — a sound I’d come to recognize as her version of a sigh. It brushed the cave walls like a distant wind.

“Actually, I do,” she said. “I spent two winters with them in the Harpshield Ruins. That’s their winter gathering site. They’ve built wooden halls there now, raised palisades against the snow. I know their elders. I broke bread with them. Played music for their children. I think I know them better than most who cling to their cities and lock their doors at night.”

Her words struck like a slap. I blinked, stunned. My throat tightened. My hands had curled into claws against my knees without me realizing. Her feathers fluttered faintly — restless — as if she’d felt my shock radiate through the still air.

She continued, quieter now, taloned fingers gesturing lightly, catching threads of firelight in each movement. “Yes, I’ve been avoiding the Gur monster hunters — for caution’s sake. But I believe they can be reasoned with.”

I laughed, sharp and hollow, the sound scraping my ribs like broken glass. “Reasoned with? Gods, you’re naive.”

Her feathers lifted slightly — an avian tension that would’ve signaled danger in a beast. Her round eyes darkened, fixating on me with sudden intensity.

“Perhaps I am,” she said. “But I find it hard to believe that Gur monster hunters would work for a vampire lord. We don’t know anything. You saw a hawk and assumed a conspiracy. Maybe it was just a scout. Maybe they weren’t following us at all. They didn’t pursue. There’s nothing concrete tying them to Cazador. All you gave me was a pile of venom and xenophobia. I understand why you’d hate them — they hunt your kind. But that’s not what you said. You turned it into something else. Something uglier. Maybe I am naive, or maybe I just believe in giving people more chances to disprove my prejudice than you do.”

“Don’t you dare talk to me about unfounded prejudice, you bumbling fool. They’re the reason I was turned in the first fucking place! The reason I was enslaved and tortured for more than a century and a half!”

The roar cracked through the cavern like a whip, slamming into the stone with such force it echoed back, brittle and raw. For a fleeting moment, I almost wished it would bring the cave down around us — a righteous collapse to bury the memories, the rage I could never seem to quiet.

“They attacked me. Killed me over some petty squabble — left me bleeding out in the streets of Baldur’s Gate, choking on my own blood. Alone. Terrified. And they didn't even have the fucking mercy to finish the job before Cazador found me. I was a half-dead wretch, sprawled in a pool of filth and blood in the Lower City. He drained what little I had left, promised salvation with that charming lie of his… then made me his spawn.”

She went still.

Her wings, usually half-open in that guarded but regal posture, tucked tightly against her back. Her feathers smoothed down in a gesture that almost looked vulnerable — small, quiet, restrained. The silence stretched thin, vibrating with the weight of what I’d said.

Then, softly — achingly gently — she spoke. Her voice was a low trill, shaped by that alien throat, touched by a subtle rasp that should have sounded strange. But the words landed with devastating precision.

“I’m sorry.”

Two simple syllables. They should have sounded cold. Distant. And yet somehow they gutted me more deeply than any silver blade ever could. The urge to lash out, to spit something mocking and venomous in return, flared hot in my chest — but the words tangled and died before they reached my mouth.

I couldn’t protect myself with anger. Not from that.

She shifted, her talons scraping lightly against the stone floor, a soft rasp like chalk on slate. Then she lifted her head again and met my eyes — those storm-washed blues untouched by  transformation, steady and strange and achingly present.

“Maybe I’m underestimating your sire,” she said at last, her voice gentler now. The feathers along her cheeks gave a slight, visible shiver. “Or overestimating their grudge against vampires. Either way…” Her head tilted, her gaze pinning me with unnerving clarity. “I trust your judgment. If he found a way to convince Gurs to kill a civilian, it seems reasonable to infer he could convince them to drag down a spawn. If you think this is Cazador’s hand, I believe you.”

That… stunned me. More than argument, more than logic. She could have challenged me. She had the history, the experience. She could have pressed her view and insisted that her knowledge outweighed my suspicion. But she didn’t. She just… handed me trust. No resistance. No fight.

“Wait, what? What do you mean he found a way to convince Gurs to kill a civilian?” I asked, frowning. The pieces she referenced didn’t align — not with what I’d said.

“Isn’t that what you just said?” she replied, confused now.

“No, I said he found me after they attacked me,” I clarified, baffled by where the misunderstanding had even started.

“You said you were left bleeding out. That was what was killing you, right?” she asked, still puzzled. “Furthermore, you were in the Lower City?”

“Yes. What of it?” I replied, genuinely curious now.

“It wouldn’t have made sense for him to just find you by accident, then.” Her brow furrowed — or at least the avian equivalent. “Why would your attackers not finish the job? Why risk someone finding you and saving you? If someone had stepped in, the Gurs responsible would have been executed without trial. The Fist kills Gurs for lesser crimes at the gate all the time.”

She took a slow step closer, voice tightening with thought.

“Also… the speed at which someone dies from bleeding out depends heavily on the wound. If the injuries are serious enough to incapacitate you — major arteries, for example — you wouldn’t have had long. If your carotid artery had been cut, you’d have died in one to two minutes. A femoral artery? Two to five minutes. Even large venous injuries, like the jugular vein, kill in four to eight minutes. You wouldn’t have lingered long unless the wounds were intentionally chosen to keep you alive but incapacitated. Backstreet murderers don't have that knowledge, which means…”

She paused, her feathers bristling with unease.

“He would have had to find you immediately after the attack. Meaning he was already nearby when it happened. And that, frankly, doesn’t make any sense. Cazador Szarr is a known recluse among the nobility. He barely leaves his estate — certainly not by foot. And how many noble lords do you know who take midnight strolls through the Lower City?”

I felt cold creeping up my spine, but I didn’t stop her.

“If he was ‘hunting’… why take such a risk? What if someone saw him? Even if most wouldn’t recognize him, many would notice a noble of that stature sprawling on the street in the middle of the night. Why take that chance when he has people to fetch victims for him? And even if — if — he just happened to be passing through, he would’ve heard the fight way before seeing it. Why go look what happened there at all and risk being seen? Why not stay hidden or go on with his business?  he doesn't strike me as the altruist type. So why go toward a fight that has nothing to do with him? Why intervene at all, unless he planned it?”

She tilted her head again, deadly calm.

“It seems far more likely that he orchestrated or was involved in the attack — that he needed a way to break you. To earn your trust. And that turning you was always part of the plan. He could have charmed one or all of them to instigate the attack. Especially if you had bad prior history with your atrackers.”

My breath caught. That couldn’t be true. It was too much. Too cruel. Too calculated. But the logic — the terrifying, meticulous logic of it — clawed at my thoughts.

“Why would he want me?” I asked, barely above a whisper.

“I don’t know. But he did want you. He turned you, didn’t he? And he doesn’t just turn anyone. Six spawn in at least two centuries? That’s very selective. It's even less believable that he would just turn you opportunistically. Maybe he wanted you under his control for a reason. Maybe you were a threat. Maybe he needed something only you had. Who were you before he found you? How old were you? Were you nobility?”

Who was I?

If only I knew.

If only I hadn’t lost those pieces of myself across decades of servitude and silence. Her question struck deeper than I expected — a reminder of everything he hollowed out.

“I don’t remember much from before,” I murmured. “Even less since the tomb. I remember being a magistrate in Baldur’s Gate. Just turned thirty-nine when I died. Not long enough to become memorable. I think I was noble… but I don’t remember my family. Not clearly.”

She nodded slowly, almost thoughtfully, like she was solving a puzzle I couldn’t see.

“Then there are many reasons he could have wanted you. A magistrate holds authority. And for someone so young — by elven or human standards — to reach that position? That suggests one of three things: competence, cunning, or privilege. All of which could attract a vampire lord’s interest. Maybe it was a feud with your family. Maybe you were working on a ruling he didn’t want passed. Maybe you had a trait he valued in a spawn.”

Her gaze sharpened again.

“But one thing’s certain: it’s far too suspicious for him to accidentally just appear out of nowhere in the very narrow time window between your attack and death and just spontaneously decide to offer you immortality.”

I stared at her.

Not blinking. Not breathing. Not moving.

The cave felt colder now — not from wind or shadow, but from the awful, gnawing possibility blooming behind my ribs. A thread of logic, stretched taut and trembling, tying together all the loose fragments I’d buried. Things I’d refused to question. Things I couldn’t afford to.

“Do you truly think he arranged the attack?” I asked, my voice brittle.

“I think…” She paused — not from hesitation, but care, like she was laying each word down gently, sparing me their full weight. “I think the story of your turning seems improbable. Especially for someone like your Sire. But I do not know the man. I am just trying to deduce the situation from inferences. You tell me, Astarion. You were there. You spent one hundred and sixty years under his tyranny. You know him — you were victimized and abused by him. I trust your opinion on this. Between a convenient accident… and a calculated design… which seems more likely to you?”

The question didn’t accuse. It didn’t push. It simply settled in the silence between us — calm, damning, inescapable. And the truth of it hit me like slow-falling stones, each thought striking something deeper. I tried to shake it off — to scoff, to scoff even if it sounded hollow. To laugh, if only to chase the sound of it from my head. To call it paranoid. But my mind wouldn’t let go.

That does sound like something he would do. Awfully so, with his obsession with power over people.

I clutched at the memory like a starving dog, teeth sunk deep into a rotten bone.

The blood. The agony. The cold.

The silence.

The fear.

And then, he appeared like a miracle, a saviour. Didn't he look triumphant? No… not triumphant.

Expectant. 

Knew what to say and how to act. 

knew how to sooth.

Something small and battered inside me detonated.

Not a spark. Not a simmer. A full rupture — white-hot, searing, blinding in its clarity.

Rage. Not the kind I knew — not the soft, constant hum of bitterness or the venom I curled around like a blanket. No. This was pure. Unbridled. A wildfire rage that surged up from the depths of me like a scream I had been holding for over a century.

Even that had been a lie. My death. My pain. My desperate plea for life that night — all of it.

A fucking stage.

And I’d played the part perfectly. The grateful victim. clinging to the only hand that reached for me — not knowing the horror that will follow but also that it had been the same hand that slit my throat in the dark.

“I begged him to save me,” I said, not to her — to the echoing stone, to the bloody hands in my memory. “I thanked him when he offered. I meant it. All those years — I told myself that .....”

My fists clenched at my sides, trembling with the force of restraint I no longer cared to maintain.

“He made me thank him for orchestrating my execution.”
The last word cracked. Splintered. I barely heard it over the roaring in my ears.

I stood too fast, stone scraping underfoot. I didn’t remember moving, only that I couldn’t be still. Couldn’t sit in the ashes of that realization. The cave felt too small. Too quiet. Like it was collapsing inward — or maybe that was me.

My breath was shallow. My fangs had dropped without me noticing, the sharp points now pressed into the soft flesh of my lower lip. Every part of me buzzed with fury — not just at him, but at myself. For not seeing it. 

She hadn’t moved — not a feather, not a breath wasted. Just watching. Her feathers caught the firelight like snow kissed with veins of blue lightning, soft and cold and searing. She didn’t speak. Didn’t try to soothe me. She understood. I saw it in the stillness of her form, in the way her eyes met mine without flinching. She knew this kind of rage. The kind that came too late and too much and all at once.

Then, without a word, she reached into her pack and pulled out a scroll. She held it out between two talloned fingers. 
“A Silence spell,” she said quietly. “Lasts ten minutes.” Her voice remained calm, steady as she set it down on a flat stone, “I’ll wait for you outside. Join me when you’re done.”
And then she left.
The spell scroll waited where she left it. I stared at it, breath ragged, body shaking, 
A Permission.
to not be okay. Not to fix it.
But to break safely, where no one could hear. 

I broke the scroll's seal.
The silence fell like a blade.
No wind. No fire crackle. No breath. Just a hollow, crushing quiet that flattened the air around me. The sound of the world vanished — and with it, the last thread of control I’d been clinging to.

I let go.
I screamed.
Mouth wide, jaw clenched, body arched back — the kind of scream that had no voice, no witness, no restraint. The kind that could only exist in magic-muffled void, where nothing could escape. My whole body shook with it. My throat burned, my chest seized, and still I kept going — until the scream turned soundless and shapeless and senseless.

I tore and pinched at the stone with my hands, raking at the walls like they had betrayed me. Dust and grit filled the air, scraped my palms, lodged beneath my fingertips. I shattered a loose rock against the ground until it splintered in my hands — again, again, again, until the pain bloomed sharp and satisfying in my knuckles.

The fire spat coals beside me, unnoticed. I overturned the small pot she’d left near the flames, flung it across the space. It hit the far wall and cracked clean in two.

Still not enough.

I continued to break and rake every available thing in the empty cave. My mind was lost in the white fuzz of rage until I stumbled back toward the cave wall and collapsed against it, breathing ragged and open-mouthed, gasping in a silence that swallowed even that.

Stone pressed cool against my back. I slid to the ground slowly, every movement raw. My fingers were scraped. My knees bruised. My eyes burned from the tears I hadn’t felt fall.

And there — in that spell-bound silence, amidst the scattered ruin of my outburst — I sat.

Just a man.

Used.

And finally, furious enough to know it. I swallowed roughly, forcing down the bitter knot in my throat. 

I stood.

My movements were slow, deliberate. Stone scraped beneath my boots, and the cave’s silence — though no longer magical — still clung to me like ash.

Then I left.

The cold met me like a slap as I stepped outside, but I welcomed it. Let it bite at the cuts on my knuckles, sting the tears drying on my cheeks. Let it remind me I was still here. Still breathing.

She was waiting.

Just beyond the mouth of the cave, she stood at the edge of the rise, looking out across the vast, snow-drenched expanse of the mountain pass. Her silhouette was still, her feathers ruffling slightly in the wind — a sentinel shaped by sky and storm. She didn’t turn as I approached. She didn’t need to. She knew.

At the side of the cave mouth, laid my pack, fully sorted.
Closed.
Secured.

My gear — weapons, leather and cloak folded, prepared — laid neatly on top next to it with two healing potions were waiting for me.

She had touched everything I owned, everything she had given me and yet, I felt no violation. Only care. Quiet, unspoken care. The kind you don’t ask for. The kind you don’t always notice until it’s already been given.

I finished outfitting and drank the potions, I flexed my aching fingers once, then bent to lift my pack.
It felt heavier than usual.
Or maybe I was. Still, I slung it over my shoulder and straightened, exhaling into the wind.

Then joined her.

She didn’t speak.

The wind howled across the peaks. Snow drifted in thin, sharp spirals. Far below, the trail vanished into white mist, as if daring us to step forward and find what waited.

“…Thank you for helping me see,” I said, voice hoarse but steady.

She gave the faintest nod. Just once. Then turned, slow and certain, and began walking down the slope — the snow crunching beneath her boots like brittle parchment.

I followed.

By the time the sun finished its slow drowning behind the jagged peaks, the world had turned a bruised purple, streaks of colour bleeding down the slopes like spilled wine. The valleys and mountains drank it greedily, shadows pooling in their hollows until even the far trees seemed swallowed whole.

The cold thickened with every step, breathing across the back of my neck like some waiting thing. My breath fogged, each exhale a pale ghost that quickly vanished. The scent of pine was sharp and wet, laced with the faintest hint of frost. Underfoot, patches of old snow still clung to the stones, crunching under my boots, and the rocks glittered with delicate sheaths of ice that caught the last miserable light.

Above me, she flew.

Her wings were enormous — dark bands of blue and gray stretched wide, lifting her in slow, deliberate beats. Each downstroke stirred the air against my cheek. It would have been majestic if it hadn’t also felt like being shadowed by some ancient hunting bird. Her silhouette cut across the dying sky, banking and sweeping low over the ridges, head swivelling with every cautious tilt. Sharp eyes darted over every tangle of brush, every low rise that might cradle hidden teeth.

Once or twice, she called down to me in a low, rolling trill — something I was coming to understand as a warning. I would pause, hand at my dagger, listening with that thin, uncanny sense that had kept me alive for centuries. Nothing came. But still, I found myself glancing behind us too often, tracking shapes that might only have been the wind catching between the trees. Or maybe not. There was a silence in the woods that felt deliberate.

She never asked me to lead. Never suggested I scout ahead. It was always her rising into the bitter air first, scanning each gulley and fold of land before signaling me onward with a small flick of her claws. As if it was simply settled — her life wagered against whatever might be waiting out here. Her body between me and the dark.

And gods, I hated that. Hated how easily she took the burden. How naturally she assumed the knife should find her first.

But I let her do it anyway.
Because something ugly and secret inside me liked knowing she would.
Because part of me wanted her to prove — again and again — that I was worth it.

We were roped together.

A single length of thick, weatherworn cord tied around my waist and looped twice over her taloned legs. The knot dug into me when she soared higher, dragging me after her up the steep switchbacks. It was humiliating. It was necessary. The trail we took was narrow as a thought, slick with frost where meltwater ran and froze again. One wrong slip and I’d tumble into the ravine below — little more than a smear on the rocks by the time I landed.

She climbed it differently. Even without launching into full flight, her clawed feet found tiny holds in the stone, wings mantling out to catch herself, balance shifting in quick, sure motions that no elf could match. Sometimes she flapped once, twice, just enough to lift her body a handspan off the ground to gain another ledge. The rope would snap tight, and I’d lurch forward, hissing curses that vanished into the wind.

And she never looked back. Never asked if I was managing, if I needed the rope loosened, if my shoulders ached from the constant tug of it. She simply climbed. Trusted me to follow. Trusted me to endure.

But trust, I was beginning to understand, could be its own kind of pressure. Its own kind of violence.

Because she never asked if I could endure.
Just that I should.

As if pain was irrelevant, and the only failure was falling behind.

There was something sharp in that. Something cold. Like the mountain air had soaked into her bones and frozen the part that should hesitate, that should wonder if I was faltering. Maybe that was what survival looked like to her — relentless motion. Forward, always forward. And I was tethered to it. To her. To a pace I hadn’t chosen, but couldn’t slow.

My chest tightened every time the rope yanked again. Not just from the strain, but from the knowledge that she never once misstepped. Never once faltered.

I, on the other hand, slipped twice.

The first time I caught myself.

The second, I didn’t — not immediately. My foot lost traction on a smear of ice, and I stumbled, knees striking stone, palms scraping raw. The rope snapped taut and held me like a leash. It bit deep into my waist before I scrambled upright again, breathing hard, humiliated.

She didn’t turn.

Didn’t check if I was bleeding, or if I had broken anything.
Just stilled for a heartbeat until I found my feet — and then moved on.

And gods help me, part of me was grateful. That she didn’t see. That I could preserve the illusion — of strength, of composure. Even if every step now stung. Even if my breath caught too often in my throat.

We were roped together.

But it felt, more and more, like a tether.

---

We trekked all night, then all day, high on the pass, until  the world fell away.

We reached a section where the trail skinned itself thin along the cliff’s face. To our right, a sheer wall of crumbling gray. To our left — nothing. Open air. And far, far below, the forest spread out in dark knots, so distant it seemed painted. The light had drained entirely by then, leaving only the faint bruised glow on the horizon and a thin scattering of early stars. The stormy sky has surprisingly been a boon allowing us to traverse during the daytime without me combusting. Even in this harsh environment, the world never seemed more beautiful.

I missed the sun.

Another thing he took from me.

Somewhere off beyond the next fold of ridges, a wolf howled, the sound sliding over my skin like cold oil.

She landed ahead of me on a narrow outcrop, claws scraping stone. Her head dipped low, one wing half-lifting as if to brace herself. A shiver ran through the span of feathers along her shoulders — fatigue, still gnawing at her despite her stubborn refusals to acknowledge it.

I saw her press a taloned hand to her side, breath coming short. She didn’t glance back. Didn’t ask for a pause. But I stopped anyway, letting the rope go slack between us, waiting.

The hush that filled the pass was almost a living thing. The mountains listened. The stars listened. Even the wind seemed to pause, tasting our scent, deciding whether to tell the things that might be hunting us.

Finally, with a small roll of her shoulders, she straightened. Her beak clicked once, head cocking to scent the air, then those cold ocean-storm eyes found me.

“We’re close,” she rasped, voice rougher now, the trill beneath it faint. “The hills are not far. Two more peaks north.”

A thin line of steam curled from my lips when I exhaled, sharp with relief I couldn’t quite admit.
“Charming,” I muttered, forcing something like levity into my voice. “Lead on.”

Because wherever she was going, I was going too.

Even if it meant walking right into the jaws of whatever watched us from beyond the trees.

---

She took wing again, the rope tugging around my waist as she climbed — a living tether to something strange and merciless and somehow mine. I watched her silhouette glide over the ravine, wings catching the last tremor of light. Her claws stretched wide, legs tucked up in a way that was disturbingly graceful. A single feather drifted down, catching on the rope between us.

I plucked it free. Turned it over in my hand. It was soft at the base, tapering to a rigid blue-gray line at the tip. Warm still from her body.

And for one breathless, vicious moment I thought: Mine.

Not friend. Not lover. Not even ally. Just mine. Something to keep, to hold, to bury claws into so no other creature could ever touch it.

I clenched my hand around the feather, felt it crumple. Then let it drift away into the abyss below.

And kept walking.

Even into the jaws of whatever watched us in the dark.

And something was watching.

When we broke beneath the first ranks of pine on the last northern hillside, the world seemed to exhale all at once — and something new took its place. A pressure. Low and heavy, sliding under my skin like oil, slicking my nerves raw. It wasn’t sound. It wasn’t sight. It was simply there, coiling around my throat, tightening with every breath.

Something was waiting for us on the hills.

The taste of iron tangled with the resinous bite of the trees and the brittle sting of snow. My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth. My ears strained for something — anything — beyond the hush of the wind through needles.

Then she went still.

Raptor-still. Wings half-raised, hackles of down prickling along her spine. Her pupils shrank to hard black pinpricks in storm-water eyes. Her head swept side to side, breath shivering through flared nostrils. The talons on her feet dug small divots into the frozen earth.

“We’re being followed,” she whispered. The words weren’t meant for me — more a primal, startled admission. The raw note in her throat twisted something deep in my gut.

My hands dropped to my blades before my mind even caught up. “What?”

“Gur,” she rasped, voice thin and metallic. “Hunters coming fro the west and the north. Where is that damn familiar ?!” 

Of course. Damn them and their cursed ironvine snares. Their superstition. Their long memories.

She kept looking arround before deciding to cut the rope lose and soaring through the sky. I felt panic bubbling in my gut. Was she abandoning me? Is this it?

Until I saw a redish light erupt above me in the sky before hitting something in the treeline. A single caw escaped the target before it exploded in spell remains. Before I could fully realized what happened, i saw her flyin straight toward me  screaming. 

“Run,” Just a command — eyes blown wide with it, focus hot and clear.

So I ran after her. 

We sunk deeper in the mountain woods Through dark trunks that closed in like the ribs of some dead god. Over slick roots and under hanging tangles of snow-heavy pine boughs. Branches clawed at us, tore lines across my throat and hands. The cold bit up through my boots in cruel little teeth, snapping at my ankles.

I was faster than she was in a full sprint. But I didn’t slow. Neither did she.

She ran strange in this shape — half-bound, half-lope, using her wings for balance, mantling them close whenever a branch threatened to tear through. Her talons left ruts in the soft places where the frost hadn’t fully set. Her scent tangled sharp with pine and sweat and the bright coppery tang of living, of blood still warm inside veins. I breathed it like it might be the only true thing left in this churning nightmare.

Behind us, the forest watched. I couldn’t see them. Couldn’t smell them — not over the riot of her scent, my own sour adrenaline, the bite of churned earth and snapped needles. But I felt it. The weight of eyes. The way some shadows moved wrong, too deliberate. Once, a tiny gleam — moonlight kissing a blade, quickly swallowed again.

They were good. Almost too good. Almost silent.

Almost.

---

We broke west at a split in the slope, plunged through underbrush thick with frost. Elenya’s breath rasped, but she never faltered. Ducking under limbs. Skirting gullies. Trying to lose them. Trying to save us.

When we finally stopped, the world seemed to hold its breath.

No steps behind us. No flicker of shadow.

Just trees. Snow. Two heartbeats.

She braced against a trunk, breath ghosting out in shallow streams. I rested a hand lightly against her back. Felt the tremor there.

“They’re gone,” I rasped. “For now.”

She didn’t answer. Just let her eyes close for half a beat. Then pushed off the tree.

She shifted into a leonin with a ripple that crawled across my skin — white  fur surging over muscle, muzzle elongating, a low rumble building in her chest. Then she whispered something under her breath.

A simple word. “Faras.”

A soft pulse of magic answered, curling around her limbs. Then she took off like a streak of white and muscle, snow exploding under her claws.

So did I. Because whatever waited ahead was still better than what might catch us from behind.

A few could outrun me in a sprint — fewer still in a dead drop of panic and bloodlust — but she was surprisingly faster. Even burdened by pain and spells, she kept pace with me stride for stride. Her mane whipped past my shoulder as we tore downslope.

We still had a few hours left on the wards she’d woven around me — that faint silver haze clinging to my skin, cloaking me from the worst of their sight. Maybe we could outrun them. Maybe we could lose them among the gullies and ice-lashed thickets.

So we ran.

We broke west at a split in the slope, plunged through underbrush thick with frost. Branches cracked, snow spun up in ghostly curtains. Elenya’s breath rasped beside me — a harsh, animal sound. But she never faltered. Ducking under limbs, bounding across half-frozen streamlets, twisting between frost-silvered stones. Trying to lose them. Trying to save us.

---

Then the hiss.

Sharp. Intimate. Like a snake slipping past my ear.

 The thwack — solid, wet, wrong.

Elenya jerked forward with a strangled noise, her back arching, claws gouging the snow. Her other hand flew to her shoulder. Came away dark and slick.

Blood.

The scent of her blood — hot, painfully hers — punched straight through me. My legs went loose for half a heartbeat. It felt like someone had shoved a blade up under my ribs and twisted.

Before I could even curse, more bolts hissed through the dark. One slammed into the trunk beside my head, showering my cheek in bark. Another clipped so close it split skin. I tasted blood — mine.

---

Elenya twisted, stormy eyes blown wide, muzzle working around some spell. I saw the glow catch in her claws, flicker — then stutter out like a dying star. The faint shimmer of protective magic on her skin fizzled, choked by pain or shock.

“Astarion, run!” she screamed. The sound ripped up from somewhere raw, full of an animal terror that didn’t suit her teeth or claws.

Too late.

Figures burst from the trees. Half a dozen, maybe more. Dark cloaks smeared with mud and pine, masks painted with leering animal snarls. The stink of old leather, sweat, and ironvine powder.

Gur. Hunters.

And tonight, we were the quarry.

---

Another bolt thunked deep into the earth by my boot, vibrating like a plucked string. Elenya staggered, tried to lift her hand again — to cast, to do something. But the magic guttered and died. Her claws curled into the snow instead, staining it rust.

She swayed. Her eyes found mine. Wide. Worried.

About me?

And something in me just… broke.

All those long years under Cazador’s leash, trained to flee, to preserve the master’s favorite plaything — all that craven instinct just burned out.

My fangs ached. My mouth was full of spit and fury. My blades were in my hands before I even knew I’d drawn them.

Elenya’s lips moved. Some plea, a shape of my name. I couldn’t hear it. Didn’t care.

Because the hunters were closing. Weapons out, breath heavy. The stink of living men, so sure of their victory.

And I was already moving to meet them.

Notes:

I wanted this chapter to capture not just his hunger for blood, but the far more dangerous hunger for connection — twisted up with old lessons of ownership and power.

If it feels dark, possessive, a little cruel — that’s exactly where he is right now. Healing is messy. Sometimes it starts in places that look nothing like kindness.

Chapter 22: Mercy's End

Summary:

Elenya made a promise: she would not let him be taken. Not by the hunter’s blade, not by the Sire's leash, not even by the cold weight of her own monsters.
But vows spill as easily as blood, and mercy can end long before love does.

Notes:

This chapter is rough — in the body and in the spirit.
There’s gore, horror, and quiet tenderness. The lines blur because they must, and I did promise a romance and religious imagery somwhere in the tags

Elenya's POV

---

The moment the bolt hissed through the trees and bit into her shoulder, Elenya knew it was over.

Pain bloomed sharp and wet, an iron flower unfurling beneath her skin. Heat raced down her arm in jagged rivulets, pooling sticky and hot under her leathers. But she didn't scream. Her body simply moved—instinct surging up from older places than fear, dropping her to one knee in the snow. Her cloak whipped around her like a living thing, hiding the wound as crimson blossomed across white.

Her breath caught in shallow bursts. Each inhale dragged the scent of crushed pine needles, churned earth, and her blood deeper into her nose until it turned metallic, bitter on her tongue.

"Astarion, run!"

But even as the words tore from her throat, raw and thick with dread, she knew it was already too late.

She heard him snarl—a low, vicious rasp that sounded nothing like a man. She turned just in time to see him shifting his weight, eyes gone bright and feral, muscles coiled to spring. A silvered dagger glimmered in his grasp, its edge catching the faint winter light. His lips peeled back from his fangs, the corner of his mouth twitching—an almost pleasant anticipation.

Weight settling onto the balls of his feet and preparing to lunge. She didn't need to look to know the expression on his face: eyes gone bright with feral delight, lips parted just enough to flash fangs, nostrils flaring for the scent of coming blood.

No, no, please—

Before them, up in the distance, shadows moved. Peeled themselves from stone, trees and frost with chilling speed. Figures cloaked in winter-dulled greens and browns, hoods drawn tight, their leathers stained in strange dark smudges—ironvine powder. The scent of it was sudden and harsh. It burned the delicate part of her leonin muzzle, clawed at her eyes. Alchemical. Purpose-made. A hunter's scent. Something to dull the sharper senses of creatures like her—and like Astarion.

Time slowed as her fur bristled despite herself. The mantle and fur along her spine rose, a tingling warning that rippled from neck to tail. Her claws flexed against the sole of her boots, scraping through old leather loam beneath. A faint vibration passed through her paw pads from the ground as her Whiskerbed tightened and her whiskers shifted. — Her Pupils turned into tiny vertical slits focused forward.

Seven of them. Maybe more hidden. One crouched on a rocky ridge to her right, crossbow half-raised, the string still faintly trembling from the shot that had found her. Two slipped silently through the underbrush, so smoothly they might have been part of the wind. Three more rode in from the far slope, their horses picking careful steps through drifts, breath streaming white in the cold. The last stood near the center—older, thickset under his heavy cloak, a short, broad blade, but still clean.

They hadn't struck again yet. That meant there was still a chance. A thin scrap of possibility.

She forced herself upright at a staggering speed, still under the longstrider spell. Blood slid warm down her bicep to drip from the curve of her elbow. Her other hand stayed raised, claws spread, empty. She sucked in a breath. The cold scraped raw through her throat, smelled of ice and pine sap and that dreadful ironvine. Her heart slammed so hard it felt like it might claw free of her chest as the edge of the world seemed to sharpen. She could hear and see it all.

The crossbowman tracked her with a minute tilt of the barrel. She heard the leather groan under his gloves as he steadied it. His shallow breath, a faint creak of leather as he flexed his grip, even the tiny settling sounds of snow cracking under his boot. Every instinct inside her screamed to turn, to pounce on all of them if she had to. 
It seems that her form screamed as much for blood as Astarion did. That's when she heard them, spider. Hundreds, not thousands, of skittering and clicking sounds invaded her ears. She needed to stop this before it broke past words. She lifted her injured arm higher, claws splayed wide, her blood dripped in small steaming lines down her knuckles.  Her mane prickled with static. She growled low in her throat—sharp enough to vibrate the air—and thrust her other hand on his shoulder without looking, palm on Astarion in a silent plea: Stop to both of them.

As the massive, mountain-sized spider loomed at the edge of the fog realm, I frowned.

She shouldn’t be that big.
She shouldn’t even be able to see this place. The curse was supposed to be fully isolated—contained. Hidden.

But she skittered across the webs that ringed the fog, encircling me in glistening threads. Her song rose, not to pierce the fog—no. She wasn’t singing to me.

She was singing to the body.

Panic bloomed.
How in the Nine Hells?

I tried to thicken the fog around it, to protect her, to shield her—but it wasn’t enough.
I wasn’t strong enough.
I had given too much of the fog to Astarion—to hold him, to cradle him, to mend his mind—and now I couldn’t reinforce the wards or withstand this kind of attack.
It was divine. Supercharged. Drenched in fury.

That conniving, rotting bitch.

How did she find the body?
How did she recharge the curse like this?

The body was unscryable—even to divine eyes. Only the Friend could gaze upon us.

How?

I scanned the space around the body—then I saw it:
a single strand of spider-silk, woven around Astarion’s leash.
She was watching him.

Rage flooded my veins.

How dare she?
She had turned her gaze on him because she couldn’t see us.
But—he had nondetection cast. Permanently. Every moment.

How did she bypass that?

Oh.
Oh.

He told me.

He said he prayed to every god he knew in the tomb.
He said he begged. Pleaded. Called for release.

Even her.

How fucking dare she.

I ordered the fog to devour the thread. It vanished in an instant, but not fast enough.

Above, the spider cackled.
The song grew louder.

Too little. Too late.

What was the point of hiding now?

She had already found the body. Already aimed the curse like a blade.

What good was shielding the fog realm if we lost the body to her?

The body was us.
It was my job to protect her from this.
That’s why I left her—so she could bear the pain of the world, and I could protect her from the pain within.

I couldn’t let that song reach her.

This was my fault.
She couldn’t see the threads—but I could.
I should have noticed. I should have looked closer. Even if there was no reason to suspect a connection between Astarion and Lolth, I should have seen it. I should have focused.

But I was so blinded by him.
By his pain.
By the red, jagged, angry leash.

And I missed it.

I had to fix this.
I had to fight.

I surged forward, ready to step beyond the fog, to confront her directly—

But the fog wrapped around me.
Soft. Apologetic. Grief-laced.

It pinned me down.

Not to trap me.
To protect me.
To protect the realm.

To hide me—from her. From the curse.
To keep what little was left safe.

I struggled, trembling with effort, teeth grit, muscles burning with memory.
I clawed at the fog, gasping to rise.
To reach anything.
Even the spider beyond would be better than this—than this smothering, sorrowful cradle.

But the fog held firm.

And I, the protector, the witness, the wrath...
was forced to hide.

She was massive in this form, towering, broad-shouldered, easily seven feet even with her spine hunched in pain. Her mane flared around her head and shoulders like a cloud of golden-brown, catching stray flakes that melted into tiny rivulets. Her breath gusted out in white bursts. Her tongue rasped nervously over one of her long canine fangs.

She whispered softly, " We can’t escalate. Don’t give them a reason."

He paused. She felt it rather than saw—his whole body going rigid, shoulders tightening, the fine tremor in his frame like a blade straining against its sheath. His breath faltered, caught, then hissed out between his teeth, but still, he didn't move.  Didn't leap. Just watched her from the corner of that bright, feral gaze, red eyes dilated, mouth parted to bare the edge of his fangs.

Her heart tumbled painfully in her chest. "Please! Let me try".

Why is the fog turning against me.

I am the fog. 

I tried to comand it. 

But it wouldn’t let me.

It clutched me tighter, swaddling me in grief, in shame. Holding me safe.
Hiding me.

Because that’s all the fog does, the freind had told me, voice warm with sorrow.

It doesn’t let you keep yourself. It only hides you.
You don't control it, it controls you. 

I sucked in a ragged breath. Tried to command it again. To shape it, control it, pull it aside so I could meet Lolth’s laughing mawing curse and snarl my defiance into those eight hungry eyes. But my will cracked under the weight of it. The fog shoved me down, slamming my spine to the earth. my claws flailed, catching only cold, empty air.

YOU ARE MINE, I howled. Not at Lolth. At the fog. At myself. At the part that trembled.
The spider cackled—a brittle, mocking sound that scraped my eardrums raw.

“Keep torturing yourself, little crying butterfly,” the silk voice cooed.
“You’ll beg to come back to me when his mercy choke you.”

Something snapped.

A thread in my ribs. A crack in my will. A soundless scream of bone-deep no that rose, not from my mouth, but from the trembling, iron core I thought long buried.
I was the fog.
I had bled into it, folded myself inside its shapeless safety to never fucking be controlled again. Never be caged again. But now— it dares to ... it dares to pin me?
I bit into it and started sucking.

My claws stopped flailing. They dug. Not into earth or shadow, but into the fog itself—dragging, raking, clenching. I carved mouthfuls of silence from its vapor. Devoured it. The air shuddered around me as I pulled it into me and ate it like vengeance.

You behave or we all disappear. A low growl crawled up her throat. Something forged in the stillness between pain and mercy. The fog buckled, its surface fracturing in slow, spiraling spirals like ice under strain. Slivers of light — fractured, oily, kaleidoscopic — bled through.

I forced my eyes open.

And the fog thinned.
Just a breath. Just a flicker. But it was enough.
the fog realm appeared under my eyes. An array of sceneries from the past populated by spectral memories. All living the same moments over and over. 

My shape  solidified  and statrted to exist again — my shoulders, my claws, my war-scarred face glistening with greiv and rage. Enough for the colors of my soul — violet sorrow, golden ache, red fury — to slip through the cracks in the mist and shine like broken stained glass.
Across from me, the spider paused. Its eight obsidian eyes caught the flicker.

Caught me. The truth of my realm.

“There you are,” Lolth whispered. Not triumphant. Not amused. Hungry.

Then she struck.

A flash — silver legs lashing forward like lightning with claws the size of spears. The fog did shield me this time. It parted everywher else and focused right in front of me—obeying me for one brittle instant—and that instant wasn’t enough.
Pain split through me. A starburst of agony, blooming red through my chest as the blow hurled me back like a broken doll. my body arced through the thinning gloom, tumbling end over end—
—and crashed down hard on the far edge of the realm.

Stone cracked. my ribs screamed. my ears rang.
And still, I breathed.
The fog around me stirred, wary now. Uncertain.

Mending my wound
It did not try to control me.
Not anymore.
Because I'd bled it.
Torn it.
Made it.

And somewhere inside my chest — underneath the bruise, beneath the blood — something purred. Not with contentment. With promise.
I would rise.
I would burn.
And next time, the spider would not find me hiding.
She would find me hunting.

I felt the spider’s web tighten around the fogrealm—strangling it, strangling me. Harder than ever before. 
I had to hold. Just a little longer. Give the body time. Give the her a chance.
I narrowed what remained of the fog. Shaped it into tendrils. Then I whispered the command through grit teeth:
‘Find her. Find that bloody spider.

The Gur were still advancing. The one with the crossbow shifted slightly to have a clear line on Astarion. Another hunter, young, slender, had an axe hanging, fingers tense around the haft. Blood slid down to touch her side, slick under the fur at her ribs.  She forced herself to stand tall despite the throbbing, despite the way her vision shivered at the edges. Her mane fluffed, catching stray flecks of snow. Her claws flexed open, showing empty palms.

Her voice when it came again was low, raw from strain, but steady enough to reach him.

“It’s okay,” she rasped, never taking her eyes from the lead hunter. Her tail lashed once, a sharp punctuation against the snow. “I’m alright. Calm down. We don’t have to do this.” 

She could feel his stare cut to her wound—saw his throat bob in a hard swallow, nostrils flaring at the scent of her blood. An ugly snarl curled from his lips then, soft at first, building in his chest, rolling out toward the encroaching Gur. A sound too low for mortals, more felt than heard. A threat.

The tendrils found her fast.

Coiled near the jagged mouth of the crystal cave—where thought once echoed like prayer and now rang hollow—the spider strained forward.

Vast. Unnatural. Its limbs arched in terrible, deliberate hunger, each segment twitching with silken malice. Eight eyes glinted like polished obsidian, each reflecting a different flavor of madness. Its abdomen bulged with webbing—shimmering with memory. The husks of joy, the exoskeletons of trust, shriveled and bound within, suspended like trophies in a sanctum of betrayal.

It crawled closer.

But the cave refused her.

They came first as specks.

Tiny pinpricks of light, fluttering at the edge of perception. Soft wings. Fragile glimmers.

Butterflies.

Thousands of them.

Their wings torn. Burned. Half-missing. Some nothing more than twitching scraps of light and nerve. But they flew. They kept flying. They swarmed from the mouth of the cave like a living storm—made of every piece of herself Elenya had buried, every hope she had tried to forget, every mercy that had once made her soft.

And they fought.

They threw themselves at the spider, one by one. Clinging to her fangs. Her eyes. Her limbs. Their wings beat desperate winds into her silk. Their bodies choked her web. Their deaths burned.

The spider shrieked.

Its limbs spasmed, flailing at the mass of broken light crawling across its carapace. One leg slammed against the crystal ridge, cracking stone. Another raked down its own side to tear off the growing clump of flapping bodies.

But for every butterfly crushed, ten more came.

Wounded. Singing. Dying.

The cave pulsed with light—an impossible glow deep within, as if the memory of herself was calling them, defending the last sacred place not yet devoured. The spider twisted back, screeching as its path was denied.
It reached again—mandibles clicking, venom threads drooling toward the mouth of the cave.

The butterflies answered.

They surged like a wave of holy rot—decay turned resistance. Their wings glowed with the last warmth of every kindness Elenya had ever given, even when it hurt. Their bodies burned with compassion's rage.

They didn’t scream. They sang a song of sorrow and hollowness. 

The Gur slowed. Hands tightened on hilts. Eyes darted, one to another. The older leader’s jaw tensed, but he didn’t call the attack—yet.

Elenya sucked in a cold breath, let it fill the deep well of her chest, let it brace her spine. Then she took a small step forward, claws still held wide and harmless.

Her eyes flicked to Astarion, softening, trying to catch him before he snapped. “Please. Let me try to stop this. Let me try for both of us.”

His lip twitched agahdidn't'tdidn't’t move. Not yet. His fangs showed in a sharp, trembling line, breath steaming between them. Watching. Waiting.

Then she turned her full gaze on the leader, feeling the way her shadow fell across the snow, towering and broad. Her mane rustled with each subtle shift of muscle, and her claws gleamed wet where blood had run into the curve of them.

Good, she would be able to resolve the situation. I needed to resolve mine as well. Astarion needed me as well, and I promised to keep him safe from the monster. All of them. The fog hummed in anticipation.

Recoiled But it did not flee.

It thickened.

I emerged from the mist. Half-shape, half-will—my form shimmered in the uncertain space between resolve and ruin. I did not walk. I bloomed—My body glitching. I glided from the mist like regret, like vengeance held too long.

I raised one clawed hand and whispered through the howling Spidersong: 
“Choke.”

Fog answered. The tendrils surged, bloating with purpose. It rushed the spider, billowing in violent waves—cold, cloying, merciless. It surged down the creature’s spiralled limbs, into its eyes, its mouth, its many-throated voice. The spider writhed, legs hammering the ground, carving canyons in the fogscape as it shrieked in a language made of silk and madness.

But this was my realm. 

She flailed, screeched, spat cursed silk into the air—but the fog held. I held.

Then we crashed.

Elenya squared her shoulders, towering even more as she let her leonin form stretch to its full, imposing height. The Gur shifted uncomfortably at the sight, hands tightening on hilts, breath fogging in wary puffs. She swept her gaze across them—deliberately, lingering on each face, each trembling mouth or wary squint—before pinning the leader with the cool weight of her stare.

“What is the meaning of this?” Her voice cut through the hush, roaring and sonorous, every syllable sharpened by the faint, rumbling snarl that always lived beneath her words in this form. “Since when do the children of Selûne stoop to hunting lone travellers in the dark like vulgar bandits?”

The insult landed clean. She saw it in the faint ripple of discomfort among the younger hunters, the way the woman with the axe half-lowered it, suddenly less certain. The older leader’s nostrils flared. His lip curled into a tight, disdainful sneer.

The leader didn’t even glance at her. His eyes stayed locked on Astarion—cold, narrow slits of pale steel beneath a frost-caked brow. His sword dipped by a fraction, angling to better track the spawn’s every coiled twitch.

“You’re travelling with a vampire spawn, Lady.”

“I am,” Elenya answered without hesitation, her voice rumbling out of her broad chest in that low, smoky register her leonin form lent her. One clawed hand rose, a small, casual flourish that seemed almost amused, though her fangs were bared in something close to a smile. “And?”

Her tail snapped once against the snow, sending up a bright scatter of ice crystals. “What business is that of yours, old man? He is not hurting anyone. Hunting means knowing the difference between darkness and evil. Or have your eyes grown so clouded you see nothing beyond your own nose?”

A faint ripple moved through the Gur ranks—an exchanged look here, a slight shift in stances there. Some of the younger ones seemed unsettled, casting quick glances at their leader as though suddenly questioning the clean lines they’d drawn.

But the old hunter only snorted. The sound was ugly, thick with disdain. His breath left a ragged white curl that coiled like smoke around his teeth.

“It’s my business when it draws breath by blood stolen from honest folk,” the leader growled, spit catching in his beard and freezing there in tiny crystalline knots. “When it stalks our roads by night and leaves husks in the snow. When it charms soft-headed cats into protecting it—”

How DARE he.
How dare she.
How dare all of them.

Why can’t I just be left alone?

Is that really so much to ask? Is sanctuary too great a sin? Is peace some treason they can’t bear?

Why did that cursed hunter come looking for us in the middle of the godsdamned Troll Hills?

What did Astarion do to deserve this?

What did I do to deserve this?

To have this creature—this thing, this curse born of silk and spite—chasing me into the marrow of my own mind, tearing through the one place I thought was mine. The fog was supposed to be mine. I gave them everything. The world. The body. The blood. I left. I ran.

Why won’t they leave us the fuck alone?

A scream ripped from my throat, raw and feral, and I surged forward—flying through the fog, wings crackling with rage. The web tightened as I rose, that sticky, suffocating thread digging into my throat, my ribs, my will.

She loomed below—the spider—a silhouette of writhing limbs and hunger, slick with venom and memory, trying to climb toward the cave again.

Not this time.

Not ever.

I dove.

Behind her, Astarion’s snarl tore through the cold. It was a brutal sound, jagged as glass. She felt more than saw the way his body coiled—muscles tightening, claws of instinct digging for purchase. For a breath, the world seemed to pivot on a blade’s edge: the way his legs tensed, the angle of his shoulders, the small twitch of his head toward the hunter’s exposed throat.

The body's ears flicked back, but only briefly. Then she huffed a short, amused sound that was almost a laugh. Her mane rippled with the motion, loose snow tumbling from the tips of coarse golden hairs.

“I am neither soft-hearted nor charmed, hunter.  And again, the spawn hasn't laid a single hand on any innocent. From where I stand, you are the ones hunting us for coin. A fully trained hunting party in the middle of the troll hills at night, seems like someone sent you, and asked for the big cavalry, seeing as you all came for a single victimless spawn,” she said, voice a low, rolling thunder. Her fangs glinted in the thin moonlight, too sharp, too white against the deep wine of her gums. “Are you so certain you wish to step into a fight you don’t understand?”

The leader didn’t answer. Didn’t have to. His shoulders squared in stubborn defiance, his hand tightening around the hilt of his sword until the leather groaned.

So she went on, tone deceptively calm. “Or again, maybe you do understand whose side you are taking. What did that monster offer you, Gur? What could be worth betraying the old hunter's ways? Shooting a bystander or are leonin monsters to you as well? ”

A subtle shift rippled through the gathered hunters. The youngest, a freckled boy whose breath poured out in quick, nervous little gusts, flinched. His eyes darted from her towering leonin form, to Astarion’s taut, glinting figure, then quickly down to his boots. “Lies,” someone muttered.

“He may not have harmed anyone yet, but he will,” the old hunter spat.

“He hasn’t,” she repeated, weight settling harder into her stance.

A woman's voice muffled under a thick woollen scarf drawn high over her nose erupted. Her grip on her crossbow twitched with uneasy conviction. “Doesn’t matter if he’s hunting or not. He’s still a monster.”

Elenya’s lip peeled back in a slow, deliberate snarl, exposing a cruel line of serrated canines. The air between them seemed to press tighter, filled with frost and the faint, metallic ghost of blood.

“And who are you,” she rumbled, voice low but cutting, “to decide that?”

The earth seemed to hold its breath under her paws. “He can’t feed on people. He’s spawn—bound by his Sire's command not to drink from thinking creatures. Turned and enslaved against his will. He is a vampire's Victim, not one of them. Stop this folly at once, I implore you, we need not be enemies.”

That finally cracked the surface. 

My claws lit with spectral fire, I drove my arm straight into the spider's back, piercing the chitin, feeling the pop of pressurized rot beneath her shell. She shrieked, flailing upward, eight jagged legs kicking at the sky.

And we lifted.

She pulled us both into the air—spinning, screaming, dragging us higher through the collapsing sky of my own damn mind.

Below us, the landscape split—temples of oaths I never kept crumbled in on themselves, the bones of bridges cracking under the weight of people who’d once promised to stay. Smoke curled from places I had buried too deep to name.

We shot through it all—clawing, biting, wings tearing wind into shreds.

She threw me.

I hit the spire of a broken memory—sharp and glittering, etched with Astarion’s face the first time he looked at me after feeding all those night ago in a run down abandoned house. The spike punched through my wing and out my shoulder. I screamed—not in pain, but in fury.

That was mine.

She didn’t get to touch that.

Silence setteled. Even the pines around them seemed to hold still, needles shivering faintly in the cold.

She let her claws flex once against the snow, leaving small, perfect furrows. Her tail lashed slowly behind her, stirring up tiny eddies of powder.

“Listen closely—because I wish for this to end without more grief. This spawn is under the protection of Candlekeep and the Temple of the Crying god. I was sent to retrieve him.” Her words rolled out like thunder through her broad chest, each syllable steady, unflinching. “I can show you both my sigil pin, the correspondence from an Avowed requesting sanctuary. This rescue was also sanctioned by the Crying God—whose chains I bear. So step aside… and ask yourselves why you are here. Who really sent you on our trail? Because you sure as hell didn't stumble here equipped and prepared by accident. You knew he was a spawn before approaching.”

She let that hang—long enough for breath to fog thick between them, long enough to see the faint widening of several pairs of eyes.

Then her muzzle lowered slightly, eyes narrowing. “The escape was kept utterly secret. Magically warded, traced only by the concerned. So either you’ve sold your calling—taken coin from a foul vampire lord hands at the Gate to hound us like dogs—or you are being used. A dagger for someone else’s feast.”

A murmur. One of the horsemen shifted in his saddle, leather creaking. The older leader stiffened, nostrils flaring.

Elenya’s next words came softer, roughened by memory. She switched to Gurri, the cadence and clipped syllables lilting strangely around her fangs.

“In both cases… I hold great regard for your tribes. They showed me kindness in Harpshield’s winter meets. I still carry the memory of elder Ozzcar Vargoba—who laid claim to those snowy lands. I can show his bow as proof of my bond.”

Her ears tilted back slightly, breath catching. Blood ran faster down her arm now, warm against cold fur. Her claws dug deeper into her palm to ground herself. When she spoke again, it was in Common—soft, but with the finality of an oath.

“We do not have to do this.”

A brittle hush answered. Somewhere, far off through the trees, a wind whistled, sending flakes cascading in brief flurries.  Maybe, that the memory of old hospitality, of shared fires and carved tokens, would be enough to loosen fingers from triggers. 

A brittle hush answered. Somewhere, far off through the trees, a wind moaned, sending flakes cascading in brief, shivering flurries. But then the youngest rider shifted, his horse stamping nervously.

“Where are the others, then?” one of the older rangers barked. A human with a scar cracked down one cheek, bow half-drawn. “The elf who fled north yesterday—the aarakocra seen at the crossing? If this is some grand escort, where’s the rest of it?”

Elenya’s tail lashed once, sending a curl of snow swirling behind her. Her golden eyes pinned the speaker, flat and unblinking.

“This body is in charge of this portion of the extraction,” she said simply. Her voice in this form rolled deeper, vibrating faintly through the ground. “The others ran to continue on their mission, and to get word to Candlekeep. My hands were tasked to bring him through the forest and valley.”

“Why in all the hells would Candlekeep or the bleeding priests of Ilmater guard a—” another spat on the ground, glaring at Astarion, who still crouched low and taut, knives ready, lips drawn back from sharp teeth, “—a fucking spawn?”

“That,” Elenya rumbled, claws flexing, “is none of your fucking business.”

I tore myself free, mist bleeding from the wound, and rose again. The sky cracked above us—no sun, no stars, just shifting fog and shards of memory. The storm howled, fed by my breath, my grief, my rage.

I surged upward, wings reforging in real time from my will alone.
They were jagged now.
Barbed.
Brighter. 
Angelic. 

And behind me—they followed.

The butterflies.

Still Dying. Still broken.
They rose like dying stars, all wings and pain and defiance.
They swarmed after me, circling my form in a vortex of embered light. I felt them with every beat. Felt them believe.

We rose together—and I dove again. tears of blood striking down my glitching cheeks. 

I let the stone stretch up around me—wings like mausoleum doors, arms open in mock benediction, face cracked and crumbling. Tears of ash spilled from my ruined eyes, carving burnt rivers down the effigy of what I used to be.

Then I moved.

I brought my wings down like judgment.

The wind screamed. The fog parted.

She shrieked.
Staggered.
But never stopped spinning.

That damned silk—her web—lashed upward, caught my ankles mid-flight. The fibers burned like memory. They yanked me down, dragging me through half-spoken curses still echoing in the marrow of the fog. I fell past pulsing caverns lined with heartbeat-light, through veins of trauma too old for language.

Until—

We slammed into the mountain.

That mountain.

Shaped like a weeping angel, kneeling over something gone.

Over me, maybe. Over the version of me that never made it out.

My knees buckled at the sight of it. My breath caught like a chain in my throat.

And it was the form I took now.

A harsh bark of laughter answered Elenya. “None of our concern? When it prowls free under moonmaiden's light, walking amongst honest folk? How in the gods’ names can we be sure he won’t tear out some farm girl’s throat by dawn? he was forbade to feed, not to kill.”

She sucked a slow breath between her teeth. Snow sifted down around them, catching on her mane.

Then she spoke—slow, clear, every word heavy with iron.

“Listen to me. I swear—by his chain—I will not let him harm a soul. But you’re being used. Whatever bounty you’re chasing, it came from a vampire lord. You’re doing his work. Not your own.”

That caught them. Like frost catching on a blade. A murmur shivered through the line of Gur. The freckled boy looked at her sharply, mouth half-open. Even the woman with the scarf shifted, glancing toward her companions.

The leader’s eyes cut back to Elenya, dry amusement curling his mouth. The faintest sneer.

“By His chain? Ilmater’s mercy for corpses? That’s bold.”

Then he finally—truly—met her gaze. Held it.

And found something there that did not bend. Something old, raw, ragged from carrying more suffering than any soul rightly should—but unbroken all the same. The chain on her chest glinted as if to answer, half-buried in her thick mane.

For just a heartbeat, nothing moved. Not the snow. Not the trees. Not even a breath.

“Step aside, little acolyte. You’ve been charmed. Or fed on. I see the sickness in your face,” the leader said, voice scraping like stone on stone. “Happens to soft-hearted fools like you.”

Her jaw worked, a muscle jumping beneath the thick fur at her cheek. “I am sick,” she growled, breath curling out in pale ribbons. “But not for you to judge.”

She tipped her broad head toward Astarion. He hadn’t moved—still crouched low, knives angled back like hooked claws, eyes burning, watching her. Waiting. Trusting her, damn him.

“Look at him. He’s a spawn, you know as well as I, that he can't charm. He can’t do it.”

“And you’re what?” The leader’s teeth bared in a cold smile, breath gusting out bitter and sour. “A bleeding heart with a death wish? A lonely cat who wants to feel needed?”

Her tail swept once behind her, heavy and deliberate, stirring the powdery snow. But when she spoke, her voice was level, carved of old stone.

She came at me again—all limbs and hunger and triumph, thinking she could eat me a second time. Thinking I'd still break the same way I did before.

I laughed.

It sounded like a sob that forgot how to end.

And then I unleashed it.

The fog inside me exploded outward—spilling, bellowing, crashing like storm tides through the hollowed architecture of my mind. The tendrils lengthened mid-roar, shifting into chains—long, barbed, and red-hot with fury. They cracked through the air, wrapped around her, and slammed her to the ground.

Down.
Down.
Down.

Into the cityscape that rose like rot from the stone—Menzoberranzan—inverted and gasping, the inverted ziggurat hollowed out, glowing with the bruised purple of past horrors. I knew this place. She’d first dug her mandibles into me here.

I remembered the pain. The bite. The silence after. Not today.

Her body crashed through the inverted temple, bounced down the black-marble steps like a puppet with its strings burned. When she hit the pit floor, I followed—wings spread, roaring fury, the fog trailing behind me like a funeral train.

And then—the butterflies returned. Thousands of them, dying still, with jagged wings and blood-tipped antennae, fluttered down around her—bodies glitching, twitching, shifting—

into spiders.

But not hers.

Mine.

Born of my grief. Forged in my ruin. They crawled over her body, silent and surgical, weaving webs across her limbs, binding her to the obsidian floor. Just like hers had once done to me. Web for web. Thread for thread. Shame for shame.

She screamed. Bucked. Fought.

But the pit kept her. And I flew above her. My wings warped midair—splintered into three.

Three sets of wings now. Shifting forms, glitching like torn thoughts, radiating crimson light. A color I had known to belong to mercy. I felt the rage crest again—sharp, precise. One of the fog-chains trailing from my wings snapped taut, twisted, curled— became a spear.

Long. Serrated. Quivering with red fog and memory.

And I dived straight down. No hesitation. No pause. Just motion. Like vengeance falling from the hand of a divine nightmare. My spear howled in my grip and I let it fly with the full force of my will, driving it down into her heaving, thrashing chest.

It struck. 

But didn't kill her. 
she too was eternal.

“I’m someone who made a promise.”

There—there it was. A hairline crack in the brittle stillness. The woman with the scarf flinched, her hand easing off her hilt. Beside her, another hunter’s bow dipped a fraction, eyes darting uncertainly between Elenya and the pale figure behind her.

But then the older man’s eyes narrowed, sharp with something mean.

“But what are you? What did they offer you to betray your own blood, Gur?”

His words slid out oily, cruel—and almost curious.

Elenya’s claws curled into her palms. She could smell the sharp tang of her own blood mixing with ironvine and pine, could hear the steady pound of Astarion’s heart just behind her shoulder.

“I wish you no harm,” she rumbled. “And neither does he. But understand this—” her eyes locked with the leader’s, pupils narrowed to hard slits, “—I stand with him. And I will die with him. That was my vow. ”

The air trembled. Frost seemed to shiver up the trunks of the nearby pines.

“So choose wisely. Killing him may seem free of consequence to you—but killing me? Even if you succeed, that may not be a debt you’re prepared to pay. Your faces are known. The privious escorts already marked you as Gur.”

A hush answered. The younger boy swallowed audibly, fingers tightening on his reins. Snow fell in slow, delicate spirals, the world holding its breath to see who would break first.

"Step aside, we have no qualm with you nor your backers, we only need the spawn," said the leader. 

I breathed heavily. Summoned all my certainty into a single line. A single truth: "You may take him... Over my dead body." 

It could have worked.

It almost worked.

She felt the tremor in the hunters’ lines, the hush that might have cracked wider, spilled into mercy. For a breath, the snow itself seemed to pause—flakes drifting slow, catching the faint winter light like tiny shards of glass.

Then the leader sneered. His lip curled back from yellowed teeth, breath steaming harsh in the cold. He spat into the snow—an ugly, wet mark that hissed against the frost. And in that small, contemptuous motion, Elenya felt the fragile possibility shatter.

Her breath caught in her throat. The ache in her shoulder sharpened, a hot lance under her fur. 

The spider shrieked—a high, skinless sound—and exploded.

Into a hundred thousand smaller ones.

They swarmed me. Covered me.

Bit into my flesh. Tore into me. Crawled into my wounds and burrowed into the marrow of me. I screamed—a real scream, this time, one that cracked the fog itself like a shattering veil.

They were in everything. My veins. My nerves. My thoughts.

I flew upward, blind with agony, wings ragged, my voice raw with a scream that seared all the way into my soul.

The fog trembled.

It began to disperse—thread by thread unraveling—as the Spidersong rose in pitch and pitch, like silk tightening around a throat. Three of my wings were nothing now—chewed through, dripping fog and memory ichor.

I crashed.

Hard.

Into the fungal garden.

No.

Not here.

Not this memory.

We tumbled through it—my broken wings trailing smoke, her swarm shattering the dreamscape like glass—and hit the ground in a heap of limbs and ache.

The destruction was unspeakable.

The long, curved table—once the center of ritual, discussion, and hope—was split into five pieces, scattered like broken promises.

And there—

There he was.

I saw him.

The drow.
A spectral memorial now, etched into the ruins.

His body lay twisted on the garden’s ravaged floor, cradled in moss and rot, a letter chart still clutched in one pale, spectral hand. His eyes were empty. Gone. Glassy.

Dead.

Just a memory.

And it still broke me.

Grief hit me like a collapsing tower. It pulled me downward, tearing through every shape I wore. My form shook, rippling with the weight of sorrow too massive for my bones.

And I changed.

Massive. Wounded.

My wings stretched again—vast, luminous, veined with starlight, pulsing with sigils of forgotten names. My thorax split down the center, bleeding slow rivers of molten stars. I hovered. Just barely. Every beat of my wings cost me.

But I wasn’t alone.

The butterflies returned.

They flickered into the air around me, luminous and dying, just like me. I could hear them. Each one humming like a prayer falling apart.

We were all dying.

I was just one more broken thing in the swarm. Another dying butterfly, bleeding from my own memories.

The blood pouring from me now was poisoned. Venomous. It hissed as it touched the ground.

The spiders screamed. They could smell it—the pain. The ending.

They let go.

Fell away.

And she reformed.

Her.

The curse.

My own curse, walking on eight legs and hunger. Wearing my shame like a crown.

 

The leader’s eyes, hard and flat as old iron, locked on hers.

“Get the spawn.”

A rider moved. The sound of leather creaked—then the thud of a horse’s hoof breaking through crusted snow.

Her stomach plunged. It was already too late.

The spell was broken. The line of hunters surged, blades flashing, snow churning under quick feet. Astarion’s low snarl rose behind her, rich and ragged—an uncoiling promise of blood.

And the night exploded.

My skin changed again.

My legs stretched tall, limbs barbed with memory, with ritual, with every mercy I’d ever weaponized. My mandibles twisted—jagged, glowing faintly with Ilmater’s chain-marks.

I didn’t become her mirror.
I didn’t become her vessel.

I became her reckoning.

I skittered.

She lunged.

And we clashed.

No sound. Just impact. Just will against will.

We tumbled through the collapsing fog, our limbs tearing through a forest of nooses, our weight crashing through a cathedral of broken chains, our bodies smashing down into a graveyard of unborn thoughts, every grave still warm, still named.

She had taken all of this.

Every time she stole my shape. Every time she whispered that I was hers. Every time the world said I was too much—too broken, too loud, too wrong.

And still—I changed.

A woman wrapped in barbed chains, her eyes leaking fire.
A blindfolded fey queen, her smile bleeding honey.
A child of ash and splinters, bone daggers clenched in each palm.

Each time I struck, she staggered.

Each time I bled, I remembered why I’d come.

She met me mid-air, silk spearing from her limbs like javelins of fate. I twisted, dodging one, but another line grazed my cheek—

And I remembered.

Nere’s laughter, the day I begged him to stop.
Sedlan’s breath, right before he bit me.
The way I killed the butler and didn’t flinch.

I snarled.

Grabbed the thread.

And yanked.

We collided again, locked in hatred and inheritance, midair, just above the mountain that wept stone tears for things that couldn’t be buried properly.

We spun.

Claws slashing. Mandibles snapping.
Wings folding and unfolding like broken promises.

The first clash was a blur.

Astarion moved—exploded, more like. One heartbeat he was behind her, a low snarl vibrating in his chest, the next he was streaking forward in a smear of pale limbs and bright steel. His blades flashed up in a vicious cross, catching the first hunter mid-stride. Blood sprayed in a hot arc across the snow.

Then the others crashed in.

A whip snapped out, covered in dull red glyphs—spellbreaker runes. It wrapped around Astarion’s leg and pulsed. A burst of raw, burning magic slammed through the bond, slicing up from her gut into her chest. Elenya gasped, nearly folded over from the shock of it.

He howled—a savage, animal sound—and twisted, dragging the man with the whip close. His daggers punched up under the hunter’s ribs. The body spasmed, went limp.

But more were there. Too many.

Another lunged with a net glittering with tiny ironvine beads. It brushed Astarion’s shoulder—just brushed it—but the backlash roared through their bond all the same. Her vision went white at the edges. Her knees buckled.

Astarion! she screamed at him in her mind, not as a command but as a frantic tether—because if he fell, she would collapse too.

His blades were lightning. He spun low, eviscerated the man with the net—hot ropes of blood pattered the snow, steaming. But as the corpse fell, another hunter swung a mace wreathed in sickly blue sigils. It cracked across Astarion’s ribs.

The pain hit her like a hammer. She sucked in air on a strangled sob, clutching her side. Wet heat pooled under her hand. Her own wound—torn wider by magic meant to share the hurt.

Astarion staggered, growling through bloody teeth. He met her gaze for the barest instant—fury and fear twined tight—and then he was moving again, knives cutting arcs through the cold.

Elenya’s claws dug into her palm. No. No more. Her breath shuddered out, frost swirling from her muzzle. Then she dragged her hand across her brow and flung it outward. A ripple of silver light burst from her palm, catching two hunters mid-stride—Hold. Their bodies went rigid, frozen by will alone, eyes rolling wide.

I shifted again.

Became a sphinx now—massive, ancient, divine. A crown of Ilmater’s broken links lay heavy across my brow. My mane rolled with smoke, eyes burning with the memory of things I’d endured and chosen not to become.

I bit her thorax—deep.
Tore it open.

She howled, writhing, flinging us both upward—into the airspace over the Troll Claws, under the night sky, and then—
into the lilac grove.

Not that memory.

The sacred one.

Astarion was there.
Running.

His spectral form, light-footed and elated, smiling with freedom that didn’t know it was being watched.

Free.

She tried to web it.

Her silk lashed forward, fangs descending, dripping poison onto the only joy I still kept sacred.

No.

I roared.

Wings tore free from my back—vast, bleeding, and edged in light—and I launched.

Radiant fog poured from me, vaporous fire trailing behind my flight path. I slammed into her mid-strike, tackled her through the lilac grove.

The petals burned.

The salt air twisted—became blood and silk. The ground shook with old grief.

But I held her.

I clawed her.

I screamed into her many eyes—

“You don’t get to have this.”

And I changed one last time.

My fangs extended, long and bright—vampiric, holy, venomous.

And I bit.

But still more came.

Astarion’s boot slipped on blood-slick stone. A hunter lunged, driving a short sword toward his side. The blade sank in. Deeper than it should.

Elenya screamed—no words, just a ragged, broken roar. The agony tore through her shoulder to spine, made her vision fracture. She nearly vomited from the surge of it. but managed to maintain focus on the spell. 

The hunter wrenched the blade free, and both of them lurched—Astarion twisting to ram a dagger into the bastard’s throat, Elenya crumpling against a tree for half a breath before she forced herself upright.

Their breaths thundered together through the bond—erratic, seared by shared pain. Every cut he took scrawled across her own nerves. Her muscles trembled, the blood loss making her head swim.

Still, she raised her hand again. Claws crackling faint green.

Not yet. Not while he still fought.

And then she moved.

No incantation. No prayer. Just raw, savage will.

Another charge. Her claws snapped to her temple, dragging outward like ripping threads. summoning her strongest magic available

Sleep.

Sleelighspirallyou'reeeeou'reeee dropped face-first in the snow, dead weight. 

Blue light spiralled. One dropped face-first in the snow, dead weight. 

The snow churned red beneath them. The night split with snarls and the wet snap of blades through flesh. And in the midst of it—tethered by more than Ilmater’s magic—Elenya and Astarion bled together, burned together, stood together.

Still too many.

I sank my fangs not into the spider's flesh—but into her mind. Into the center of her song.

And I dragged her down.

Down into a vision of twilight—

A smoke-figure standing in a shattered realm of twighlight and air.
A missing domain.
A broken crown.
A wager lost to something older and more cuning than she expected and witnessed by a crying god revealed.
Rage
hatred
Revenge

We tore through a sky shaped like my guilt.

Clouds split apart around us, heavy with rain that sounded like voices I had tried so hard to forget.

“You’re too much.”
“You’re never enough.”
“You should’ve died.”
“You should’ve stayed.”

And still—I fought.

I was fury.
I was fog.
I was the chain, and I was the breaking of it.

She lashed out with her limbs, black silk slinging through the air, drenched in poison and history. Her voice coiled into the wind, all venom and prophecy.

“You belong to me,” she hissed, her mouth a tangle of dripping mandibles.
“They cheated. You were always meant to be mine—my wrath, my avatar in the body, my little butcher.”

I screamed back.

And then I tore her mouth open with my claws—ripped it apart, silken muscle and curse-slick bone screaming between my fingers.

“I belong to no one,” I spat into the ruin of her face.
“And least of all to you.”

And I didn’t wait.

I shoved us both downward, through the final layer of stormcloud—where the sky turned purple-black and the fog churned like prophecy denied.

Then—

Astarion screamed.

The sound ripped through her like claws across raw marrow—his scream, tangled in the bond, became her scream. Agony lanced from his chest into hers, white-hot and consuming, until her vision went dark around the edges. Her legs almost gave out.

Through the swirl of pain and snow, she saw it: two hunters had closed on him together. One caught Astarion’s wrist, twisting, driving a hooked blade through his forearm. The other slammed the hilt of a sword into his gut, doubling him over.

Blood frothed at his lips. His knives clattered to the ground, lost in a spatter of crimson.

Elenya’s breath tore from her in jagged sobs. Her claws clenched so tight against her palm she felt flesh tear—hot rivulets running down to drip from her knuckles. She could taste copper at the back of her throat.

Through the haze she saw Astarion try to wrench free—snarling, eyes wild—but another hunter struck him across the head with a spellbreaker cudgel. His body jerked, went slack.

No.

A raw, primal sound shuddered up our chest. Our eyes burned with salt and rage.

Her clawed hand snapped out, grabbing the holy symbol at her throat. It pulsed weakly against her palm, as if uncertain—afraid.

I was so tired of this. have we really this little choice in existance? to be the blade or the wound.

If we want to keep our promise…

The thought wasn’t a prayer. It was a verdict. 

I plunged and dragged the spider toward the Old Temple.

The one that gave me my name.
The one that whispered my first mercy.
The one I bled in.
The one I still lived in.

As we fell, the fog roared back into me.

Chains snapped inward, retracting like tendrils returning to the heart.
The butterflies spiraled, dying lights folding into my chest.
They became one with me—They always were part of me.

Their last breath filled me with power—pure, concentrated, desperate self.

And then I raised my hands.

The wind held still for one sacred breath.

I gathered the last of the realm’s rage.
Condensed it. Sharpened it.
The pain, the history, the screams. Every stolen name. Every thread.

And I struck her.

A single bolt of concentrated energy ripped from my chest—blinding, soundless, final.

It carved through her. Her body stopped mid-air. Mid-scream. Mid-curse.

She froze. 

Then she began to fall. The Spider Song quieted but her body remained twistching and alive.

She lost for now. 

If I want to keep my promise ....

“Our mercy ends here” 

We did not whisper it. Did not breathe it. It simply was.

When we reached for the power that had carried every orphaned sob, every prayer made from bloodied knees, it did not shine. It shuddered. It swallowed its own light, took Ilmater’s chains and wrapped them tight around our heart until we could not tell which pain was his and which was ours.

And when we let it go—

—there was no brilliance, no choir of gentle hands.

The world simply tightened. Like a throat strangling on a sob.

We watched him—this man who would have cut our vow to ribbons—stiffen, confusion seeping into his eyes. His sneer faltered, twisted sideways under the weight of something unseen. Then the veins beneath his skin blackened, curling like worms, pulsing with rot.

We felt it. Oh gods, we felt it. His lungs shredding inside him. The marrow of his bones curdling to hot sludge. The wretched horror when he understood this death was not simple, not sacred. It was ours. Given. Taken.

And when it finished, he did not fall. He simply crumbled—into dust that scattered across the snow in a sigh that mocked every mercy we’d ever begged.

Then silence.

Wide eyes turned to us. Even Astarion, blood-slick and reeling, stared with something close to fear. Seeing not the priestess, not the gentle chain, but the jagged edge we’d hidden deep. The thing we’d become to keep our promise.

Run, we rasped. The word tore itself from our chest, scraping raw on old grief.

They did not.

So we made them.

White Fog spilled from our feet, thick and hungry. It carried every hurt we had ever borne, every cry we had ever tried to swallow, every chain we had chosen to wear. It curled around ankles and hearts, whispering of pain too vast to flee.

The first scream was almost a relief. It told us we were still here, still enough to hurt.

“My spirit…guardian,” we choked. A bitter prayer.

We stepped forward. Our claws crackled crimson energy, Ilmater's, our dagger drawn in her other hand. Our face did not change—only hardened, jaw set, eyes hollow.

“I made a promise,” we cried.

Then we moved. No elegance. No divine flourish. Just violence, raw and practiced. Our blade found a thigh, severing the muscle. Bolts of burning, glass-like energy flared from our hand, jagged and hungry. Each hunter who entered the fog howled in anguish, nerves afire with borrowed suffering.

And all the while, we wept.

Please, we begged them. “Just stop. Leave us.”

But they did not.

So we kept hurting them. We drove our claws into soft bellies, burned through leather and oaths alike. Our dagger found ribs, our magic heads and our fog found minds. Every time they screamed, a part of us screamed with them.

Until there was only one left near us—white with terror, his sword half-raised, his breath broken on his lips. He fled, crashing through the underbrush, his panic echoing out into the cold.

We staggered to Astarion. The fog did not bite him; it wrapped around him like sorrow given shape. We sank to our knees, clutching his shoulder with claws sticky from old grief and new blood. Ilmater's healing light flooded out of us—bright, desperate, cruel in its purity. It stitched what had been shattered. Forced bone to knit, blood to flow. Astarion shuddered under our hands, a strangled noise clawing up his throat. His eyes snapped to ours—wide, startled, some part of him not believing we would spend it all on him.

But we did.

When another hunter rode at us through the fog—mad with dread, blade lifted high—we tore our hand from Astarion, seared it with a spark of guiding fury, and hurled it. A streak of crackling silver shot from our palm, and light slammed into the rider’s chest. He flared bright, then fell backward, limbs jerking once before stillness claimed him.

And still…we rose.

Still, we cut them down.

Our dagger found ribs again, tendons again, throats again. Our claws flashed, ripping through leather and skin, sending hot blood pattering over the snow. And beside us, without word, without plea—Astarion stood. His blades gleamed in the dim glow of our spirit fog, slashing low and quick, backs turned to each other, fighting together. Not as a predator and a prey. Not even as a monster and a chain. But as something smaller. Something terribly mortal. Bleeding, breaking, standing because the other still did.

Until at last there was no one left to kill. 

But the last Gur. 

He stared at them—at the heap of bodies steaming in the snow, at the white fog curling around the two of them like a hateful benediction—and then he turned and fled. Branches whipped and cracked in his wake, his ragged breathing echoing out into the dark.

When the last echo faded, silence spilled in to fill its place.

Slowly, Astarion turned to face us.

Blood streaked his cheek, matting silver hair against sharp ears. His chest heaved, knives drooping low in his grasp. He watched her with eyes that seemed older than the world—like he was seeing not the priestess who prayed over broken bodies, but the woman who would stand in the dark and break them herself.

We had done it for him.

We stood there, gasping, the taste of blood and bile thick on our tongue. Our dagger hung limp at our side, claws twitching, half-curled into fists that could still tear. Snow hissed as it drank what we had spilled.

And we wept.

Our shoulders shook with it—small, shallow convulsions, like our body no longer knew how to properly cry. Tears cut hot lines through fur, splashed on ruined snow.

Somewhere deep inside, the spider was healing slowly. Her dying voice skittered across the tender meat of our thoughts, testing, whispering—See how easily you carve? How cleanly you end? deep down you want to take. 

But we did not look at it. Would not give it our name.

We were not the blade. We just would not let him become the wound.

So when we staggered forward—away from corpses, away from terror still knotted in the dark—we reached instead for the fragile tether we had dragged so far. The chain wound gently and silently around our hearts. Ilmater’s warmth uncurled inside our chest, a slow cradle of sorrow and mercy.

We clung to it.

But it was not enough.

We bowed our head, tears dripping to stain our claws red. A broken laugh rattled loose, bitter, weak.

“We’re not no one, not monsters,” we whispered. Our voice was in tatters, just breath in the cold. “ We are Elenya.”

But the snow only drank our words. And Ilmater’s comfort was all that kept us from sinking. 

Behind us, we felt Astarion’s eyes—wide, uncertain, quiet. Watching us come apart for him. Watching the ruin we had wrought together.

And though the spider twitched with delight and dying gurgling noises, we simply closed our eyes and let the pain be what it was—proof we had not yet become what we feared.

I needed to leave. to take care of the aftermath.

But before, I looked at Astarion one last time. He was fine. I caressed his cheek to solidify it, as proof of his life. He looked bewildered. My second-hand cupped his cheek. And I whispered

"You are okay." A statement, not a question. 

His eyes distorting was the last thing I truly saw with her eyes before I slid back to the fog and let her pick up the pieces of us. 

To each Eleyna her task.

She stood there, gasping, the taste of blood and bile thick on her tongue. Her dagger hung limp at her side, claws twitching, half-curled into fists that could still tear. Snow hissed as it drank the blood splattered across her boots.

And she wept and started gathering the bodies. 

---

Rech té i hathran roost.
Frey vald isk durovna.
Frey vald isk ablast.
Im orak ne tay.
Krasin ne trah.

She murmured the old words under her breath, each phrase cracked at the edges, breath smoking in the cold. Her claws dug into the dead, shifting limbs and torsos into a rough pyre. Blood matted her mane and neckcrest and soaked her hands. Her pads split on armour and splintereIdidn't'tdidn't’t matter.

One by one, she heaped them.theieIlmater'ssheher'sshehe could. Covered torn throats, tucked loose hands across sunken chests.

Above themSelûne's’s moon hung swollen and white—watching. Unblinking. Unmoved.

And in the frost-bitten hollow of her chest, a memory flickered:

Ozzcar Vargoba, broad hands folded over his stomach, eyes glistening as he spoke over the bodies of his kin. The hearth of Harpshield blazed behind him, wreathing his shaggy hair in gold. Villagers stood in a wide circle, cloaks drawn tight, heads bowed. A single great pyre smoldered at the center, sweet with juniper and wild mint. Ozzcar’s voice rolled deep, gentle—softer than any prayer I’d ever heard.

“We bury what we were, and feed it to the flames, so it might rise through the smoke and dance with the Moonmaiden in her sky.”

He’d looked at herthen—a stranger, frost still fresh on my shoulders—and smiled.
Stay.

Learn how we say goodbye.

So she had.

Watched fire swallow the dead. Watched spirits curl skyward. Listened to the pipes wail until her heart could not bear its own tightness.

Now, under the moonmaiden's light, there were no pipes. No wreaths of juniper. Only the iron stink of blood and the way her breath tore out in ragged gasps. She stacked them all the same—an offering to the night that had claimed them.

When she struck the tinder, the fire caught in a low, hungry rush. Flames licked through hair, cloth, and split wood. Smoke roiled up, dark and greasy, before finally thinning to a paler coil that drifted into the stars.

She sank to her knees, claws clenched in the snow, tears cutting lines through the grime on her cheeks. Other than the continuous tears, her face remained cold and neutral. Almost detached.  

Dance with her, she tried to whisper. Dance with her, so you don’t linger here.

And the only answer was the slow hiss of burning. Every corpse. Every severed limb. Every shred of bloodied cloth.

She was whispering prayers that broke on her tongue.

Not for forgiveness.

Not even for understanding.

Just to say: I saw you. I’m sorry. You left me no choice. 

Astarion didn’t speak. Not as he watched her hands extend toward the pyre, not as her voice started reciting the funeral chant she learned all those years ago.

---

When he finally crossed the room, he didn’t speak. Just lowered himself beside me, close enough that our shoulders brushed. The weight of him there was more grounding than any prayer. 

Outside, the last sunbeams slashed through the trees, catching on drifting motes of ash. For a heartbeat, it almost looked like the pyre still burned—tiny ghosts of what they left behind.

He didn’t speak at first. Just sat there, backs pressed to a rough wooden wall, watching the pale sunlight creep across the snow until it nearly touched their feet. She could smell the ash still clinging to her fur, bitter with scorched cloth and bitter marrow. 

During this time I was back in the fog. 

The spider still layed broken on the ground, her whisper quieter than ever before But they did not stop. The web she had woven across the fog realm—the one clinging to every edge of thought, to every old wound—slackened.

More than ever.

She had taken a heavy defeat. The kind she couldn’t disguise. But I knew her. I knew the curse. The hollowness. The god in her throat.

She would be back.

Not today.
But eventually.

I stumbled through the fog.
No—the fog stumbled through me.

It crawled into my lungs, coiled thick around my heart, wound soft, suffocating webs around every thought started to burn. Spiders skittered over my skin, delicate feet whispering across me, across scars. Tiny mouths bit down, tugging out strands of my guilt, my sorrow, my grief—and devouring them. Every little gnaw sent bright pulses of pain through my nerves.

Her last ditch effort, her way of flipping me off before what would follow. 

Somewhere in the white haze, I heard the song faintly.
Lolth’s song. Sweet as rot. Notes wound tight in silk, tugging at old scars inside my mind. Promises of power. Of cruelty made holy.
pressing me to give up this game. 

That's what it was to her.

A game. 

I looked at the spider. 

“You were always meant for me, kitten,” the voice purred, threading through the fog like warm breath.
“You were to be crowned in blood and silk. My perfect little butcher. You’ll regret what you cost me.”

The words burned through me, hot as poison. The web drew tight—tight around my thoughts, my throat, my heart. The fog thickened, choking, pressing her down until torso cracked and legs buckled. She was flattened on the ground, mandible clicking and voice shreiking tearing useless furrows through the mist.

I stood in the air above her, ragged and burning, and gave the command:

“Throw her out.”

The fog obeyed.

Chains uncurled from the ruins of my ribs and wrapped her twitching husk.
They dragged her, limp and howling, to the furthest edge of my realm.

The edge where even my memory won’t walk. And they hurled her into that nothingness.

Away.

Not dead. But temporarly banished. The sky trembled, flickered—like lungs unsure how to breathe.

Silence rushed in, thick and ringing. And I turned. I turned to face the realm—what was left of it.

My sanctuary.

Ruined.

Over and over again. 
I am getting tired of this. 

The lilac grove, blackened and curled.
The mountain, cracked and crying sand instead of stone.
The butterfly garden a graveyard.
The temple door warped, half-sunken into the earth like a mouth refusing to speak.

Fog drifted through it all.

Thinner now. But mine. 

I hovered above it—bleeding light, wings shattered, but still here. And I whispered; 

“Begin repair.”

The fog heard me. It began to pulse.

Gentle. Careful.

It wrapped the broken memories. Gathered the ashes. Lifted the pieces.

And I… I let myself feel it. The ache. The cost. The grief.

But I would rebuild it. This realm. This self. Even if I had to do it alone.

Because the spider didn’t win. This gave me time. 

For now, I needed to watch the body and Astarion. 

Hours later, when she collapsed by the fire—too tired to eat, too hollow to sleep.

He wrblankearoundIlmater'sdsdter'sdsd shoulders.

He sat beside her.

Close. Not touching. Just there.

Then, after a long, hesitant moment, his hand came to rest on her shoulder. Light, almost uncertain, as though he expected her to flinch. She didn’t. Couldn’t. Her body was too spent, her heart too numbed in the thick of the fog to startle at simple kindness. So she just sat there, hunched forward, claws dug into her knees, breath rasping in and out like something wounded. 

They stayed like that as the flames crackled low, spitting tiny embers that danced and died on the packed dirt floor. Then, at last, his voice—rough and small, barely more than a ghost of sound.

“You are… still crying.”

It wasn’t an accusation. Not pity, either. Just quiet awe. As if he couldn’t quite fathom how someone could still have tears left.

"I am," she simply answered.

“Why were you getting hurt when I was being hit?” he continued, his voice low, scraping slightly with the edge of weariness—and something else. A fragile confusion, raw around the edges, as though he were trying to puzzle out some new cruelty of the world. His hand still rested on her shoulder. She felt the faint tremor in it. Elenya didn’t lift her head. Her eyes were fixed on the fire, watching it gutter and catch in tiny whorls of blue and orange. For a moment, she only breathed, drawing the scent of smoke and scorched leather deep into lungs that still ached from shared agony.

Then, hoarse, almost too soft for the words to survive:

“Warding bond spell. It ties your vitality to mine. Your pain, your wounds… half of it comes to me. So you don’t fall so easily.”

A brittle, broken laugh shivered through her chest, barely there.

“So I don’t lose you before I’m ready.”

Her ears twitched at the small, sharp sound he made. Something between a hiss and a breath caught on teeth. Astonishment, maybe. Or horror. She didn't really care. And when he spoke again, it was almost a whisper.

“You chose that?”

She closed her eyes. Let the silence speak for her.

“That was the third spell?” he added after a beat.

She only nodded, slow and heavy. The firelight caught in the wet along her lashes, turning each tear into a tiny, trembling ember.

“I made a promise,” she said simply. No grandeur nor sworn flourish. Just a raw truth, laid bare.

Astarion was silent. For a long moment, he simply watched her, his own face unreadable in the dance of shadow and flame. Then his hand slid from her shoulder, fingers drifting up to the thick fur at the back of her neck, right under the heavy fall of her mane. He began to knead there, tentative at first, almost as if unsure he had the right. His thumb pressed slow circles into the tense muscle, working carefully around impossible knots. He extended his claws slightly and started just grazing her skin in a way that made her body melt.

“You’re trembling,” he murmured. An observation, tinged with something so gentle it almost hurt.

And he kept working, slow and quiet, until her shaking began to ease—not because the horror had passed, or the grief had dimmed, but because for one fragile moment, under his hand, she let it go.

“Was that your first time… killing?” His voice was hushed, low, like he feared the words might break something fragile. His hand stilled at the back of her neck, claws resting lightly against her skin. She mourned it.

“No,” she answered. It came out flat. Not hard, not proud—just a simple statement of truth. Her eyes stayed on the fire, watching it spit and crackle around half-burned branches. His thumb flexed against the tense ridge of muscle at her nape. He didn’t pull away. Didn’t press, either. Just breathed, slow and careful, as though afraid to disturb whatever old ghosts had stirred in her chest.

"Not by a long shot, doesn't make it any easier." She added. 

He was quiet for a long time, his breath ghosting cold across the side of her face, stirring a few stray strands of her mane. Then he swallowed—she could hear it, the small, unsteady hitch—and his thumb moved again, rubbing slowly across the tight line of tendon at her neck. Her body fully relaxed, and a deep low rumble vibration started in her chest. 

“You did your best,” he said, finally. His voice was rough, as though the words had scraped their way up from somewhere deep. “Gods know I’ve seen what it looks like when someone doesn’t try. You… you tried so hard. You always do.”

For a heartbeat, she let it hang there, let it pretend to be enough. The words folded around her like thin linen against winter air—kind, but failing to warm. Her claws dug deeper into her knees. She let out a laugh, small and sharp and frayed at the edges. It didn’t sound anything like relief. But the low rumble bloomed fully into a throaty purr. 

“It wasn’t enough,” she whispered. The words cracked in her throat, each syllable raw with truth. “It’s never enough. I can’t save everyone. I couldn’t even save them from me.”

A faint, wounded sound slipped past his lips, cutting through the purr—softer than a sigh, sharper than a breath.

“I’m sorry,” he managed, hoarse. “I’m so… gods, I’m sorry.”

She turned then, slow and heavy, her mane falling in thick ripples around her shoulders. Her earlier purr transformed into a low, continuous vibration meant to calm others nearby, especially younger or smaller companions. Her eyes met his. There was nothing noble in them—no divine shine, no righteous spark. Just a tired, battered woman who’s seen too much blood for too many years.

“It wasn’t your fault.” She curled her tail tighter while a soft rumble vibrated in her chest. She reached up, claws careful, and touched the edge of his cheek. Her pads were rough, still tacky with old blood, but her touch was gentle.

“You know that, don’t you?” Her voice was soft, but it held a quiet demand. “Say you know it.”

His eyes shone faintly, catching the dying firelight in fragile sparks. After a beat, his throat worked again, and he gave the smallest, most reluctant nod.

“I know.” It came out low, strangled. “At least… I’m trying to.”

She let out a long breath, felt some small part of the vice around her chest loosen—not gone, never gone, but eased by the fact that he was here. A deep, rhythmic purr, almost like a lullaby, erupted from her to comfort him. No, it wasn’t just for him — it’s for her too. A shared sound of grounding

Then she shifted closer, until his hand slid from her nape to rest instead at the curve of her shoulder. They sat that way, side by side, sharing the faint warmth of the flames and the heavier heat of everything neither of them could say.

His hand lingered on her shoulder, claws flexing just slightly, as though he didn’t quite know how to hold on without hurting her. Then his breath hitched—a faint, uncertain catch—and he spoke, voice low, almost fragile.

“You know… back there. In the fog. The way you moved, the way you—” He faltered, then let out a rough little laugh that held too much ache to be amusement. “You didn’t look like a killer to me. You looked… gods, Elenya, you looked beautiful. Terrible, yes. But beautiful. Like some guardian tearing the world apart just to protect.”

She didn’t answer right away. Her eyes dropped to the wooden floor by her feet, and she remembered the snow where black smears of blood were still half-frozen in dark veins across the white.

When she finally spoke, her voice was thin, exhausted, but painfully honest.

“I know,” she rasped. “It suits me—hurting. Feeling it or doing it. One way or another. Suits me too well.”

He made a small, helpless noise and leaned in closer, forehead almost touching the side of her head. His breath stirred her whiskers, cold.

“Don’t do that,” he murmured, trying for a grin that wavered on cracked glass. “Don’t say things like that. For once, let me try—let me say something light. Let me make you feel better, tell you how valiant and noble you looked, how lucky I am that you were there, how—”

“Don’t lie,” she cut in, sharp but trembling. Her claws dug into her own arms, pressing through the matted fur until she felt the sting. “Not tonight. Please, at least don’t pretend.” Her eyes lifted to his, raw and shimmering. “I can’t handle it.”

He exhaled hard, pain flickering across his face like the shadow of a passing wing. His hand slid back to cup the side of her neck, thumb brushing tiny circles just under her jaw as if that alone might steady her.

“I don’t know what to do,” he admitted, voice breaking on the last word. “I wish to all the hells I did, but I don’t.”

“You are already doing plenty. Really, There’s nothing to do about it, Astarion." She closed her eyes and continued "I may have been forced to do something I did not want to, but I don't regret doing it. Not for one second. They left us no choice.” she whispered. 

And that was the truth of it—heavy as iron, cold as the snow beneath them. So they sat together in the hush that followed. Her head dropped forward at last, resting lightly against his, breath mingling in small, shaky bursts that fogged and vanished into the dark. His forehead slipped from hers, just enough for his head to drop against her broad shoulder. For a moment, he hovered there, tense and uncertain—then he let out a slow, ragged breath and simply let himself lean into her. His nose pressed into the thick ruff of fur at her neck, breathing in deep, almost desperate, as if trying to memorize the smell of smoke, blood, pine sap and her.

Elenya didn’t move. Didn’t flinch or stiffen or pull away. She just sat there, letting him rest against her, her own breaths shallow. The fire cracked low beside them, spitting tiny sparks into the dark. It came back, started in her chest — a low, rolling rumble, like distant thunder stirred by warmth instead of storm. It trembled up her throat unbidden, spilling out between parted lips as a sound too deep to be a sigh, too tender to be a growl.

A purr — rich, resonant, undeniably alive. It pulsed in waves, rising and falling with each slow breath, like the ocean exhaling through her ribs. Her shoulders loosen, her eyes half-lid, and her entire body leans into him — a full-bodied surrender, to the quiet ecstasy of being near someone that trust her. The sound vibrates through her, felt more than heard — through her spine, her sternum, the tips of her fingers where they press against warm fabric. It’s not delicate. It’s not shy. It’s volcanic contentment — rumbling like a heartbeat the size of a mountain, strong enough to shake the silence around her and leave the air thrumming with peace.

She presses her cheek gently to the crown of his head, rubbing her whiskerbed to it, purring louder now, unashamed, her tail curling lazily around his ankle.

It is a sound that says:
You are safe.
I am good.
And I don’t need words to say so.

Then, very slowly, her claws lifted. They found the back of his head. Her claws sifted through the tangled silver curls, smoothing them, combing them gently away from the nape of his neck. She let her pads linger there, massaging small, idle circles against his scalp. Astarion let out a faint, unsteady sound—half sigh, half shiver—and nuzzled closer. His breath stirred the fur along her throat crest, his hands gathering the folds of her cloak tighter as though to anchor himself in this one small place.

Neither of them spoke. There were no easy words for this. Only the slow give of her hand in his hair, and the faint hitch of her breath when his lips brushed her collar, not as a kiss—just an accident of closeness, a soft stumble in the quiet.

They slept like that, both tangled and bruised.

---

She dreamed

Faces bloomed in the whiteness.

Wide eyes, mouths frozen in screams. Gur hunters cut down in her name.
Their blood is on your hands. Their pain was yours to cradle, and you broke them instead.
The fog loved this. It surged eager against her ribs, flooding her veins with ice. It ate her grief, sucked it down like marrow from cracked bone. Her heart lurched, too heavy, too hollow.
A scream—hers? The fog’s? The spider’s? It didn’t matter. The world split.

---

She awoke with a violent gasp, body lurching upright—only to find herself already tangled, already caught. Arms banded tight around her, a familiar scent flooding her nose: Sickly sweet scent of vampiric undeath, blood, earth and a tinge of soap that smelled like grandmothers' regrets. Astarion.

He was awake. Wide awake. Eyes bright and hollow all at once, watching her with a frantic, silent intensity. His breath shuddered against her Cheek.

They were still pressed together, the blanket half-fallen away. One of his hands was curled tight against her ribs, as if anchoring himself. Or maybe trying to keep her from drifting somewhere he couldn’t follow. Elenya’s heart thundered so hard it felt like it would crack her chest open. Her claws twitched in the furs, ghostly faces of Gurs still dancing along the edge of her nerves.

But there was no dead here. No fog. No guilt.

Just Astarion, eyes rimmed dark with exhaustion, staring at her like she was the last real thing in a world gone hollow.

She'd done it again, hasn't she? Worried him, not but this morning she promised she wouldn't. Promises used to be easier to keep.

She let out a breath. It broke around the edges and pressed him closer. Astarion’s hand found hers before she even realized it was reaching. Long, cold fingers that twined awkwardly through her thick, pawed ones, squeezing tight — not elegant, not seductive, just desperate. Grasping.

She didn’t let go and started purring again.

She was okay.
He was okay. 
That's all that mattered right now. 

What are a few more ghosts haunting her? 
They made their choice. 

So did she. 

For a long while, they just lay there. Tangled and pressed against each other on the rough bedroll, breath clouding faintly in the cold lodge air. His head rested against the slope of her chest, nose half-buried in the dense fur of her mane. She felt each exhale, small and unsteady, ghost warm across her skin. His arm draped across her ribs, weightless and cautious at first, then heavier. Her claws combed through his hair again. Slow, uneven strokes, catching on small snarls. Sometimes he shivered. When he did, she pressed her palm flat against the back of his head, cradling him close. She could feel the way his whole body melted, tense at first as if expecting a blow or a demand. Then it eased. Shuddered out a sigh. Leaned in. 

At one point, he tipped his face up, red eyes watching her with something fragile. She only huffed a breath, her muzzle twitching in the ghost of a tired smile, and let her claws scratch lightly behind one of his pointed ears. The way his shoulders sank — boneless, as if someone had finally let him set down a weight — nearly broke her heart.

So she did it again.

They stayed like that. Not speaking, both were listening to the rhythmic beat of her purr. The moment felt natural and sacred at the same time. It was the press of his temple against her collar. The way her claws raked slow lines over his back through his shirt, until his breath evened out. The way his thumb stroked small, unconscious circles against her side. Sometimes he pressed his nose deeper into her mane and simply breathed her, like anchoring himself to her scent alone.

Has she ever been touched like that? If she has, she can't remember. 

Eventually, they both drifted — not quite asleep, but caught in that heavy quiet where the body goes slack and the mind stops gnawing.

And if she woke again with her claws tangled in his hair, his leg draped over hers like he couldn’t quite bear not to touch her even in dreams — she didn’t pull away.

---

Come evening, she felt herself again. Apparently so did he — because he was already complaining.

In the looted packs, they found letters. Bounty notices. One was sealed in dark red wax.

“Do not capture the spawn. Too dangerous. Observe. Report. Await further instruction.

—The Sacharine Hall, Baldur’s Gate.
Signed by : M.V.”

Elenya said nothing.

Astarion’s voice was low, scraped raw. “Cazador. Through a proxy or a fake name. But they didn’t want to wait. Thought they’d get paid if they finished it either way.”

She only nodded, eyes hollow.

“He knows I am not alone,” Astarion rasped. Dread twisted his mouth. “And now he knows worse—some escaped. They saw you. Your spells. they heard you speak. He’ll know it... That was a mistake,” he whispered.

Her breath caught, came out in a rough snort. “What — was I supposed to kill them all? Was this not enough?”

Silence.

Then, quieter, almost broken:
“Let him know. I invoked two powerful institutions back there, Astarion. He may think this is a group effort. They’ll think you were retrieved by an organized force.  A group ready to pay in steel to keep you from him. Let him wonder about that. Let him learn I’m not letting you go. If he is as paranoid as you said, this may actually be a boon.”

His eyes widened, stark red catching the last cold light.

“You’re going to get yourself and others killed. You may be in good standing with your church, but what happens if he starts attacking temples? to retaliate”

“Do you truly believe he would risk it? Why would he launch an attack on a temple of one of the previous members of the Triad? Go to a place filled with clerics and monks and paladins and an anti-undead ward to throw a fit about his missing spawn that he abandoned in a tomb. That seems unlikely, even if he succeeded or hired someone else, an attack on a temple would not go unnoticed. This would attract paladins and holy warriors from half the lawful good pantheon to his doorstep? . Honestly, I wish he would try to set foot on an Ilmater's temple. You were turned so young. Ilmater doesn't take kindly to child cruelty. Anyone smiting Cazador would be supercharged there. I doubt he would do that, Astarion. From what you told me, Cazador appear to be an extremely sadistic, perverse narcissist with a self-aggrandizing mania. Those types fear the unknown more than anything. It's all about control. If he’s as paranoid and calculating as you say, then anxiety will be gnawing once he hears that. He doesn’t and can't know why Candlekeep or Ilmater’s flock would be interested in his spawn. It’ll make him even more careful. It’s a vampire’s nature to believe time is on their side.”

His lips curled, fangs just visible. “What about Candlekeep? They don’t take lightly to having their name invoked. You told them an Avowed sent you? What if he starts sniffing around that?”

“Oh, right! Don't worry about Candlekeep. They won't be a problem, what I said was technically true.”

“What?”

Betrayal flared across his face, sharp and bright — a flash of fear and anger. “What are you talking about? You said you didn’t work for anyone! What the fuck would Candlekeep want with me? Are you getting them some sort of test subject or twisted specimen? Speak. Now.”

She huffed. “Are you done? Can I place a word? I did say that I don't particularly work for anyone. Which is true. One of my faces is an Avowed field researcher. It’s one of my main working suits. So technically, yes, your retrieval was commandeered by an Avowed. Me. You paranoid drama queen!”

“What?”

“What what?”

"You're... an Avowed?!"

“Not really. But close enough. I technically am, but. It's more of an honorary position. I didn't really join the order. They kind of gave me a pass.”

His jaw tightened. “You're serious?”

She rolled her eyes, mane fluffing in a small exasperated shake. “Okay, now I don't know why, but I am starting to feel pretty insulted by your reaction. I am a scholar bard, god damn it, and a pretty good one at that. Why are you acting so surprised about this? Candlekeep is a great place to learn things, and I told you that I liked to write about underdocumented civilizations. You are acting almost like you couldn't believe I could be one of them. I'll have you know they insisted until I said yes, okay? That old greedy weasel, the Keeper of Tomes, didn't let me go until I said yes. He said he would give me the title and protection even without me formally joining and...”

“Stop! It's not about that. Why didn’t you tell me? Seems to me like a pretty fucking pertinent information.”

“What do you mean I didn't tell you. How was I supposed to know it was pertinent information to you? Seems pretty unrelated to me. I wasn’t particularly hiding it. You never asked about it specifically. It just… Never came up organically. As I said, it’s only one of my working suits. Very useful for shielding. But I have many others. How was I supposed to know you would want to hear about this one specifically? ”

His brow furrowed deeper. “And what if he uncovers your identity, I mean your working suit?”

“Unlikely, I report directly to the first reader and sometimes keeper of tomes. But even if he did, so what? Even the Keeper of Tomes can’t locate me if I don’t want to be found. My sigil pin extends some of Candlekeep's wards to me and my belongings. I can't be located or surveilled magically. Even if I lost that, no one knows my real name or face. Good luck with scrying. Honestly, if Cazador uncovered that working suit… well, I suppose he could read some of my papers. I am sure he would be fascinated by the funeral rites of beast-follower quaggoths. I was told it's quite the read.”

“You are going to get yourself killed.”

She bared her teeth — more lion than woman. “Oh, not this again. For someone who thinks he’s a selfish monster, you’re adorably invested in my survival.”

He blinked. Speechless. It might have been funny if it hadn’t hurt so much.

She stepped closer. Her mane brushed his shoulder. Her breath steamed between them.

“I know he’s dangerous. I’m not stupid.”

Her voice dropped, rough with promise.

“Why do you keep insisting that I do not understand the scope of the situation. I made you a fucking promise. I won’t let him have you. Don’t you get it? I killed for you. What makes you think I’d now stop because I am afraid of getting on a mere vampire lord’s bad side for you? I’m not walking away, you idiot.”

This time — he didn’t argue.

Notes:

I sat with this one longer than I meant to. It hurt to write — because it’s not just about slaughter or survival. It’s about how grief and care tangle up until you can’t tell them apart, how protecting someone and yourself can hollow you out.
Elenya weeps at the end, not because she regrets saving Astarion, but because it costs so much of herself every time. The fog-self is very much the same.

Chapter 23: Null's Embrace

Summary:

Before he was known. Before the Procession of Justice. In a cloister veiled in bruised twilight, the god of endurance knelt alone. But pain attracts what sanctity cannot repel. And when Null visits, it is not to be banished. It is to be embraced. Whether he wants it or not.

Notes:

This one almost wrote itself.
A personal take on D&D’s theology — bending Ilmater’s myth into something more intimate, more painful. A god who endures. A presence born not of might, but of what he cannot let go.
The relationship isn’t canon. But Ilmater is one of the oldest gods in the pantheon, and his origin remains shrouded in silence — no divine war, no ascension rite, just grief and ritual. Before the Procession of Justice, all we have is that he is old. His portfolio is also unique, suffering, and enduring.
So I wrote into that silence.
Read slowly. Let it bruise.

Year of the Striking Lance -247 DR — Sanctum of Quiet Suffering

No temples bore his name. Ilmater was but a distant whisper among the gods, his realm a quiet sanctum hidden high in the reaches of Mount Celestia. Modest and small, it took the form of a monastic cloister veiled in twilight—no grandeur, no choirs, only silence and stillness. Here, the god of endurance waited with open hands and closed eyes, bearing the sorrow of mortals not to erase it, but to share in it.

The sanctum held no throne. Only smooth stones worn by kneeling, a spiral stream that wept in forgotten tongues, and an altar with a white cord. It was a place not of healing, but of enduring. Where pain was acknowledged, not denied. Where sacrifice was remembered, not rewarded.

His name was rarely spoken aloud. His worship lived in the shadows—among beggars tending the sick, slaves whispering prayers between lashes, and hermits who chose pain over comfort in solidarity with the broken. He was not part of any grand pantheon. No cities raised statues. No empires claimed his favor.

But the few who knew him called him the One Who endures. The fewer who believed in him wore simple cords on their wrists or ankles, walked barefoot, and offered no sermons—only presence. Ilmater was as obscure as a god can be without dying. Almost none sang his praise, and only five knew his creed. He was a god of quiet defiance. And he wept for mortals long before they knew they were seen.

But since too few worshipped him. He was too weak to help. Too stubborn not to try. There was no light in the sanctuary—it hadn’t been in a long time.

Only the color of bruised pearls and old parchment. The kind of silence that rang—a tinnitus of grief—under the weight of prayers never sent to him and never meant to be answered. Dust hovered in the air like suspended time. The stained-glass windows didn’t glow. They watched.

And Ilmater knelt. Alone.

His body was cracked marble barely holding shape—ligaments of light pulled taut over unravelling spirit. His robe clung to his chest where blood had dried into an abstract of suffering. His hands shook—not from effort, but from the tension of never allowing release. He was taking too much. He knew it. She will come. He knew it too.

He did not cry.

But he wanted to.

She would like it too much. 

She would suffer it too much. 

That was worse.

When did things become so wrong ? 

Maybe they always were. 

Hot, searing pain seized him. 

He welcomed it. Welcomed taking it from the farm child in Nikerymath.  

None deserved suffering. 

Children even less. 

As he dry-heaved in agony- something ancient slipped between the seams of reality.

A ripple in the fabric of silence. A twist in the gravity of the room.

Something entered that should never have had a name.

Null.

She wasn’t there—until she was.

She poured into being like oil across clean water. Her limbs didn’t obey basic anatomy. Her outline flickered just slightly, shifting and glitching. black ichor given a kaleidoscopic silhouette. like something you had to choose to see. Her face—what little you could make of it—was almost beautiful. But it shifted, shattered, dispersed and recoiled like billowing smoke. Wrong. She was barefoot. She didn’t walk. The floor accepted her, as if it had always known her.

In a manner, it did. 

The scent of dying orchids and wet leaves pulled through grave loam heralded her first—sweet and ruinous, like funeral blossoms soaked in stagnant tears. Shadows clustered unnaturally at the corners of the stone chamber, recoiling from her steps as though light itself refused to witness her. The room grew slick where she walked, and the walls—etched with prayers from a thousand dying lips—began to weep and wail softly.

Ilmater did not look up. He felt her presence before her voice, her aura gnawing at his essence like a hungry rat beneath golden skin.

Sorrow permeated his being. That's all she is now.

And then—

“Hello Weeper! ” she said, voice like velvet soaked in grave-dirt. “ Missed me much? ”

Ilmater did not raise his gaze. Did not move. The floor became a blur beneath the tears threatening to flood his cracked vision. He clenched his bloodied hands tighter, his robes soaked through with divine blood broken by mortal sorrow. The scent of her curled in his throat.

Did he miss her?

“Go back to whatever hole you slithered from.” He answered flatly. It's the other he missed. 

“Rude! That's no way to treat such an old companion. Don't you think? Lucky you, I love it when you are rude. Much better than you being quiet.  You’ve been quiet too long," she purred, not offended—delighted.

She paced slowly, silently—each step echoing not in sound, but in feeling. Guilt. Lust. Rot. Her presence moved like fingers along a spine too worn to shiver. She circled him like a wolf beneath satin. Her hair, blacker than any void, coiled around her shoulders in unnatural windless motion, crawling like ink across her skin.

"I came to unmake the silence. Why don't you cry for me a bit, Weeper?"

Ilmater focused his gaze on the floor, voices of thousands of mortals flooding his mind. All their pain, sorrow and grief bubbling and curdling in his core. His body was breaking again—sutures of divine will snapping under the pressure of millennia. Blood ran from the corners of his eyes like ink, his ribs cracking audibly from the weight of compassion. The blood oozing from thousands of cuts, yet his heart hurt more than anything else. 

Ilmater shook. He drew breath—not to scream, but to steady the scream inside.

Then spoke solemnly

" I have no desire to play with you. Go back!

She halted behind him. Her face—ever-changing, always veiled—twitched with mock sadness. Then came the cackle. Low. Viscous. Sex and despair. Her laugh curved around his ribs like a branding iron, ancient and hungry.

“And yet—here I am. One can only wonder why you keep calling me if not to play?”

She circled him once. Slid around him with a dancer’s grace, her body never quite touching the air. Her robes whispered across the floor like dead petals. She  But they echoed. Somehow. Metaphysically.

A predator. A tourmentor. A lover stopped before him. The god's hunched figure started shaking further. 

“I never called you, Null. I will never call you. I want nothing more than the universe rid of you,” he snarled.

Her whole form shuddered. Her wicked grin tore across her ever-veiled, ever-changing face like a wound dressed like a smile. She trembled in pleasure, her hand rising slowly, trembling with contained glee. Then, reverently brutal, she grabbed his jaw.

Her fingers pressed hard into his face, bruising divinity with longing.

She yanked his face up, forcing him to look at her.

“And yet—here I am. Again. And here you are—Kneeling — embracing me in your divine ribs. Tearing me from every mortal you hear whining. Taking me in.”
Her hold on his face tightened. “You suffer me, Crying one. But never suffered by me. You chose this.”

Her other hand brushed the red gashes across his face, trailing through his blood like paint. It was sexual. It was intimate. Intimate like knives pressed into a lover’s throat.

A prayer reached him—a wailing mother, broken, holding her child’s withered carcass. A keening scream of grief. He felt the child’s bones collapse in her arms. He took her pain. Again. And the feeling of loss spread through him.

Again.

Again.

And again.

He took it in. It broke him anew.

“I did,” he snarled.

Null dropped to her knees beside him, and the world seemed to still in reverence or dread. Her presence collapsed the distance between the holly and the damned. It negated both. Air thickened — not with magic, but with meaning, as though the moment itself refused to breathe. Her face hovered inches from his, an ever-shifting cascade of visages: a woman crowned in stars, a beast made of need, a child with too-wide eyes, a mourning dryad, a maddened fairy. a reflection that cried in someone else's voice. All of them hers. All of them wrong.

The air smelled of wilted myrrh and grave-slick rot. Her breath ghosted his lips like a benediction turned curse. Her gown spilled across the ground like ink in water, curling and coiling on its own volition, pooling around his knees, his hands, his ribs. She filled the space like a truth that couldn’t be unspoken.

Her presence choked him. Not with violence. With recognition.

Ilmater’s spine trembled under the weight of memory. Her scent dragged old devotions from his marrow — prayers he thought long buried, agony he had once believed noble. Now… all of it stained.

He met her gaze.

Her eyes held no single shape, but they held a constant—grief. And something beneath it. Something worse.

Longing.

He whispered, voice scraped raw by a thousand confessions that never saved anyone:

“I loathe you.”

The corners of her mouth turned — not into a grin, but into something ancient. A knowing. Her lips parted, and from her mouth poured laughter like glass breaking underwater — bright, terrible, ecstatic.

“Oh, Weeper, I want nothing more than you to loathe me,” she echoed, her voice dripping with ecstasy and folding in on itself like a secret too loud.

Her hands, still tightly gripping his jaw, tilted his head back with reverent force. The movement was intimate — almost erotic in its control — but it bore the quiet brutality of a puppeteer reminding the marionette who moved the strings. Her silken hair, threaded with ash and starlight, spilled forward, brushing against his blood-crusted chest.

Then she nuzzled into the crook of his neck like a lover returning home.

It was obscene in its intimacy.

lust. worship. Claim.

Defilement. 

Her cheek pressed to the hollow where mortals kissed and bit and sobbed. Her lips hovered just over the spot where his pulse should have lived. But she didn’t any of the three.

Not yet.

“To loathe me is to feel me,” she murmured against his skin, her breath cool and sweet and fetid. “And you do. Over and over again. Because you are still mine.”

Her words uncoiled like silk and razors.

“You want to be mine.”

She exhaled—slowly. And then, ever so gently, she slid her free hand down his chest.

Her fingers weren’t solid. They moved like drifting wax or smoke made flesh, curling and uncurling as they danced down the lines of his ribs.

They found the scar — the one above his collarbone. The one that marked the vow he took that day in the Thrice-Torn Temple. Her fingers rested over it with reverence.

Her touch was neither cold nor warm, but invasive in the way disease is — like a fever slipping past defenses. 

He flinched.

And she giggled.

It was not a girlish sound. Not even a person's.

It rang with echoing joy, sharp and fractured like a cracked bell chiming in a tomb. 

Alien.

Unsettling.

Not sound, but resonance. Wrong. It echoed not across the chamber, but across his soul.

Delighted.

“But humour me a curiosity,” she said, lifting her head just enough for her lips to hover near his ear. “Why do you loathe me, truly?”

Her breath was frost. Her voice warm.
Like winter wrapped in velvet, death dressed in lullabies.
It undid him.

She shifted her weight—slowly, deliberately—her legs sliding ever so slightly over his lap, like ice sheets grinding over a frozen lake. Her gown curled around them, amorphous, like tendrils of ink suspended in water, each swirl a sin he’d forgiven, a prayer he’d answered, a soul he’d taken into his ribs. Her torso leaned in, pressing down with the weight of centuries—of the wounds he’d held, the grief he’d swallowed.
The weight of old guilt—and older love.

Her face hovered above his now, framed by her own veil of drifting hair and undulating shadow. A crown of suffering, wreathed in the smoke of unmade prayers.
She smiled.
Not gently.
Not kindly.
A smile with too many meanings, all of them pierced him—like nails through a saint.

“I never hurt you.”

Her tongue flicked against his ear.
Soft as velvet.
Slow as oil.
Lingering like a promise made in the dark and never meant to be kept.

“I am no cause to you,” she breathed, lips brushing his skin. “Only a consequence.”

Her hand pressed harder over the scar above his collarbone—that scar. The one mortals couldn’t see, the one no one could heal.
Then her nails tapped.
Once.
Twice.
Like punctuation.
Like ritual.
Like a slow, cruel heartbeat.

Then again—harder.
Like she was knocking on the door of his ribs to remind him: I live here too.

“Sometimes of your choice…”

A pause.

A silence so thick it became a presence.

“Mostly of theirs.”

The word dripped from her tongue like venom wrapped in honey.

Theirs.

It reverberated through him like a cathedral bell cracked by thunder.

Theirs.
The mortals.
The sobbing, clawing, begging ones.
The ones who unknowingly called him in their agony and birthed her in their cruelty.
Who broke each other with greed and hatred and fear—
—and then weep at what they’d made.

Wept at her touch.

Wept into him.
Their pain poured into him like a sea that never emptied, a wound that never closed.
They also gave her power.

Even if she is eternal. But they fed this corruption. 

And he—he bore it.
He bore her.

Wept at her touch.

Isn’t that what I’m doing?
The thought shivered through his mind.
Not spoken. Not welcomed. But true.

He could feel it —in the marrow of his divine frame:
That trembling line where suffering and surrender blurred.
Where compassion wore the same mask as self-destruction.
Where this Null wore his skin like a second robe.

His creed was flawed from the beginning. like the rest of him. 

The thought disappeared in the anguish of his mind—rattled by the aimless pleas of all that suffers—clawing at him now.
A choir of the broken.
A litany of hurt.
Every voice a tether.
Every sob a leash.
And her—her—the embodiment of every consequence he could never stop.

She purred against his throat.

“Come on, love,” she whispered, “let’s not pretend. You hate me when it is them that made me.  They need me. I like them mainly for giving me to you.”

She nuzzled deeper, her lips grazing the old scar above his heart, the one that never healed—because it never could. The one he’d earned the moment he first said yes to the suffering of another.

The place she always came back to.

The place she lived.

Her lips left a faint trace of warmth in their wake. But warmth like a fever. Like a wound that hadn’t yet begun to fester. Her breath followed—cool, then hot, then void—unsettling in its shifting, like her, like truth after too much pain. Her hips rolled—just once—and his breath faltered. Not desire. Not exactly. But something darker. Deeper. Twisted between familiarity and fear.

Her teeth grazed his jaw—too sharp to be human, too knowing to be anything else.

“Doesn’t it feel good to finally admit it, Weeper?” she purred, the words dripping with triumph and something else… something crueler than cruelty: tenderness twisted into torment.

“That they made me. And you—you keep me.”

The words sank into him like hooks behind his ribs.

He didn’t move.

He couldn’t.

“I live in you when you hate as much as when you take their pain,”

Her voice was soft. Intimate. Sinister in its serenity.

“You take me. You carry me. Every tear you hold—I’m in it. Every bruise you cradle—I’m within you. By your choice, Weeper.”

She moved higher, her body barely touching his except where her mouth dragged across the shell of his ear—her lips feather-light, her tongue flicking just once. A breath, a kiss, a curse.
A mockery of tenderness.
A parody of love.
A brand whispered instead of burned.

The heat that spread from that single point felt like the scream of a dying star. Not fire—destruction. The agony of light imploding into darkness.

He felt her grin before he saw it. That hushed, ecstatic curl of lips that meant the world had cracked just the way she liked.

“I love this,” she whispered, reverent.

“I love us this way.”

Her voice was silk soaked in ruin. Rapture within rot.

A worshiper’s tone.
Or a lover’s.
Or a conqueror’s.
They were all the same in her mouth.

“I make you hate…”

Her fingers slid under his robe again, pressing against the bone of his ribs like they were altar stones.

“…and you make me love.”

She rocked her hips again, this time more insistently. It wasn’t sexual. It was ritual. A grinding of meaning. A reminder of who fed on whom.

“What I am makes some of you weep…”

Her tongue touched his temple.

“…and what you represent makes some of me holy.”

Her hands, once clawed, now delicate—too delicate—cupped his jaw. Her forehead rested against his. Her breath ghosted over his lips.

And in a whisper soft as the space between sobs, she murmured—

“You are mine. Say it.”

Her voice was not pleading.
Not begging.
It was command wearing the mask of prayer.

Say it.
Not because she doubted.
But because she needed him to admit it.

Because she fed on truth more than pain.

Because his truth was always her final nourishment.

Because the last word was the door she wanted him to open himself.

Ilmater turned his face away. Jaw clenched like iron gates at the edge of surrender.

“It’s the other way around,” he said, voice low and bitter, etched in centuries of restrained grief.
“You are mine, Null. Mine to bear, to witness, and to take, so no one else has to.”

She laughed—light and crystalline, like wind chimes carved from the bones of saints. It was not cruel. Not mocking. It was intimate, full of something older than joy. It was the sound of a wound remembering what it felt like to be kissed open.

In a slow, predatory motion, she slid both hands under his robe, her touch feather-soft at first—exploring, caressing, relearning. She mapped his body like a ritual site, her palms reverent, her fingers sly. Her weight remained ethereal—barely there—yet it pressed down like a prayer you couldn't finish, like a hymn you sang through bloodied lips.

Her thighs, pale and smooth, bracketed his hips, locking him into her silhouette. Cold radiated off her like mist from the edge of the void, but where they met—where she rocked against him—heat surged like blasphemy: aching, urgent, alive. He gasped, and it broke something ancient in the silence.

“Oh, sweet Weeper,” she cooed, voice velvet-laced and sinful. “Yes, I am yours to bear. And bear me you do.”
She moved again—more deliberately—hips grinding against him in a motion that was ritual first, pleasure second. Her breath hitched, and it made her smile.

“My most beautiful vessel. You bear me so reverently.”

She licked the side of his ear with a slow, reverent curl of her tongue, tasting him as if he were a sacred relic defiled just by being hers. He trembled beneath her, but still—still—didn’t push her away.

“I am yours to bear, Weeper,” she whispered, her voice dipped in starlight and ruin. “As much as you are mine. Mine to break. So no one else can.”

Her hands—gods, her hands—traced his ribs like braille carved in pain, like scripture remembered by touch alone. Her nails dragged over scar tissue with aching familiarity, igniting nerves he'd sworn no longer worked.

“You don’t even resist. You embrace me with open arms,” she murmured, tilting her head, mock-adoring.
“It’s so exhilarating. Why not push me? Why not fight me?”

She leaned in and kissed his jaw—not with lips, but with absence—a phantom’s hunger masquerading as tenderness. Then again. Harder. Bruising. Claiming. The kiss wasn’t about pleasure. It was about ownership.

About the things he had never truly let go of.

Slowly, Ilmater raised his hand and brushed the outline of her face. It wasn’t affection—it was ritual. A litany. Cold and darkness flooded into his fingers, numbing him. His exhale was shallow. Tears began to fall, carving salt trails down his cheeks like bloodless wounds.

“I cannot fight you, Null,” he said, voice stripped bare. “Not really. You are eternal.”

She rolled her hips once more—this time with aching sensuality, her core brushing him with slow, deliberate friction. Cold fire licked his skin. Pleasure. Pain. Memory. Guilt. All the same thing here.

He trembled.

“It’s not your fault, Null,” he whispered. “You are what you are.”

Her moan into his ear was a dirge, a sound that coiled in his spine and stayed. Her presence curled around his soul, claws and silk, shadow and salt. The moan was famine. Worship. It echoed with every scream he'd ever taken into himself and held.

Still—he said it.

“I can only fight those who wield and spread what you are. But you... you are mine to endure. Forevermore.”

She exhaled like a lover exhaling his name, then pushed him down. The cold stone floor accepted his back like an altar takes blood.

She pinned him, her thighs like vices, her gown blooming around them like sacrificial smoke. She leaned in close, lips at his ear.

“Say it,” she breathed. “Say you belong to me.”

He clenched his teeth. Didn’t speak.

She dug her nails into his sternum, and blood bloomed beneath her fingertips. She sighed—and the sound was one of orgasmic sustenance.

“Say it!” she snarled, her voice flaring like a thousand winds howling through catacombs.

He finally rasped—

“Not really. Not anymore.”

Her smile darkened. A monarch spoiled. A predator denied only slightly.

“You’ve built a throne for me in your marrow,” she whispered.

“I hate you.”

Her hands slid further beneath his robe—toward his heart, his center. Her touch was both anatomical and intimate—like a mortician tracing lifelines with lust. She studied him. Not like a scholar, but like a god sifting ash for prophecy.

“You let me inside every wound,” she said.
“When they scream, you bleed. When they die, you carry. You are soaked in me.”

Her lips brushed his throat—soft, cold, reverent. A kiss. A curse.

“But do they even know your name?” she asked.

He shuddered.

“No,” she answered for him, her tongue tracing the salt of his skin.

“Because you want it this way. You want to be used by them. Hollowed by them. To be offered to me. Weak and unknown. I know you. I am the only one to know you, Weeper.”

She rocked her hips harder—sensation and shame rolled together in a single, feverish rhythm.

“You want someone to take the choice from you, don’t you?” she whispered. “Give you a reason to come back. Over and over.”

“I want peace,” he breathed.

“Liar,” she hissed, and bit his throat—hard, just above the collarbone. A sharp, claiming mark.

“You want to be undone.”

She pulled back, radiant with ruin, her face flushed with delight.

“You wear suffering like a king wears velvet,” she purred, hips moving again. “And I… I am your crown.”

She rocked harder, mouth at his neck. “Your court. Your kingdom. Do you endure me for them—or do you use them to endure me?”

She stilled for a breath, then whispered, hot and dark:

“You are mine. Say it.”

And for a moment—a blink—he saw something else.
Not the goddevourer.
Not the veiled beast of smoke and sorrow.
But a ruined girl.

A dying fawn with blood at her flank and defiance in her eyes.
A cracked mirror reflecting nothing but pain and memory.
A ten-faced black diamond, each facet a different shape of ruin—love curdled, innocence warped, divinity undone.

And Ilmater—Weeper, Saint of Suffering—gasped.

“I am still yours, Null,” he whispered, his voice caught somewhere between prayer and plea. “Always.”

She moaned.

The sound tore from her like a wound blooming in reverse—beautiful, aching, and wrong. She ground her hips against him, again and again, a rhythm older than cruelty and far more intimate.

Not sensual. Not base.

It was ritual.

Each motion was a vow renewed, each grind a communion between destruction and the vessel that held it. She wasn’t trying to arouse him—she was feeding, claiming, marking.

Possession dressed in affection.

“Good boy,” she whispered, almost reverently, her breath painting frost across his skin. “So good for me. Always.”

Ilmater’s hand, trembling, rose again. Slowly. Carefully. Like he was touching something sacred and defiled in the same breath.

His fingers brushed her cheek.

Not to push her away.
Not to pull her closer.

Just to remember the shape of her face.
To remember that beneath the horror was a person.
Beneath the shrieking entropy, a soul still flickering—burnt and starving—but there.

He traced the slope of her cheekbone, the phantom of tears that were never hers, and whispered—

“But only yours to break.”

The words shattered between them like stained glass.

Her pupils dilated. Her breath hitched. For a single instant, she froze—her body poised mid-motion, like even she hadn’t expected that.

Her face twisted—not in rage, not in lust, but in something much more dangerous.

Wonder.

And then grief.

The kind of grief that has no origin, only echoes.

Her lips parted, and a soft, pained sound left her. Her hand gripped his wrist—not to stop him, not to hurt him. Just to anchor herself.

And then she leaned forward, resting her forehead against his. Her body still moved—slow, languid now, like she was memorizing the sensation of being wanted in spite of herself.

“Only mine to break,” she echoed, voice unsteady, barely audible.

Not triumphant.

Claimed.

And something in her broke too.

Not loudly.

But irrevocably.

Again

The storm of Null, trembled—not with power, but with recognition.

Of being seen. Truly. Fully.
only in her vilest shape.

And not cast aside.

She pressed her lips to his—not in violence, not in mockery—but in surrender. A kiss that held the weight of the millennia between them. A kiss that almost resembled his first.

She pulled back, eyes shining with too many things.

And Ilmater held her.

Because what else could he do?

She was the wound. And he, the one who bleeds for it.
She was the blade. And many were, the hand that bears it.
She was Null.

And he was hers to break.

Always.

Their lips parted.

Ilmater’s breath caught somewhere between ache and defiance.

“What do you want from me, Null? Why do you keep coming back?”

Her eyes gleamed like drowned stars.

“Because I want to. I am not the one making this difficult, Weeper. I know what you are. I accept it. Savor it. Love breaking it. Like the good old days.”
She tilted her head, half-mocking, half-mournful.
“You started this dance, didn’t you? You invited me into the fold of your divinity, into your essence. There is no point in asking why I hurt the Weeper. It’s what I am. The wound and the blade. The sorrow and the despair.”

She brushed her lips against his throat, just once.

“I keep coming back for the same reason you keep enduring. You never left me, Weeper. You just took me with you.”

His voice was hoarse, barely audible.

“Why do you want me to scream?”

Her breath trembled as she leaned in.

“Because when you do, I feel you the most.”
“I know it’s true. I know it’s real.”

And then she kissed him again—on the mouth.

Soft.
Deep.
Possessive.
Starving.

It tasted like ashes and honey. Like the end of prayer and the beginning of a fall.

Her hands fisted in his hair as she pressed closer, devouring his hesitation, consuming his quiet resistance.

“You are mine,” she whispered against his lips.

“I can never truly be yours,” he gasped. “I’ll always belong to what you used to be.”

Her smile was a lament. It bloomed like rot in spring.

“But you already are, Weeper. In every way that matters to me.
Just as I am yours—in every way that matters to you.”

His breath hitched.

“Not in the way that matters to me, no. You don’t love me, Null.
Not since...”

She cut him off, her voice sharp with disdain and devotion.

“Oh, Weeper. I do.
To an extent your kind can never fathom.
I do not lecture you on belief, so do not presume to teach one such as I feelings.
I love you infinitely, completely, more than anything.
I would swallow the Realmscape to see you whimper.
I would swallow you entirely—forever.
We are eternal.”

“I hate you,” he whispered.

“Maybe,” she purred. “But you didn’t run from me.
Not like she did.”

He froze.

“You still embrace me. Every time you touch pain—you feed me.
I’m the suffering you sanctify. The one you hide.
I am the shadow in your realm.”

“I miss Null,” he said.

She placed her hand over his heart.

“But I’m right here.”

“Do you miss it?” he asked, eyes burning.
“Do you ever grieve it?”

“It is in my nature to grieve,” she said softly. “And you know it.”

A pause.

A prayer curled in his throat.

“Then choose Null. Throw it away. Come back. Please.
Scream.”

She laughed—low, cruel, intimate.
Then she leaned in, lips brushing his ear, and whispered in his mind:

“You first.”

And she vanished.

Leaving him kneeling. Alone.

Marked.
Bruised.
Breathing too hard.

Half aroused.
Half broken.
Fully heartbroken.

The silence that followed was not holy.

It was hers.

---

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the planes, near what would one day become Alaghôn in Turmish, a portal of brilliant gold tore the sky. Tyr, god of justice, marched forward with two hundred celestial archons behind him.

The Procession of Justice had begun.

But Ilmater did not rise.

Not yet.

Notes:

This is just a snapshot of his story. There’s so much missing—before, after, between.

I know what parts come next.

But I’d love to hear your theories. Now that I sprinkled some nuggets here and there
What do you think happened?
What do you think broke?
Why does it matter?

Chapter 24: My Divine Intervention

Astarion POV

---

Foolish woman.

We should be fighting, running.

They’d gut her open. They’d make me watch, thinking it would weaken me, break me, drag me back to whatever righteous little cage they’d prepared. Then back to Cazador. And then what did all this bleeding loyalty of hers buy me? Nothing but a small break from the master’s leash.

So run.
Gods, I should’ve run. She asked me to run.

But my legs…

They didn’t move.

I stayed. Watched her square those massive shoulders, blood still drying on her claws, eyes bright with that ridiculous stubborn light. 

I will kill them all. They made her bleed. They made her kneel. 

I will rip their throat out. 

But I waited. 

She begged me to wait. 

So I am waiting to see what she’d do.

And hating that I waited.

To see if she could save us. Save me. 

The leader—a brute in black leather and salt-crusted mail—addressed her snarling

“You’re travelling with a vampire spawn.”

I braced.

spawn.

And it was like a drop of blood hitting hot oil. Everything snapped. The brittle peace, the poised line of bows and ironvine, even the cold ache of my own self-preservation. Gone, replaced by something raw, immediate, feral.

Of course, it was about me. Always is. Always the monster at the center of the circle of blades.

Their eyes cut to me like knives — as if by simply existing, I’d invited them. As if by breathing, by being what I am, I’d earned this verdict.

And then there was her.

Standing there, broad and bright and terrifying in that leonin form— standing between me and them. Like it would change the outcome. Her shoulders squared, her mane flared with every ragged breath, and the scent of her blood was already staining the air.

They’d cut her down for it. Call it justice. Another righteous purge of the wretched vampire pet.

And she—gods, she didn’t even hesitate.

“I am,” she said. "What of it?" 

Then she spoke — low and rumbling, like stones dragged across old bones. Not frightened, not even strained despite the way her arm shook. She addressed them with that terrible calm, invoked the name of Ilmater, then Candlekeep — cloaking herself in holy chains and ancient tomes like armor.

Look at her.
All blood and breath and oaths.
It’s… intoxicating.

I should have felt disgust — I usually did at the sight of anyone so thoroughly entangled in their own virtue. But watching her stand there, huge and golden and terribly imposing, it felt less like piety and more like raw stubbornness, refusing to kneel. refusing to play the game by others' rules.  Theirs and mine.

A bitter taste crawled up my throat. Jealous, possessive, and mean.
little mention of me. Just her sacred chain, her vows to gods that never answered.

“Does she even see me here? Or just the task she burdened herself with?”

Then, as if it were nothing—

“He hasn’t harmed anyone.”

Just that.

Like she was talking about the weather.

Like it wasn’t even a question.

My ribs tensed. Something unspooled in my chest. I didn’t know what to name it.

They muttered around her. The hunters. Their words like teeth—“He will.” “He’s still a monster.”

She didn’t falter.

Swore by her god’s chain. Said she wouldn’t let me hurt anyone.

And I—I nearly laughed.

How dare she?

This broken, blood-drained priestess thought she could stop me? Control me?

NEVER.

Her promises were kindling at best.

They didn't believe it either. 

---

And then they — those filthy little carrion pickers—laughed at her. Mocked her. Called her weak, soft-hearted, dull-headed, charmed, bewitched, a lonely cat snared by pretty teeth.

How dare they

The leader laughed. Spat in the snow. Called her sick. Said I’d already fed from her. 

implying she was a mere plaything. 

How dare he, 

It wasn’t him calling me a monster, it was the way he looked at her, like she was something lesser. A thing to be mocked for caring. That's what made rage bloom in me like fire through dry vines. Not because it was untrue. But because it was mine to think, mine to whisper at her in the dark, not theirs to jeer across the snow with crude smirks and hands on hilts.

They were nothing. 

They were doing his work—Cazador’s—and they dared to look at her like that?

No.

They would not take me.

And they would not touch her. 

I will kill them all or die trying.

I still had the capsule. 

---

She tried again. Gods, she tried.

But they didn’t listen.

Of course they didn’t. 

But then she said—

“Over my dead body.”

And the world went still.

By the time the order came—“Get the spawn”—I was already moving.

The first blade I sank was bliss. Familiar. Easy. The body folded under me, hot and slick, blood fountaining up my arms. For a breath, the world made sense again. Just hunger, just survival. I could do this, kill two-thirds, maybe more, before I fell. 

I believed I could do it. 

Until I felt her.

Not behind me — in me.

Her breath caught. A tiny hitch. Barely there. But it was threaded straight through my chest, a bright wire pulled taut. When I took the next strike — a short blade slashing across my ribs — it wasn’t just my own pain that sparked white-hot. I felt her stagger. Heard her breath tear ragged in her broad chest.

I spun. Caught a glimpse of her clutching her side, claws slick with blood that should have stayed under her skin.

Her breath hitches every time they land a blow on me. Gods. She’s… sharing it?

She’s tied herself to me. Tethered us together in this slaughter so I might live a little longer. So I wouldn’t fall as quickly.

Who does that?

No one does that.

Just her. This battered, brutal, bright thing that stands there bleeding for me with the same calm certainty she’d pour tea. 

She is so cruel with her kindness, and it’s monstrous, the way it twists something low in me — a dark delight to know she would hurt herself just to keep me standing. That’s devotion. The kind even Cazador could never inspire.

I killed two more before the net caught my leg. 

The whip hit next—runes burning like fire in my bones.

I tore through the restraints, but it wasn’t enough.

There were too many.

I fought like an animal. Like I’d been bred for it.

Because I had.

But still—I went down.

My legs gave. Just—gave.
A clean, bright pain flared up my side where the hunter’s blade had slid in, so deep I felt it grind against something inside me that ought never be touched. My knees hit snow, teeth snapping together so hard I tasted enamel and blood.

No—no, I can’t—I can’t go back.

But already my vision was tunnelling. The edges grayed out, closing like a noose.

Through that tightening ring of sight, I saw them.
Gur boots are moving in.
Crossbows resetting.
Ironvine stinks thick enough to gag on.

And behind them—so far, gods, she looked so far—Elenya stood swaying. Her claws were slick, her broad chest heaving like a bellows over hot coals. Blood dripped from her mane in fat, dark droplets that hissed against the snow. She looked… tired. Not just wounded—spent. Hollowed out by all the pretty chains and old promises she’d tangled around herself for me.

I felt something tear inside me. Not flesh. Deeper.

They’ll cut her down. And for what?

A fresh wave of pain rolled up my ribs, stealing my breath. I pitched forward, catching myself on clawed hands. The snow bit cruel and cold, painting red where I braced.

All this blood. All these dead. And it ends the same way. I fall. She dies for it. And I—

My breath hitched, panic and grief tangling until I couldn’t sort one from the other.

I go back.

Back to Cazador.

I saw it so vividly, my stomach heaved—his long white fingers twining through my hair, lifting my chin. That soft, poisonous smile. The delight dancing behind his eyes as he pressed his cold lips to my temple, purring about how clever I’d been to try. How adorable my little rebellion was. Before he broke every inch of me again to be sure I wouldn’t forget the lesson.

She’ll die for this. And I’ll end right back at his feet. Collar tighter. Chains deeper. And it will all have been—

A strangled laugh ripped up my throat. It burned. Almost a sob.

For nothing. Gods, for nothing.

---

She only cast control spells.

Hold. Sleep. Command.

Nothing lethal. Nothing cruel.

Nothing that would have actually stopped them. Not truly.

And gods—how could I have been so stupid?

She wouldn’t really fight.
Wouldn’t kill.
Of course, she wouldn’t.

She was Ilmater’s. His priest. His chain draped in soft words and quiet pain. That gentle leash always looped around her throat.
And those are her darling little Gurs with whom she spent two years camping in some fucking ruin. 

She’d promised to keep me from hurting anyone.
Promised to stop me if it came to that. Promised—so solemn, so sure—never to let me slip.

Which meant—

It meant she promised to kill me.

And worse—

I asked her to.

I begged her, back in that wretched crypt, to be my last kindness. If it ever came to it, if the hunger swallowed me whole… she’d be the one to end it. I thought I wanted that. Gods, I thought that was mercy.

But now—watching her stand there, hand on her holy symbol, eyes wide with terror and that stubborn sorrow—my gut twisted around itself.

If I took the capsule now—the poison I still had tucked away, hidden for a clean exit—she’d die with me.

That cursed bond she’d cast. Her agony braided into mine. If I drank it now… it wouldn’t just be my end.

She’d drop where she stood.

And I—

I couldn’t do it.

This wretched bitch.
This idiot.
This fragile, bleeding marvel who didn’t even know she’d made herself the baited trap of my whole ruin.

I can’t kill her.

So I did the one thing that’s always kept me alive.
kept me sane. 

I drifted away, and I waited.

Bound.
Dragged.

Their ropes bit into my arms, silver net flaring hot across my nerves. Each tug was an insult. A reminder, I was prey again. Property again.

The world blurred around me, streaks of white and shadow. A hunter’s boot crunched close by my ear. Somewhere, horses snorted, breath pluming in cold puffs.

Through it all, I just… watched her.

Standing there. Broad and breathless, her hand pressed hard to that chain at her throat. As if clutching it might steady her.

Her eyes shone—moonlit, wet at the corners.
Murmuring prayers, I couldn’t hear. Maybe to Ilmater. Maybe to the pieces of herself she was trying not to break.

Please, I thought. Please, set me free of this. Of everything. Just say the words. Do what you swore.

I expected it. Truly, I did.

Mercy’s End, she’d called it, in that gentle rasp. Promised it would be painless. Promised me an eternity with that soft, quiet, stupid god who sent this ridiculous soft, quiet, stupid woman staggering my way.

And maybe—maybe that would have been alright.
I’d tasted something good, at least. Once. Her hand on my chest, her voice in my ear, that foolish certainty that I was worth even one more day.

So take it from me now. Before they drag me back to him. Before Cazador has me crawling. Before he shoves your ruin in my mouth just to watch me choke.

No searing light. No burst of divine agony. No blessed slip into black.

Just her eyes going hard. Her breath caught, then shattering into something else. Something older, rawer. Her claws curled around that holy symbol, shoulders rolling forward, like a beast bracing to pounce. 

The spell was released.

Finally free. 

But then—

It didn’t hit me.

Tears started streaking her cheeks. 

Oh.

Oh gods.

It wasn’t mercy at all.

It was something so much crueller. So much darker. Something that unspooled inside me like a thousand hot needles.

And for a heartbeat—shameful, monstrous—I felt it.

Wonder.

---

It hit him.

The leader.

I saw it.

I saw it happen.

Saw the way his lip curled to spit some final order, then caught. Eyes went wide, veins blooming black under thin skin like cracks in old marble. His mouth opened, gurgling wet, but nothing came. Just the smell—Dry decay, hot and necrotic and immediate.

Saw him turn to dust.

No flame. No scream.

Just confusion. And fear. And then ash.

He turned to dust right there on the snow. Folded in on himself, skin sloughing from bones that were already rotting. The wind took what was left, carried it off like so much waste.

And I saw her trembling. Shoulders hunched, claws still half-clenched around that damned holy symbol. Tears streaked through her fur, catching red where blood had already matted it. As if the agony of it—of what she’d done—had torn through her just as surely.

As if the pain of it had torn through her.

And in that moment, I knew.

She hadn’t killed me.

She’d killed for me.

And gods—gods, it was monstrous. The way his veins blackened, the way his eyes shrivelled down to nothing, the way that curse or prayer or whatever dark mercy she wielded chewed him from the marrow out.

It was monstrous.
It was horrifying.

It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

A low, shuddering laugh tore through me, dry, cracking around the edges, not really laughter at all.

“Oh, look at her now,” I thought, half-sick, half-starving for more.
Not a healer. Not Ilmater’s gentle chain. Not some pious lamb led to slaughter.

Look at the ruin she can make of a man.
And for me.

What a terrifying, glorious creature.

And what a fool I was to ever think I could run from her.
Or let her go.

Then the white fog poured out from her feet.

It rolled across the ground in hungry curls, slick and silent. Reached out to kiss the hunters. The moment it touched them, they screamed—high, ragged, animal sounds. I saw one claw at his own face, gouge deep enough to tear skin from bone. Another collapsed, spine arching as if knives pressed into every nerve.

She moved then.

Not like a priest or a caster, weaving some careful, distant spell.

She moved like a stray. A gutter-born cutthroat. A half-starved dog with nothing left to lose.

Her power ripped out raw and clumsy, oddly colored blasts, snapping through the dark, too bright, too wild. Her dagger went where it needed. Throat. Spine. Artery. Whatever the fog didn’t finish, she did.

And all the while—she wept.

Her eyes never left me. Even as she opened another man’s belly like fruit, even as his insides spilled warm across the snow—she was looking at me.

Coming to me. Fighting for me. 

And it was wrong—gods, it was wrong—how deeply it twisted through me. This ugly, gnawing thing in my gut that wasn’t revulsion wasn’t fear. It was delight. Dark, terrible, breathtaking delight.

Because this—this ruin—she wrought it for me. Breaking herself as much as the Gurs hunters, all for me. This was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. 

Something broke open inside me then. Not pity. Not relief. Not even the old familiar lurch of triumph that comes when your predator’s teeth sink clean.

No — this was something else. Something low and hot and sick, curling through my gut, sinking claws in places I didn’t know could still bleed.

Because look at her.
Look at her.

Her breath came in ragged sobs, claws slick with bright blood, tears scoring clean lines through the filth on her muzzle. Her power burned out of her raw, unpolished — ugly even. Her strikes were too desperate, her spells too loud, her blade too wet. There was nothing graceful here. Nothing divine.

But all absolutely glorious. She was ruin incarnate. Ruin that wept. Ruin that shook with horror even as it gutted what threatened me.

A mighty guardian ripping through the battlefield. 

And all of it — every shredded throat, every scream that died in her fog — was for me.

A low sound escaped my throat, half a laugh, half something broken and hungry. My fangs ached. Gods, my hands trembled. I wanted to reach for her — drag her closer, press my mouth to her pulse just to feel it thunder. My own heart was racing, sharper than any blade, and not from fear. Not even from the fight. From this. From watching her slaughter in my name.

For my sake. 

The pious Ilmatari breaking her vows so spectacularly, I knew she didn't technically. She was defending herself, but seeing her soaked to the elbows in gore, White's mane and fur turned crimson in blood. It looked like... like she was made for this.

felt holy and profane at the same time.
Because it was rapture, wasn’t it?
The way her throat bobbed on every sob, each breath a fragile thing that said she was still here, still mortal, still breakable.

And still fighting.
Still mine.

I didn’t have a name for this. This sharp thing lodged under my ribs, cracking with each pulse of my heart. It wasn’t hunger. It wasn’t lust. Or — gods, perhaps it was some vile blend of both. Perhaps too twisted to recognize.

Her claws buried themselves in another man’s shoulder, dragging him close. Her dagger found the hollow of his throat. Blood sprayed — hot, bright — catching in her mane. Her eyes locked with mine the entire time.

I nearly groaned as heat pooled in my core.

Oh, look at her now. 
The martyr who fed the vampire and gutted the monster hunters. 

Gods forgive me — I wanted her. In ways I couldn’t yet comprehend. Wanted that ruin turned on my behalf forever. Wanted her claws to always come for me, not to tear, but to hold. Wanted her to keep that promise over and over, until there was nothing left in her but this desperate, savage grace.

I wanted her like this.
I adored her like this.

---

She finally arrived and came to me through the carnage.

The fog coiled around my ankles first—white, thick, trembling with the agony she poured into it—and for a mad heartbeat, I braced for it to burn. For it to peel my skin from bone as it did the hunters, to shred me from the inside out.

But it didn’t.

It welcomed me. It wrapped around me like her scent, like her hands, cool and close and almost tender. It smelled of Cedar, night orchid, iron, and sorrow. It didn’t bite or claw. It cradled. My breath caught. A shiver ran up my spine — sharp and cold and unbearably sweet. Gods, I’d never felt anything like it. I should have been terrified. But all I could do was draw in another breath, pull more of it inside me, dizzy on the grief and devotion threaded through every curl.

Then she reached me.

Her claws pressed to my shoulder, blood-slick and shaking, and divine light flooded out of her.

Ilmater’s light.

It seared along my torn ribs, wove through shredded muscle, set every nerve alight — not with pain, but with blistering, impossible relief. My heart stuttered. Then raced. Faster than it had in decades. As if remembering it was meant to chase something. She looked like something out of a madman’s prayer. A towering angel of ruin, tears streaking her blood-matted fur, that terrible fog kept curling at her feet like a living penance. And from her chest, that divine radiance poured — molten, pure, too bright for my ruined soul to look at without flinching. 

She was something out of a madman's prayer. 
Mine, 
In that tomb, I begged the god of suffering for release. 

My breath hitched. Gods. I was drawn to her. In a way, I’d never been drawn to anything. Not blood. Not power. Not even freedom. Just her. Broken, brutal, sanctified in grief.

She was my divine intervention.

Then — a motion beyond her shoulder.

A rider. Half-mad, blade raised, plunging through the fog with death on his teeth. He didn’t even hesitate — he meant to carve straight through her.

And her head turned, eyes blown wide, hand snapping out. Light shot from her claws — a guiding bolt, searing through the fog to hammer into the rider’s chest. He jolted back, mouth open in a shocked gasp as the spell burned through flesh and bone.

But it wasn’t enough. Not yet.

And that— that’s when I stood.

No one could touch her.

Not while I still drew breath. Not while this new, raw, desperate thing in my chest — bright and sacred and monstrous all at once — still clawed to keep her near.

So I joined her.

We fought side by side.

Not with grace. Not with the careful, coiling predator’s dance I’d honed under Cazador’s cruel tutelage. Not with her measured spells and martyr’s chants.

No.

We fought with rage. With grief. With something shattered and incandescent between us. I tore into the next man with my claws because my knives were slick, lost somewhere under the churned snow and blood. She ripped another down with divine fire that still dripped tears from her eyes.

Her shoulder brushed mine. My snarls tangled with her hoarse sobs. And every breath we shared tasted of iron and frost and something that might have been mercy — if mercy could ever look so ruinous.

And in that moment, I understood.

I was never leaving her.

Because where else could a creature like me ever belong, if not at the side of something this terrible, this weeping, this good and bright?

---

"We are not no one, not monsters," she said before adding, "We are Elenya."

We?

What is she talking about?

Who are "we"?

I didn’t say anything. The words clung to the cold like breath turned to frost. But something inside me recoiled—no, shivered—at the sound of her voice.

It didn’t sound like her.

Or maybe it sounded too much like her. Like every part of her speech at once. A chord with too many notes. Too many wounds.

She was kneeling in the snow, blood still cooling on her fingers. Not just others’—hers too, I realized. Her skin was cracked. Lips dry. Hands trembling in a way that wasn’t from pain, but from the aftermath.

The way you tremble when you’ve come back from somewhere. She wasn’t looking at me. Just down. Her head was slightly tilted, like she was listening to something I couldn’t hear. Her lips moved once, too soft to catch. And then—She closed her eyes.

And I felt it. Like something settled.

The tension in the air didn’t fade. It just... dropped, like snow from an overloaded branch. Still heavy, but no longer waiting to fall.

Behind her, the bodies were cooling. The hunters—dead. Torn apart. And her magic still crackled faintly in the air, a lingering echo of what she’d unleashed. Of what we had done.

She had broken for me.

Because when she finally looked up at me—

Her eyes were alive. Animated.  Not in the metaphorical, sparkling way poets describe. No, I mean it literally. Gone was that empty, stormy blue gaze. I had only seen her eyes like that once before: the night I fed from her. After she let me sink my fangs into her neck and looked at me, caressing my cheek, reassuring me like I was the one who just escaped being drained.  It was something that opened inside her; I saw the truth beneath the mask.

Her eyes had been fogged for so long. Soft, distant, unreadable.

Now?
Now they looked like the sky before lightning.
Clear. Deep ocean blue with streaks of lightning, cracked open. Wild. 

I wanted to ask what happened.
I wanted to ask what she meant.
But I didn’t.

Because she was already touching my face lightly. Her clawed fingers were cold, but steady. Her other hand rose too, and she cupped my cheek, gently as a lover, but with the gravity of a goddess pressing a blessing into bone.

"You are okay," she whispered.

Not a question.

A statement. A realization. A reassurance.
not to me, to herself. 

And for a moment, I believed it.

Because she said it with those eyes.

And whatever had just happened inside her… it wasn’t over.

---

I watched her work as her eyes dimmed back to that stormy, muffled colour. Watched her claws — claws that had moments ago ripped men open — now close gently over glassy eyes, tug cloaks higher over ruined throats, settle stiff hands across sunken chests. She stacked them with a reverence that made something twist hard under my ribs. Like this was a vigil. Like she was still trying to honor them. Even after they’d tried to kill her. Even after we’d torn them apart.

Gods.

A fragile, ugly thought bloomed: Will she turn that grief on me?

Would she look up, tears bright on her muzzle, and see me as the reason she was weeping? Would she finally decide that whatever vow she’d made, it wasn’t worth this — I wasn’t worth this ?

And what then?

What would I do if she left me here, if that promise of hers crumbled under the weight of all this bloody guilt? I needed to be careful here. I can't lose her over this. I didn’t let myself linger on it. Couldn’t. So instead, I followed her. She struck a match. The bodies caught slowly, oily. Smoke curled up to join Selûne’s pale, watchful eye. I stood beside her as she bowed her head. Didn’t touch her. Watched her lips move around some strange language, her breath fogging in the cold. Couldn’t quite make myself join. Just listened to the quiet tears shake her frame, felt the way the grief poured off her like steam.

A simple farewell. “I saw you,” she whispered to the last one. “And I’m sorry.”

---

She couldn’t walk.

So I guided her.

Found an abandoned lodge. One she’d mentioned earlier. ruined. Damp. Safe.

I nearly fled.

Gods, I almost did. The moment we stumbled into this miserable ruin, when she sank to the floor and all that iron in her spine went slack, some shrivelled thing inside me clawed up my throat and screamed Run.

Because I didn’t want to watch what came next.

But I didn’t run. I couldn't anymore. 
Never.

I lit the damned fire. Sat down. Close enough that our shoulders brushed. Told myself it was exhaustion that kept me there, that made me watch her bow her head until her mane spilled forward to hide her face.

But then I saw her claws — dug so deep into her knees it was a wonder she hadn’t split herself open. Like she was the only thing holding herself together.

Then she started to shake. Small, silent tremors that travelled from her shoulders all the way to where our arms touched. Gods, it rattled through me. Made my throat tighten. Made my claws curl against my palms.

And before I could stop myself, the words fell out.

“You’re… still crying.”

It wasn’t meant to be cruel. Wasn’t meant to be anything, really. Just… I didn’t understand it. How could someone still weep after all that? How she could look at these slaughtered men — men who would’ve put a spike through her heart without a second thought—and still find grief enough to spill.

It confused me. It terrified me.

It shamed me.

How delighted I was to see her break and kill. 

The pleasure of her unravelling. 

Then the worst of it.

I had to know.

“Why were you getting hurt… when I was hit?”

My voice sounded strange to my own ears. Thin. Raw. I almost didn’t recognize it. Because I had felt it — through every clash, every searing cut. The way her breath caught when a blade found me. The way she wavered on her feet. Like my wounds had burrowed under her skin.

Then she said it. Soft. Like a confession whispered to the dark.

“Warding bond.”

And I swear something split in me.

She chose that.

She chose to suffer — chose to bleed — for me.

Even before she killed for me. 

Not out of compulsion, not because some vile spell forced her hand. Because she wanted to. Because she made some wretched promise to herself that I’d keep drawing breath, even if it meant carving her in half to do it.

"So I don’t lose you before I’m ready." she added. 

Gods.

It was hideous. It was breathtaking.

It was everything I didn’t know how to want.

And when I asked — voice low, scraped thin with horror or wonder or both — “You chose that?”

She only nodded. Slow. Heavy. Like it was obvious.

Like, of course, she did. A thousand instincts gnawed at me. Mock it. Twist it. Find the barbs before they find me. But tonight, the seemed muted, far away. All I could do was watch her shoulders quake under that tangled mane.

So my hand moved on its own. Found the thick fur at her neck. Began to knead — hesitant at first, terrified she’d flinch away, that I’d feel her pull from me. But she didn’t. Only shuddered once, then stilled.

“You’re trembling.”

Of course she was. How could she not be? After everything she’d torn through. After what we’d done — what I’d let her become.

But she didn’t say anything. Just breathed. Let me touch her. Let me stay.

And gods help me, I wanted to stay.

I wanted to keep my hand on her. Keep feeling that fragile heat, the soft give of muscle under old scars. Because it meant we were both still here. Still together in this horror.

So I told her the only truth I could find.

“You did your best. Gods know I’ve seen what it looks like when someone doesn’t try. You… you tried so hard. You always do.”

And she laughed. Not kindly. A sharp, splintered little thing that sliced through my ribs.

It wasn’t enough.

It’s never enough. I couldn’t even save them from me.

And there it was.

The twist of the knife.

Because all this ruin, all this grief — she wore it like a chain of her own making. Blamed herself for every corpse cooling in the snow. As if she hadn’t been the one saving me — as if any of those bastards would’ve shown her the mercy she showed them.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. And I was. Gods, I was.

More than I’d ever been sorry for anything.

Then she looked at me. Really looked. Those battered eyes, still wet with tears and older hurts.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

Her claws touched my face — cautious, blood-matted, heartbreakingly gentle.

“Say you know it.”

I almost couldn’t. The words were glass in my throat.

But her eyes held me fast, and in the end I nodded. Just enough.

“I know. At least… I’m trying to.”

Because what else could I give her? I’d already taken everything else.

We sat like that for a while. Shoulder to shoulder, breath mingling with the thin, acrid smoke. My hand drifted to her mane again, claws combing through snarls sticky with old blood. I didn’t know why I did it — didn’t know why it made something in me loosen. It was absurd. Childish. Dangerous.

Because what if I grew used to it?

And then I was telling her how she looked in the fight. Not monstrous. Not vile. But beautiful.

Terrible. Yes. But beautiful. Like someone who would tear down the world just to keep what was hers.

And the dark truth was — that was what I wanted. That was what kept my own heart thundering in my chest, louder than it had in centuries.

Because she chose to stand there. Choose to suffer for me. Choose to keep me.

And if Cazador ever came for her because of it… Gods help him. All his torture and compulsion would not smother the eternal rage that would consume me.

I’d carve him sooner or later into scraps so fine not even the rats would find enough to feast on.

Because she was mine now, too. I don't know my what. But mine for sure

Whether she knew it or not.

for once, I did mean to lean in. One moment our foreheads were almost touching, breath catching together in that fragile hush — and then I was slipping, letting my head drop against her shoulder. Felt her broad frame go tense under my cheek for half a heartbeat. Gods. I almost pulled away. Almost snarled something, cutting just to preserve the last brittle scrap of distance. Because this — pressing my nose into the thick, matted fur at her neck — this was too much. Too close. Too real.

But then I breathed her in. 

Smoke. Blood. Sweat. Cave water, cedar, juniper, myrrh and night orchid.. Her.

And I just… cracked. The tight, icy coil that had been holding me upright since we fled the ambush gave way, and I let myself lean into her fully. My nose buried deeper into that warm ruff, my breath rasped out slow, raw, nearly shaking.

I was memorizing it. Every scent, every tiny hitch of her chest under me. Because some worm-eaten part of me was certain I’d lose this. That I’d wake alone again, cold stone under my cheek, her scent already fading.

---

She just sat there. Let me rest against her. Let me stay. Her breaths were shallow, uneven — as if this cost her, too. The fire at our feet crackled low, throwing tiny embers across the dirt. It was quiet. Too quiet. My thoughts churned with all the ugly things that quiet made room for.

---

And then — gods — her claws lifted. I felt them hesitate behind my head, still trembling from all the slaughter. But they found my curls anyway. Sifted through them, slow, careful, smoothing away the snarls, working down to the base of my neck.

Her pads pressed small circles into my scalp. Gentle. Almost absent, like her hands were moving of their own accord.

And it nearly undid me.

A sound slipped out before I could trap it — half sigh, half shiver. Pathetic. I actually nuzzled closer, hands clutching tighter at her cloak like it was the only thing keeping me from splintering completely.

No words. What could we possibly say?

I had centuries of practiced whispers, pretty barbs, poisoned comforts — and not one would survive this silence. They’d die the moment they touched the cold air, exposed for the hollow things they were.

So I just stayed there. Let her claws comb through me like I was something fragile instead of sharp. Let my mouth bump against her collar — not a kiss, not anything graceful — just a broken creature clinging to the first warmth it found.And it was terrifying how badly I wanted it. How I could already feel myself sinking into it, like if I just pressed close enough, long enough, I’d disappear inside her and never have to face the world again. 

The sound came before I realized what it was.

Low at first. Barely there. A vibration, more than a sound—a rumble I felt in her chest where my cheek rested, soft and steady, like thunder smothered in velvet. It took me a moment to place it. Then another to believe it.

She was purring.

Not the lazy, smug hum of a cat basking in sunlight. No. This was deeper. Wilder. Alive in a way that made my breath catch. Like it was stitched into her bones and now spilling free, unbidden.

It rolled through her, through me, where our bodies touched. My hand curled slightly tighter against her side, instinctive. Her claws combed through my hair again—slow, soothing, catching gently at snarls without pulling. Like she had no intention of stopping. Like she wanted me there. Wanted this.

And gods help me, I wanted her to.

I didn’t understand it. Not fully. I’d curled around enough bodies in my time to know the difference between heat and comfort, between seduction and safety. This was neither. Or maybe both. Or maybe something else entirely—something I didn’t have words for, because no one had ever given this to me.

Not like this.

No bargains. No glamour. No leash.

Just warmth. Claws and breath and silence that felt almost sacred. For a few fragile moments, it was something real.

until her nightmare.

When she finally exhaled — really exhaled, the tension leaking slowly from her shoulders — something in me gave out.

Before I could stop myself, my hand found hers. Cold, awkward fingers twining through hers — rough, calloused, still faintly sticky with blood. Not elegant, not seductive, not anything I’d honed over the years. Just… desperate. Human. Grasping.

And she didn’t let go.

She held on. Claws curling around my hand like it was something worth keeping. And I swear to every wretched god watching — my entire chest felt too tight for breath. And the purr resumed

Pressed shoulder to shoulder, the air was cold enough that each exhale clouded softly and ghost-like. Her heartbeat slowed beneath me — a heavy, soothing thrum I tried not to memorize too greedily. My cheek was half-buried in her mane, my nose brushing skin so warm it bordered on feverish. Every breath drew in more of her — that wild scent of pine and sweat and torn leather — and each time I told myself it would be enough.  And each time it wasn’t. I found myself pressing closer. Letting my arm drape across her ribs, cautious at first, then heavier, almost possessive. Like I could anchor her here. Like I could make her stay.

She shifted slightly beneath me, her cheek brushing the crown of my head. A small movement, affectionate, unthinking. And the purr deepened. Gods, it deepened. Like it had a language of its own—like it was speaking directly to something ancient and unguarded in me. It said: You’re here. I want you here. I’m not afraid of you.  My throat tightened. My claws itched with the need to anchor us in place. To pull the blanket higher, to push the world further out. To shield her from the ghosts she refused to name—and from the ones that still bled from me. Because I could feel them. Haunting her. Burrowing into the stillness like thorns. And still, she held me. Still, she petted me. As if I were the one in need of soothing.

Which, of course, I was.

I always was.

But no one had ever seen that before. Not through all the charm, not through the armor I sharpened into something glittering and cruel. Not until now.

Mine, something whispered inside me.

She’s mine. Not in the old way. Not in the vile, twisted manner Cazador used to hiss, claiming me like a prize. This was different. This wasn’t ownership. It was… anchor. Orbit. The pull of something terrifyingly mutual.

My divine intervention.

We didn’t speak again. We didn’t need to. Her purr was constant now—steady and low, vibrating like a lullaby meant only for me. And I let it carry me. Let it drown out the chaos for a little while. She didn’t pull away.

My fingers traced light circles over her side. She didn’t flinch.

Then her claws again. Gods.

They sifted through my hair — slow, uneven, catching on snarls I hadn’t bothered to fix since we fled the blood and snow. Each careful drag of her pads across my scalp sent shivers skittering down my spine. My breath stuttered against her collar, embarrassingly loud in the hush of the lodge.

She didn’t do it like a lover. Or a caretaker. More like someone desperately needing something to do with her hands so she wouldn’t splinter apart. But it still landed the same — sharp, electric, carving lines of fragile pleasure through skin starved of gentleness for far too long. Sometimes I shivered. Couldn’t help it. Her claws would press flat then, palm warm against the back of my head, holding me close. And for a terrifying instant, my body would go taut, expecting command, or cruelty, or something that bit.

But there was nothing. Just her steady hand. Her chest rising and falling. And slowly — so painfully slow — I eased into it. Sighed. Let the stiffness bleed from my shoulders. At one point, I even tipped my face up, seeking something I couldn’t name. Her eyes met mine — so raw, so tired — and she huffed a little breath that brushed my cheek, almost a ghost of a smile. Her claws traced behind one of my pointed ears. And gods. My whole body went loose. Like someone had finally cut a puppet’s strings. I slumped, helpless under that gentle rake of claws, a faint tremor running through me from scalp to heels. Her claws catching delicately at the fine hairs there. I melted. Fully. My breath stuttered out like a boy’s, my limbs slackening until I was half-sprawled across her, head pillowed against the curve of her collarbone.

So she did it again. And I almost made a sound. Almost begged. 

It should’ve been undignified.

It wasn’t.

It felt right.

Her tail curled around my ankle. Her palm flattened against the back of my head, cradling me close like I was fragile. Precious.

At one point, she whispered something—barely a breath, barely there—and I didn’t catch the words. But her tone melted the last of me. I tilted my face up, just slightly, enough to see her.

Eventually, we drifted. Not asleep, not fully. But not awake either. Somewhere in between.

And when I woke in the deep dark again, her claws were still in my hair. My leg was draped over hers. I hadn’t meant to. I hadn’t noticed

Eventually, we drifted. Not asleep, not fully. But not awake either. Somewhere in between.

And when I woke in the deep dark again, her claws were still in my hair. My leg was draped over hers. I hadn’t meant to. I hadn’t noticed.

But neither of us moved.

And if anyone had tried to pry us apart in that moment, I would’ve gutted them with a smile.

She was mine.

I didn’t know when the thought started. Only that it was there now. Rooted. Fierce. I had no gods left. But if I did, I would’ve sworn myself to her protection.

Even if she didn’t ask for it.

Especially because she wouldn’t.

---

“You’re going to get yourself and others killed,” I said, trying to sound composed. But the words rattled in my throat like stones in a cracked goblet.

Because the truth was—I was afraid.

Not for me.

For her.

And that was worse.

Cazador knew I was gone now. Knew I wasn’t alone. That wasn’t just a risk—it was a crack in the dam. He saw her, or someone did. Her spells, her voice. What kind of vampire lord wouldn’t have ears in the ground? That display was unforgettable. And he would remember it. He would tear the city apart stone by stone if it meant getting answers.

I had seen what he did to anyone who defied him.

And now she’d made herself a target.

When I warned her, she didn’t flinch. Didn’t even hesitate. Just fired back with logic and divine politics like that would stop a monster who didn’t care about consequences.

And then she invoked Candlekeep.

My heart lurched sideways. Candlekeep. The most notoriously guarded bastion of knowledge in Faerûn. The Avowed. Those dry little freaks in robes who would rather burn a book than let the wrong eyes fall on it.

And she’d used their name.

When she said it was “technically true,” I felt the floor vanish beneath me.

I don’t remember grabbing her arm or how my voice found that razor’s edge—just that I suddenly couldn’t breathe. All I could hear was you said you didn’t work for anyone, and every part of me screamed trap. Was I her pet project? Was I being delivered to some archive? A case study in pretty monsters?

Was I just another secret to shelve?

The betrayal boiled up, fast and acidic. I spat questions, sharp and fast, my chest tightening like it always did when I felt the leash tightening, when someone knew more than they were telling and I didn’t have a way to claw it out of them.

But she just... huffed.

Huffed. Rolled her eyes and called me a paranoid idiot. And then, like it was the most obvious thing in the world, dropped it:

She was an Avowed. Technically. Sort of. An honorary one. Not officially inducted—just… tolerated. Welcomed. Insisted on, apparently. “A working suit,” she called it, like it was a cloak she shrugged on.

The absurdity of it nearly broke me.

Not the Candlekeep part.

But the way she said it. Like it didn’t matter. Like I was ridiculous for thinking it did.

She snapped when I gawked at her. “Why are you acting so surprised?”

And gods help me—I was. I was surprised. Not because she wasn’t clever or well-read. But because she never told me. Not once. Not a single offhand remark or self-important puff of pride. Not until now, when it just tumbled out like it meant nothing.

She wasn’t hiding it, she said.

It just never came up.

It never came up.

I stared at her, something shifting painfully in my chest. How many pieces of herself had she just assumed didn’t matter enough to share? How much of her did I still not know?

All this time I’d been measuring her in degrees of utility and unpredictability, trying to slot her into my catalogue of threats and potential allies—and she’d been quietly wearing the mantle of a Candlekeep field researcher like it was just another coat in the wardrobe.

And she’d used that name—for me. Without hesitation. To protect me.

Even now, with the weight of the whole bloody situation pressing down, all I could focus on was the fact that she’d invoked institutions and gods in my defense. That she was still here. Still choosing this.

Her face changed again when I told her she’d get herself killed.

And then came the words.

“I made you a fucking promise. I won’t let him have you. Don’t you get it? I killed for you.”

Something in me snapped.

Not in fear.

In relief.

That word—“killed”—rang like a bell in my ribs. Because for all her poise and distance and emotional rigor, that was the raw truth. Not posturing. Not protective lies.

She’d killed for me.

I should’ve felt shame. Horror, even.

But what I felt instead was—

Joy.

Hot, raw joy, blooming through my bones like wine. The way she said it, so casually brutal, like it wasn’t even worth debating. Like, of course, she had. As if her own blood soaked into the snow was just the cost of keeping me safe.

And then she called Cazador a “mere vampire lord.”

That tipped it into disbelief.

I stared at her, genuinely unsure if I should laugh or scream. A mere vampire lord. It was absurd. It was madness. But gods help me—it was also... comforting. Because she wasn’t afraid of him the way I was. She should be. She’d seen what he could do. And still, she stood there like a lion in snow, daring him to take one step closer.

My fear was a noose. Hers was a sword.

Gods, what else didn’t I know about her?

And—how do I protect her from him, when she kept walking straight into the fire with a smile on her lips and a library card in her hand?

I didn’t know.

But I knew this:

Cazador would have to tear through me to reach her.

And if she killed for me—

Then maybe I could finally learn what it felt like to do the same.

And then came the strange part.

Out of everything—out of all the chaos and horror and righteous fury—the only times I’d actually managed to rattle her… to draw out something sharp and reactive and personal… weren’t when I questioned her choices, or mocked her divine charity, or even made snide comments about Ilmater’s everlasting endurance nonsense.

It was when I insulted her craft.

The time I called her a talentless bard in the tunnels—she’d nearly thrown me into a wall.

And now, when I raised a single incredulous brow about her being an Avowed, her mane puffed up like a threatened cat. Pride bristling down her spine. Eyes flashing with something that wasn’t cold restraint or calculated poise—but indignation.

“I’m a scholar bard, god damn it, and a pretty good one at that.”
It would have been funny. Adorable, even.

If it hadn’t been so telling.

“You’re acting almost like you couldn’t believe I could be one of them. I’ll have you know they insisted until I said yes, okay? That old greedy weasel, the Keeper of Tomes, didn’t let me go until I said yes. He said he would give me the title and protection even without me formally joining and…”

She trailed off, waving a hand like the details bored her.

But I wasn’t bored. I was… curious.

Why did it matter so much? Why did I, of all people—cynical, callous, irreverent me—why did my opinion on her academic standing sting?

I racked my brain for some past comment, some context, but came up empty.

So I asked.

"Darling?" I coaxed, drawing the word out like honey from a comb.

She didn't look up. "What?"

Her voice was flat, crisp, but there was a note in it. Dry. Brittle. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was pouting. No, I was certain she was.
Not that her expression or speech had shifted—she was too practiced for that. She never really talked unless it was about her work. Her research. Her little quests for forgotten truths and half-ruined shrines. She wasn’t guarded so much as distilled—her conversations pruned down to relevance, trimmed of excess. 

But the tone was unmistakable. She was sulking,  bristling.
Cute.

An image started to click into place in my mind. A ridiculous one, but maybe... true.

“Oh, we’re in a mood, aren’t we?” I added to try to soften the tension. 

“What do you want?” There it was—that clipped tone, tighter than her posture. Still not cracking, not really. But definitely creaking.

I grinned, teeth bared. “Is it me, or are you perhaps a bit sensitive about not being taken seriously as a scholar?” That’s what I do when I get nervous. When I don’t know how else to approach something.

Her head snapped toward me like I’d just asked if she wanted to be my thrall.
I hadn’t meant it cruelly. Not this time. Not really. But I genuinely didn’t understand. I had called her everything from hopelessly naïve to morally self-important. I'd scoffed at her god, her values, her very purpose. Called her kindness a complex. And she’d let it slide with little more than a sigh.

But this? This one thing—her research, her academic legitimacy—that was the blade that drew blood?

“I just don’t understand,” I said, quieter this time. “Why would you be okay with me calling your whole belief system stupid and frankly naïve, and brush it off—yet… be bothered by my opinion on your qualification? I am hardly the erudite myself, so why does this bother you? Why that part of you?”

She blinked. Once. Slowly, and for a moment, she looked genuinely surprised. Like she hadn’t expected anyone to notice this wound—let alone press on it gently. 
Then something shuttered behind her eyes—like a door slamming closed, just as I caught a glimpse of what was inside.

She turned. Adjusted her collar. Smoothed her sleeves. A stall. A practiced deflection.
But then, she spoke.
Quietly.
Without dramatics. Without philosophy.

“It’s not that your particular opinion matters on this subject. It’s more like… It's the subject that matters in general.  I don’t know. It’s complicated to explain.”

“Try me,” I murmured.
She did. " The people I help, like you. It gives me a sense of purpose, yes. It matters in some ways, but it's their story. I like doing it, but I am helping them write. It's necessary, but also. not without cost. not without pain and not about me."
She paused, breath steady, even if her voice trembled faintly at the edges.

“What I learn along the way—what I record—that’s different. That’s the only thing I do that doesn’t hurt anyone. That makes the world easier and better without cost. Understanding and recording… It’s the only thing I do just for me. This… this was denied to me for a very long time. Even used against me.”

“Research was denied to you?” I echoed. “And used against you?”

“Yes, and no. Knowledge in general was denied. I was brought up illiterate. For a long time. Kept that way. To this day, I still have never received proper scholarly training."
My jaw went slack.
She? Illiterate? She who could recite funerary practices of half a dozen extinct cultures from memory? Who corrected my syntax in Abyssal?  
"When I was younger, ” she continued, “I was really ignorant. About everything. No one explained anything—why the world worked the way it did, why things happened the way they did. I was no one, so no one bothered.”

I remembered her saying something, once, about being somewhat of an orphan. An empty past, unnamed places.

But this… this was different. This was more than abandonment.
What type of orphanage doesn't even teach the wards how to read? 
She wasn’t just orphaned. She had been erased.

“One day,” she continued, “someone taught me the letters. Just one afternoon. He said it would be easier if I could read the titles while fetching him books. That was the biggest kindness anyone had ever shown me.”

Her voice cracked slightly—barely—but I heard it. I felt it like a blade between my ribs.
“It opened my world, and then I could find answers. The world stopped being so strange. So scary, there was always a reason. Even if we didn’t know it, it was there. Every scrap of knowledge made the world a safer place. without hurting me or anyone else.”
She paused again, then said softly:
“I spent most of my life being no one. No name. No face. Everything about me was made for someone else. I was a tool. A saviour. A stranger. A ghost, a healer. 
Always a character in someone's story.”

And just like that—I understood.

Not all of it. Not yet.

But enough.

Because I knew what it meant to be no one, in a way, to have no past, no choices, no face of your own.

“Then one day… I chose,” she said. “So why not make it my story? A collector of stories. I started writing. Remembering. Not because someone told me to. Because I would matter. And I’ll leave those books behind, so maybe—maybe—one day, another 'no one' will find them. And the world won’t be as scary anymore.”

She didn’t look at me when she said it.

For all her masks and mercies. For all her biting wit and priestly distance. Her pride—her identity—didn’t live in the gods or the blades or the spells.

It lived in ink and parchment. In the soft rustle of turning pages. In the act of remembering.

She was many things—warrior, savior, deceiver, stranger.

But before anything else, she was a lorekeeper.

And that was the part I had wounded.

And gods, what a terrible thing that was. Because… I understood what it was like to be a character in someone else's story.
But unlike me, she had carved something of her own from that emptiness.
Something no one else could take.

Her story,

And I had mocked it.

She was helping me write Mine.
She’d asked for nothing in return. Not praise. Not protection. Not even belief.
And gods help me—I’d scorned hers.

I, who knew the pain of being rewritten. I, who was still bleeding from the names forced on me.
Could only wonder at the story she picked for herself.
The one she is sharing with me. Not to be pitied. Just to be understood. Just because I asked. 

If I hadn't, I wouldn't have known. 
I couldn't have imagined. 
For all my earlier accusations about assumptions. 

I was always the one making them. 
About who she is? What she wants. What she believed. 
tried to pin her down in a role. a mold I could understand. 

Something to kill, to fuck or to use. 

Asked questions looking for weaknesses. sniffing for blood. 
No wonder she didn't make sense. 
No wonder, she kept disproving my assumptions.

I wasn't paying attention. 
only saw and believed the story in my head that I wrote about her.

What a fascinating story she must have written. 
From an illiterate orphan without a face or a name to the most impressive lorekeeper I have ever known.

“Tell me your story,” I said.

She glanced at me, nonplussed. “Which part?”

“All of it.” I smiled. “But let’s start with how you became one of the Avowed.”

She hesitated for a moment—just long enough for me to catch the flicker of calculation. But then she nodded, folded her arms, and leaned against the cave wall.

“I went to Candlekeep for the first time… oh, twelve years ago, maybe. I’d just reached this part of the Sword Coast. Decided to check it out.”

She said it like one might say they’d stopped into a roadside inn out of boredom.

“I knew you had to offer knowledge to enter,” she continued. “So I gave them something I’d written. Just a field observations document. I didn’t think much of it—they accepted it, let me in. The place was great. Safe. Quiet. Lots of scrolls. Back then, it seemed like heaven. So many things to learn.”

“And?” I prompted, leaning forward.

“Well, apparently, while I was busy devouring every book in the library before being kicked out, the document caught someone’s attention. Made its way up to a Great Reader—he liked it enough to make a bit of a fuss. Next, they found me a few days later. I was in the central court, on my way back to the visitors' library. I almost lied and told them I was someone else when I saw four monks screaming my name and running toward me. They asked me about my entrance tribute, and I answered their questions. I thought maybe my notes were a bit disorganized, and they changed their mind. But it's quite the opposite. They were very interested in it and started asking questions. Idiot, I thought it was just a matter of clarification until they asked me who wrote it and I told them I did.”

She shrugged.

“Next thing I know, I’m hauled up in front of the First Reader and the Keeper of Tomes themselves. They started interrogating me—where the information came from, how I’d gathered it, whether I was lying. I told them it was all first-hand accounts. Some of it, they didn’t believe… until I helped them verify parts using illusions, you know, showing them people and places to scry on.”

“And then?” I said, fascinated.

“They got really ridiculously frantic. Kept asking if I had more documents like that one. I was hurting for gold badly at the tome. So I figured, why not? I sold them copies of a few more notebooks—sanitized and redacted the sensitive bits. The First Reader looked like he was going to faint from joy.”

I huffed a laugh. “Really?”

“I swear, it was absurd. They put me up in some fancy suite and started calling me an honored guest. I didn’t care, except for the access to their special libraries. I kept thinking, ‘Why not milk it?’ I never planned to stay long.. The beds were too soft, and so were the people. ”

“But then,” she continued, “the Keeper of Tomes got really pushy. Wanted me to join officially. I said no, many times. I didn’t want to be tethered to an institution. I’d had enough of those.”

That… made too much sense.

“But he kept insisting. That old man never got used to hearing no. To this day, he started making outlandish offers until he made me one I couldn't refuse. A deal too good to be true. If I swore to never destroy knowledge, which I would never want to, and if I promised to deliver similar research, meaning the occasional organized copy of my travel notes, he’d give me a field title. An Avowed, with none of the obligations I didn’t want. No supervision. Just submission of work. No oaths of fealty. I could choose what I shared. It would be recorded, published and spread by the great library.”

I blinked. “That’s… extremely generous.”

“Right? When I doubted it to be true,” she said, almost laughing. “That shameless despot just crooked his head and plainly declared that his word was law in Candlekeep, so he could do whatever he wanted, without exceptions. And it would’ve been stupid to refuse.”

I listened, awestruck, as she listed the benefits. Candlekeep’s full sponsorship. Requisition privileges for scrolls and magical items. Diplomatic weight. Permanent quarters. Safehouses. Gold. Protection. Sanctuary. Freedom.

Gods. If I’d been offered that kind of power, I’d have bitten off someone’s arm for it.

“It was an insanely good deal,” she concluded. “I didn’t even understand why they offered it back then. Especially since the other Avowed weren’t exactly happy. Some of the Great Readers still aren’t. But the First Reader backed the decision.”

I had to ask. “What… was the document you gave them? The one that started it all?”

She grinned. “A multi-volume ethnographic treatise on the grimlocks of Earthroot.”

I stared. “I’m sorry, what?”

She laughed—properly, this time. “A study of Grimlock society.” 

I blinked. “Grimlocks have a society? I thought them beasts from the underdark”

“They do, actually. They’re not mindless monsters. They’re humanoid. Fully. Not savage, not unintelligent. Quite the opposite. They have social structures, rituals, and art. Most surface scholars dismiss them as xenophobic, degenerate Medusas worshipping monsters. But that’s a gross simplification born of fear and laziness,” Elenya said, fingers tracing absent patterns in the dirt.

“Yes, they are isolationist and Xenophobic—but it’s protective, not offensive. They are taught to hate non-Grimlocks for survival. Imagine what centuries of exploitation by illithids, drow and durugar slavers and surface dwellers alike would do to a culture. Especially the drow. They often raze their mushroom fields and drain their water cisterns. This often leaves full colonies starving and desperate for food, forcing them to raid surface communities in order to survive. They were also subjected to extreme depravity by aboleths.

Grimlocks adapted a cultural instinct toward concealment, mistrust of other species and control of their environment. Those who wandered away from their kin often experienced culture shock, but felt some sense of gratification at how strange things were. These wanderers were also known to be capable of overcoming their xenophobic leanings, viewing each individual they met as a potential pack member. " 

" I hate it even more when people call them Evil, while in truth, it's one of the most nonproblematic societies I have ever observed. They take care of each other, denounce greed,  and protect the weak, young and infirm within their packs. And their worship of Medusas isn’t even a real worship but adoration—it’s deeply symbolic. They are blind and thus immune to the petrification gaze. Medusas are guardians. They embody the paradox of inner vision and outer petrification. They call them Zarkhal’ar, the Tue Eyes, and believe they were once high shamans who ‘saw too much of the stone-dream’ and were transformed. In their myths, the stone dream is both a deity and an afterlife. Stone is viewed as their True Mother to the pact, so this transformation is both a punishment and a divine elevation. Allowing one to protect the clan from all that would harm it. If any creature infiltrated the Pack having a Zarkhal’ar, they would be petrified immediately. Grimlocks seek not to serve medusas, but to emulate them—spiritually hardened, untouched, seers of truth, protectors of the pack.”

“Don't even get me started on their language. Broken Beastial Undercommon, they called it. Can you imagine the level of disdain, the utter lack of respect and curiosity one must have for the subject of its own study to describe a language in those terms.  Their language is neither broken nor beastial, it's a fascinating creole—primarily Terran and Undercommon with embedded  Abyssal syntax and phonemes. It's rhythmic and vibratory, shaped for echolocation and resonant, allowing for long-distance communication through stone caverns.

They chant poetry into walls using mineral-inlay etchings, encoding myths, genealogies and social contracts in harmonic structures. Use those songs to help families teach their young. They are taught through vibrational ‘songs’ that double as both lullabies and oral histories. Three times a day, an orator will find the best resonance spot and start reciting for the children's story time. Their young are raised communally in a polycule—three to five ‘parents’ per family unit.

Most astonishing are their mortuary rituals: harmonic funerary chants that make cave crystals shimmer and stone walls resonate. These vibrations are meant to guide the soul’s ‘stone’ back into the womb of the world. Certain sounds, however, are forbidden—taboos rooted in a cultural memory of sonic frequencies that once stirred ‘the deep echoes’—which I suspect are aberrant presences (Illithides and abbeloth) buried in the Earthroot. That taboo isn’t superstition. It’s ancestral warning, carved in myth.”

I was quiet for a long moment. “I… didn’t know that.”

“No one cared to know,” she said. “Because no one cares to find out. Most people go in assuming the worst and see what confirms their beliefs.”

Then her voice softened, almost reverent.

“Anyway, that’s how I joined Candlekeep." She murmured, not quite looking at me. “Since then… everything I send gets copied. Safeguarded. Preserved. My work is now part of the Avowed’s archives. A form of immortality, really. Even if I die, my journals will be bound and treated as primary sources. Shelved as Amelia’s Codices on Underdocumented Cultures.”

Amelia.

I frowned. “Who’s Amelia?”

She didn’t flinch. Just gave a small, matter-of-fact shrug.

“That was the name of the working suit. Who I am to Candlekeep.”

I blinked. “So they don’t know anything about you?”

She shook her head, slow and sure. “Not really. Candlekeep has always been more interested in the knowledge than the method of acquisition. As long as no innocents are harmed and no minds are dominated for data, they care far more about accuracy than identity. And every account I’ve ever submitted has checked out. No one’s ever come forward to accuse me of violating their codes. No obvious deception. Just answers. Useful ones. So they let me be.”

I was silent for a moment.

“Still,” I said, carefully, “you’ve worked with them for twelve years. Why never get close to anyone there? Not enough to… at least tell someone who you are?”

Her mouth curved—something between a smile and a grimace.

“Outside the Keeper of Tomes and the First Reader?” she said. “I don’t trust any of them. And even those two—I only trust their greed. Their hunger for knowledge. I respect it. It’s honest. But if they knew more… they’d ask questions. Questions I don’t want to answer. Questions I can’t.”

There was something chilling in the way she said it. Not dramatic—just final. And I knew better than to press.

She continued after a moment, voice turning dry. “The rest of the Avowed have a… strange relationship with me. There’s respect, sure. But more hostility than anything else. Especially from the Great Readers. They do not like my lack of theoretical training. My lack of education. My methods. They call me a great collector sometimes. Says I would be nothing without my ability to access places.”

Her gaze slid toward me, sharp with old amusement. “They didn’t exactly appreciate the parachute promotion. They resented the fact that I got the title and privileges without the usual rites or ranks. And now they hate the special treatment.”

She tapped the pin on her cloak. It glimmered faintly, subtle enchantment woven into plain metal. “The Keeper of Tomes gave me this himself. It extends Candlekeep’s wards—prevents magical surveillance, scrying, tracking. He said it was to protect me. But really? It was to stop the others from spying on me. Many of them were trying to figure out how I gather my information. My ‘methods,’ as they called it.”

She let out a breathless laugh. Bitter. Fond. “As if I have some secret art. Some forbidden trick. Gods. I’m just walking into places and writing things down. It only took me three months with the grimlocks to get all that data. And I didn't even speak their language back then. Nor did I have a ring of tongues. I could only speak undercommon to them. They bend themselves backward to help me learn or understand the rest.”

She took the half-sprawled book nearby—The Curse of the Vampyr. Her voice turned low and contemptuous. “In the great library, they all had access to transmutation scrolls, to glamours. These may not be as good as shapeshifting, sure—but good enough. Most of them could cast Tongues. The magic was there. The resources were there. But they didn’t care to learn the things I record. They had already decided these places were savage. Corrupt. Unworthy. And if they did go, they only saw what they wanted to see. ”

She nudged the vampire lore book again with her boot. “Like this trash. Just recycled hysteria. Fear dressed up as fact. And they wonder why the archives are full of gaps. Gaps I filled." She listed them like facts, like items on a ledger: “The true social structures of troll warrens. The tactics of lesser yuan-ti sects. Ritual calendars of dark fae—ones not recorded in any formal lore. I filled gaps that no one else bothered to consider important. That was my secret.”

I sat back, watching her—really watching her.

There was no boasting in her voice. No vanity. Just weariness. Exasperation. The frustration of someone who’d done what others should have, and been resented for it. She went on, more quietly. “Even the ones who cared… they wanted the truth handed to them. They refused to set foot in places like that. Called them monstrous. Unsafe. As if safety was ever guaranteed anywhere. They wanted wards and sponsors and divine protections. Refused to lift a quill without them.”

She shook her head. “And the irony? Most of them are better mages than I’ll ever be. Stronger. Smarter. More learned. But none of them went.”

And I believed her. Not because she was trying to prove anything. But because I have seen her. She had gone. Alone. Unarmed, sometimes. With nothing but shifting skin and a ring of tongues. And she had watched, withheld judgement and remembered. I remembered how she met every monster we met on the way, like it was a person. forced them to be a person. She had looked into the dark, into the places people dismissed or feared, and she recorded them. Not for glory or power. But for understanding, so someone else—somewhere—would know.

Would remember.

“Amelia,” I repeated, almost to myself. A mask. A shield. A name worn like armor. But beneath it—still her.

“You’re wrong, you know,” I murmured.

She looked up. “About what?”

“You said they’re better than you. More powerful. More educated.” I leaned forward, letting my voice drop. “They aren’t.”

Her eyes narrowed—reflex, suspicion, mistrust. But I meant it.

“I know I tend to embellish the truth, but this isn't one of those times. So listen, Amelia of Candlekeep. Worth is measured in results. It always was and always will. You can not be worse than someone producing worse results. Any other metrics are plainly stupid."

She said nothing. But her hand stilled on the journal. Her shoulders softened.

And in that silence, I understood just a little more of her.
Of what she had built.
Of what she was.

I added, "You are stronger than even I gave you credit for. And I am sorry for insinuating otherwise. In my book, you are the greatest lorekeeper that ever lived.”

She exploded in laughter, eyes glistening, before ending, "Yeah, right! You almost got me there. But thank you for saying it either way. Okay, you are forgiven."

She kept chuckling, not knowing that I meant every word I said. 

---

We stayed longer in the lodge than was wise.

But neither of us could move on yet.

Not truly.

The place was cramped, drafty, and smelled faintly of old pine and smoked meat. A hunter’s rest, abandoned now. A ghost of someone else’s simpler life.

We made it our den.

She shifted again—casually, effortlessly.

One moment, she was a leonin. The next, a broad-shouldered goliath woman stood in her place, skin thick and striated like cracked marble, hair shaved on one side, the rest a long blue braid coiled over her shoulder like rope. I caught a glimpse of her old face as it melted away—no shame, no hesitation. She didn't even turn her back anymore.

“It’s for the cold resistance,” she said with a shrug, like she was pulling on a heavier cloak.

Gods.

Gods, it still does something wrong in me.

Not out of disgust. Or fear.

Something more primal. More selfish.

Watching her wear another body—so easily, so truly—it makes me want to touch her just to see what’s real. Makes me want to ask who she is this time, as if I’ll ever get the same answer twice.

But the worst part?

Each form is hers. The way she moves. The way she tilts her head mid-thought. The cadence of her voice, no matter the throat.

They're not disguises. They're… versions.

And if I stay long enough, I think I’ll come to know them all.

That should terrify me.

It doesn’t.

It just makes me ache.

She paced the length of the small room, checking inventory. Recounting rations, stacking scrolls. Her breath fogged the window only slightly—always too cold to fully mist.

“We should lay low,” she said. “They’ll expect us to run.”

I tilted my head. “You’re suggesting we stay put after nearly dying?”

Her expression didn't change. “Yes. That’s precisely why it’ll work.”

She was annoyingly right.

She continued, rifling through a pouch of powdered silverroot and dried eyevine. “We’ve got enough components for the nondetection ritual to last three more weeks. Enough alchemical reagents to brew more potions. I need to identify what we pulled out of those tunnels—maybe some of it’s useful. Maybe cursed.”

She held up a blackened ring with tiny runes etched into its inner band. “And you,” she added without looking, “need rest. You’re still hurt.”

I scowled. “A minor flourish.”

“You’re favoring your left side.”

“I am dramatic, not wounded.”

She raised a brow, clearly unimpressed. Then bent back over the pile of trinkets and tagged parchments.

I stayed silent.

Eventually, I caved. “Fine. We stay.”

And then came the scrolls.

She took out her sigil—an actual Candelkeep pin, a little thing, flat and rectangular, depicted as a castle tower with flames on top harbouring the symbol of Candlekeep, carved obsidian veined with gold. Pressed it to her palm. Muttered a spell. Her eyes flickered white as the Sending activated.

“To the Keeper of Tomes,” she murmured. “I am conducting an infiltration of vampiric societies. Let me know if any agents or Avowed inquire about vampiric specimen acquisition. Or about me or my real name.”

The reply was immediate. Whatever it was, it made her flinch.

She sighed, pressing two fingers to her temple. “Gods, he fusses. He recast the spell three times to answer.”

“You weren’t exaggerating about the earfuls, then?”

“Not even a little. He could weaponize monologues.”

The next scroll was a Sending, too. But this time, she gave a name I didn’t recognize. Her voice changed slightly—more formal, colder.

“I require any and all information about the vampire lord Cazador Szarr of Baldur’s Gate. Send findings to Client Amelia Stranstal, personal quarters, Candlekeep.”

I leaned forward, narrowing my eyes. “Who was that for? Have you lost your mind? Sniffing around him, saying that he is a vampire. and even giving the name of your working suit. Who the hell were you talking to?”

She dusted her hands. “An asset. Neutral contactor. very efficient in information gathering.”

“That’s not an answer.”

She gave me a half-smile. “It was both for information and for bait.”

I blinked. “Bait?”

Yes. If Cazador has a real intelligence network, they’ll be monitoring inquiries about him right now on other information markets. Especially about him being a vampire, since you would be the only logical leak. If someone outside his circle starts asking questions about him being a vampire… and we see no reaction? Then we know his network is weak. at least weaker than mine. They would only sniff around Candlekeep, asking about vampire spawn acquisition. This would allow us to have a great information gathering resource, some eyes on the gate on him on top of the intel. But if he sniffs around looking for the name we just gave. then we know we need to be particularly cautious about his intelligence network. ”

“And Candlekeep? No danger of that information backfiring? How would you know if he found your name from this seed? What if he learned it from something else? maybe records from the library.”

She shook her head. “No. All my research is signed Amelia S. The Avowed may be irritating, snide, and territorial, but they do not betray their own to outsiders. It’s one of the few virtues I respect in them. The archives are a closed knot. Nothing leaks. Even if someone tried… I’d know. You are giving that name more importance than it actually has, Astarion. Amelia could become a fugitive searched for by half a realm, and it would make nearly no difference to my life. I can still access Candlkeep with any other face and change face and name, and tell the other two geezers that it's a true polymorph spell. And that would be the end of it. I will still write under a new name and a new identity.”

“Okay, maybe, but what if someone comes looking for you there?”

“Then we’ve won. Big time.

Any mention of my name after the message I sent to the old weasel will raise alarm bells — and Candlekeep does not appreciate anyone sniffing around one of their own. Especially not one who specializes in infiltration. I’d owe the old binome a favor, sure, but they’d respond out of principle. They’ll handle the threat and investigate how the name got out, which might just lead us straight to something useful on Cazador.

We’ll also have found a vulnerable thread. A contact we can manipulate. Someone to safely feed him false information. Wrap him in a web of lies. Make him paranoid. Picture this: the next person asking questions is a noble from Amn, or a Harper, or a high cleric of Lathander. Maybe we tell them to direct future inquiries to ‘me and my associate in Silverymoon.’ Let him chase shadows. He’ll have no way of knowing what’s true and what’s bait. And it’ll start the rumor — that he’s a vampire.

I didn’t ask for exclusivity in my request, which means every single person who comes looking after this will be sold that same information. How long do you think it’ll take before the whispers start? I told you — vampires like to think time is on their side. But that only works when you’re hiding. Not when you’re exposed.”

I stared at her.

At the towering goliath shape, she wore like a second skin. At the voice behind the voice. At the cool, methodical clarity with which she plotted a web for the most dangerous creature I have ever known.

She dusted off her hands like she had just rearranged herbs, not declared open war.

“You’re not just poking the bear,” I said slowly. “You’re painting a target on its back and then seeing who shoots first.”

She glanced at me, nonchalant. “Exactly.”

“You’re insane.”

“Strategic," she simply answered.

She was right. Cazador cardinal sin has always been paranoia and control. Always seemed to know more than anyone else. That could actually work. Muddy the waters, especially if he starts hearing names of old enemies mixed in the pot. he has always been quick to jump to conclusions and delude himself. 

" Can you send out more? Inquiries, I mean, to different recipients selling information at the gate?" I asked before realizing.

"You mean right now? Well, I do have three more sending scrolls, counting the one we found at the Zenth hideout. But I would rather keep one for emergencies. So I could send two more. Although I do not have an infinite number of spy networks, I can just call and get started on work without paying in advance. I know one more at the Gate, though. Why, what do you have in mind?" she asked, eyes fully focused on me. 

“Send the next claiming your client to be Mallisandre Voré.”

Her head jerked up. “Voré? From the merchant family?”

I leaned against the wall, arms folded. “Exactly. A merchant princess. Or something like it. Officially, she runs an import syndicate in the Lower City under her family’s banner. In practice, she controls half the rare goods market through intimidation and creative paperwork.”

Her brows knit. “And?”

I met her eyes. “Cazador hated her. Wanted us to bring her in. Petras and I were tasked with seducing her—pull her in close, then bring her to the palace. We failed. Miserably. Petra couldn’t even get near her. I almost got her—until her escort turned out to be a devotion paladin with a sixth sense for undeath.”

I rolled my shoulder at the memory. “Cazador had me flailed for a week.”

That got her attention.

She stilled, fingers hovering just above the scroll. “Why such vitriol?”

“Because she wouldn’t play nice. Took over some of his businesses. He tried to charm her. Bed her. Bind her in debt.  She saw right through him. Kicked his envoy into the harbour. Spread whispers about ‘noble-born degenerates with a taste for blond children.’ Got him banned from half his trade routes. Outbid him at a major auction just to make a point.”

A low whistle slipped between her teeth. “Impressive woman.”

“She’s ruthless,” I said. “And loud. She likes to broadcast her vendettas. She’s got ears in every corner of the city—traders, dockmasters, fists, a few Harpers, even a noble patron or two.”

She turned fully toward me now. “So if she were to receive a report—about Cazador, say, being a vampire…”

“She wouldn’t shut up about it,” I said. “By the end of the month, half the Gate would be whispering it.”

She tilted her head, sharp and still. “And if he intercepts the message?”

“That’s the point. If he does, he’ll fixate on her. Assume she’s behind the Candlekeep inquiry. Or the temple watch. Or some other conspiracy. She gets under his skin like no one else. He’d spiral. He’d lash out. He’d waste resources trying to trace a lie.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then she gets a report. She doesn’t need to believe it. She just needs to want to.”

Her mouth curled—not a smile, exactly. Something hungrier. “You’re actually a genius.”

“Merely strategic,” I echoed, folding my arms. “I’m just… contributing.”

She turned back to the scroll, tapped her sigil against the parchment, and began muttering the Sending’s incantation.

“Client Mallisandre Voré,” she whispered, eyes flickering white. “Urgent request. Information regarding the vampire lord Cazador Szarr of Baldur’s Gate. Any known aliases, Vampire-related activities, weaknesses, ignore public-facing identities. Discretion advised. Send findings to Client residence. Payment follows upon validation.”

The spell flared and vanished.

We stood in the fading warmth of the lodge, the scent of smoked meat still lingering in the rafters.

She turned to me and said mischievously.  " I can't wait to get more scrolls to start fucking with him properly. I wish I could time the warning into the spider familiar to see him lose his shit."

I think I finally understood what she meant when she said he was merely a vampire lord. Not a God, not an absolute unbeatable force, just an enemy with a very powerful weapon against me. 

Not a master. Just a monster.

I owed that to her.
Well. Add it to the pile.

I watched as she turned back to her endless sprawl of scrolls and notebooks, muttering to herself as she cross-referenced symbols and scratched new annotations in the margins.

We'd just painted a target on the back of the most dangerous creature in Baldur’s Gate, and now she was recording footnotes like nothing had happened. Like, we didn’t just declare war. Like we weren’t daring him to bite.

Gods, I admired her.
And hated that I couldn’t stop her if I tried.

So I sat back, crossed my legs, folded my hands—

—and indulged for the first time in what will become my new favourite pastime.

Imagining all the ways I could kill Cazador.

Slow.
Fast.
Public.
Personal.
With a stake.
With the sun.
With fire. With silence. With the scream of his own name echoed back at him by every ghost he made of me.

Every image of his demise fixed something in me.

I owed her that, too.
More than she’d ever know.
More than I’d ever say.

But one day, I would carve that debt into his ribs.
And when he begged, I’d make sure her eyes were the last thing he saw.

Just so he’d know whose name outlasted his.

---

Later, she interrupted my perfectly satisfying murder fantasies with a quiet, “Come here. I want to show you something.”

She didn’t elaborate. Just stood and started clearing a small space on the floor.

Twelve candles. A ring of chalk and ash. Charcoal smeared the ridges of her thick goliath fingers as she marked the symbols — not haphazard scribbles, but precise, practiced strokes from a hand used to drawing in the dark. Her mouth moved in a low murmur — not quite a chant, not quite a spell, something that tugged at the edge of meaning.

She reached into her pouch and pulled out a small glass bead — smoky, violet-tinged, worn like it had passed through many hands. Held it briefly to her lips before placing it in the center of the circle.

I recognized it then.

A focus. no a component

And then the magic bloomed.

It began faint — a warping in the air, like heat shimmer or oil on water. Then it thickened. A dome, rippling into existence around her. Translucent, shimmering faint blue with a swirl of deeper hues beneath, like staring into enchanted ice.

She glanced up at me.

“Try to get in.”

I arched a brow, but humoured her.

Took one step forward—
And stopped.

Not slammed. Not thrown. Just… refused.

Like an invisible wall pressed back against my chest, firm and absolute. No malice. No cruelty. Just a command: you do not belong in here.

I blinked. Reached out again, slower this time, fingertips brushing the curve of the dome.

Same result.

She giggled.

Actually giggled — sweet, innocent. A low, rasping sound with something mischievous curled beneath it

I frowned. tried again and again and eventually started banging and pushing.

She erupted in a bit of laughter, amused.

“Sorry! couldn't help myself. Now try again.”

She didn’t move. Didn’t change a thing.

But the dome shimmered once and parted for me like a curtain drawn open.

I stepped in. The air shifted around me, a ripple through skin and bone. Inside, the world quieted. Not muffled exactly, just... distanced. Like the air outside belonged to someone else.

She sat in the middle, one hand resting on her knee, the other absently toying with the glass bead.

“What is this?” I asked, still looking around.

“A spell,” she said, as if that explained everything. “A ritual shield. Learned it from the drow slaver’s spellbook — the one with the broken jaw and the burned-out throat we found in the old slaver's highway.”

My brows lifted. “You copied magic off that filthy corpse spellbook?”

She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Most of the best things I’ve learned came off someone else's spellbook. people rarely bother making scrolls out of rituals.”

She gestured to the dome. “It’s strong. Blocks magic, blades, arrows. Nothing gets in. But we can cast out. One-way seal.”

“Convenient.”

“Very. Took me three days to stabilize the ritual and another two to attune the bead properly. Had to extract the rest of the components from his notes — he’d warped the incantation, probably to keep it from being stolen. The spell lasts eight hours and doesn't consume magic to cast.”

Her eyes flicked toward me. “It’s not perfect. Takes time. Can’t be cast in combat unless you’re suicidal. But if we need a place to sleep, rest, or plan, this works. It holds. keeps us safe and warm”

As she said this, I felt the air temperature rise to a nice spring night feel. 

“And you just… finished it?”

She nodded. “Today. That’s why I waited.”

I looked around again, then at her — this mountain of a woman in skin like veined marble and inked warlines, shoulders heavy with history she never offered unless asked. She didn’t smile, exactly. But something in her face loosened. Like a knot untangling.

For a moment, the flames danced blue. Safe. Untouchable.

I sat across from her, letting the silence settle.

No thank yous. No praise.

But I think she knew.
And I think it was enough.

---

We spent the afternoon tucked inside the dome — the quiet, shimmering shell holding the world at bay.

She sorted through our pack, rearranging scrolls, binding loose pages, re-stoppering potion vials that had rolled to the corners. Her fingers moved with purpose, methodical and confident, even in that massive form. Like everything she touched, bent to some quiet system only she understood.

I, meanwhile, was productively useless.

She’d handed me that smut book weeks ago — a joke at the time, something ridiculous, I said I needed to study — and now it sat cracked open in my lap. Dog-eared, overwrought, and dripping with melodrama. I’d made it ten pages before making a noise so indignant she’d actually turned to glance over her shoulder.

“Why is there lace on his trousers?” I muttered.

“Keep reading,” she said, completely unfazed. “I am sure It gets worse.”

And it did. Delightfully. I didn’t put it down.

Time folded strangely in the dome. Daylight dimmed to gray through the translucent curve above, and the air stayed warm — held in place by that spell like breath beneath a blanket. She finished her sorting. I finished the chapter about the ruined noble and the stableboy with the magical gag. We didn’t speak much.

Then hunger started to gnaw.

Not hers. Mine.

Sharp and dry at the edges. The last blood jar had been drained after the ambush, cracked open with shaking hands and barely enough composure to uncork it without smashing the glass.

We had nothing left.

And I could go out. I could slip through the dome, into the trees, find some unlucky animal and be done with it. 

But I didn’t move.

I didn’t want to leave her.

Didn’t want to leave this — the quiet, the warded peace, the strange warmth of her presence beside me like a hearth I hadn’t realized I’d built my days around.

So I stayed.

Eventually, she laid out the bedrolls.

Side by side.

No explanation. No smirk. Just unrolled them like it was the most natural thing in the world, as if last night hadn’t been a fluke.

I didn’t comment. Didn’t dare.

But inside, something bloomed. Quietly. Stupidly.

Apparently, the closeness — the warmth of her spine pressed to mine, the unconscious way she breathed in sync with me — it hadn’t been a one-time indulgence.

And for whatever godsdamned reason, I’d… enjoyed it.

She lay down first.

Curled into her side, great hulking form folding like a bear settling into hibernation. One arm tucked beneath her, the other curled loosely over her belly. Her eyes fluttered once, lashes twitching against those broad cheeks.

Then she slept.

Just like that.

I didn’t.

Of course I didn’t.

I watched her.

Because that’s what I do. Always.

There’s comfort in it — in knowing, in seeing. I memorized the tiny things. The way her chest rose and fell — slower now, but still hers. The faint line that creased between her brows as she sank deeper, never quite easing even in rest. The way her breath caught every few minutes like she was dreaming too fast, like her mind didn’t know how to stay still even when her body did.

I watched until the dome shimmered in my peripheral vision and the hunger began to curl tight behind my ribs.

But I didn’t leave.

I wouldn’t. 

Not tonight.

I can go a day hungry, I’d done worse. Gone longer. When dusk finally bled through the cracks in the old boards.
Turned the lodge to rust and shadow.

She stirred beside me.
Not startled. Not groggy. Just… slow.
Like the world had returned to her all at once, and she needed a moment to decide if she wanted it.

One thick hand rose to her neck, fingers splaying over the hollow where pulse should beat. She pressed there — not checking for life, but for something older. Something that still connected her to the shape she wore.
Then her eyes found mine.

Dark. Tired. Knowing.

“Come here,” she said.

And gods, I did.

No hesitation. No clever smile.
No flirtation to mask the want.

I crossed to her like I was answering some ancient call carved into the marrow of me. A command older than language.
It was the easiest choice I’ve made in centuries.
And somehow the most terrifying.

She opened her arms. Not grandly, not theatrically — just enough.
Her wrist laid bare.
Her throat tilted slightly.
A silent invitation, no pressure. Just… truth.

Because she’d felt it.

Even in her sleep, she’d felt it — the hunger, the heat of it under my skin, the pull that always coils when I go too long without.
And she’d woken not in fear, not in caution — but with this.

With a gift.

When I drank—
Gods.

It wasn’t feeding.
It wasn’t survival.
It wasn’t pleasure, though it burned with it.

It was sanctuary.

Warmth pulsed through her like a spell. Slow. Sure. Willingly given. No resistance. No flinching.

She smelled like Cedar, night orchids mhyrr's smoke and old ink and the faint, sharp bite of iron.

And when I drank— It was... sanctuary.

Her blood ran warm across my tongue, down my throat. Richer than any vintage, thick with something fresh and crisp like crushed mint and sweet like mead or, better yet, ambrosia that could only ever be her. I felt it push through me like sunlight forced through old glass — sudden, bright, cracking open places that hadn’t felt light since my death. My hands clenched at her shoulders, claws half-pricking through the rough leather and thick goliath skin. Not to hold her still — gods, she didn’t need to be. She gave freely. But because I couldn’t help it. Because it felt as if I didn’t cling to her, I’d float off, weightless and lost.

I drank slowly. Reverent.
Not just because I feared hurting her, but because I didn’t want it to end.

Her hand curled at the nape of my neck, gentle.
Not possessive. Not guiding.
Just… there.

I’ve killed for a gulp of vermine blood. Starved for it. Gorged on it like a beast.
But this—
This made something in me go quiet.

Not the hunger.
Me.

And maybe that should scare me.
Maybe it will.
Later.

But for now, I stayed where I was, kneeling in the circle of her arms,
and felt — for the first time in memory —
like I was not something monstrous.

Like I was held.
Like I was safe.

And when I pulled back — gasping, lips wet, throat raw with the rush of it — she didn’t flinch. Didn’t shove me away. Just looked at me, tired and so painfully certain.

“He doesn’t own you as much as you think,” she whispered.

And gods —
Gods, I believed her. As a line came back to me then. learned in another life. Almost forgotten. From before. From someone who once thought the world might be kind.

Even in the dark, one light may bear witness.
Even broken, a soul may shield another.

I looked at her — at this battered creature who wore so many skins and still chose to bleed for me. Pale now even in that mountain-giant shape, eyes sunken with fatigue, lips pressed thin against the aftermath of what we’d done.

But unflinching.

Still here. Still mine.

Maybe I could be a soul again.

Not just a knife. Not just a leash’s end.
But something that could stand beside her in this strange, terrible twilight — blood still warm on my tongue, heart racing with something that felt dangerously like hope.

So I bit again.
Slow. Deliberate. Not out of desperate starvation, but because I needed to.
Needed to taste her again.
Needed that heat spilling over my tongue, that vivid pulse that said she was alive — and still choosing to give it to me.

Her breath shuddered. Her hand lifted, hesitating only a fraction before it found my hair. Those broad goliath fingers slid through the silver curls at the nape of my neck, nails scraping lightly against my scalp — and gods, it was too much.

I groaned into her skin. Actually groaned, like something low and half-feral. Because her hand was cradling me as I drank, not forcing, not gripping to push me away. Just holding. Like I was something precious. Like this act, this ruinous joining, was not monstrous at all.

And it made my chest seize up, tight and aching.

I pressed closer, mouth sealing more greedily to the wound, one hand bracing hard on her shoulder as though I could anchor myself there forever. Her claws flexed in my hair, tugged just slightly — a rough little drag at my roots that made me shiver. I almost feared how badly I wanted it.

Because for that one raw, ragged instant, I was more hers than I’d ever been anyone’s.
And some small, secret part of me hoped I would always be.

I drank deeper.
Not like the cold, careful feedings we’d practiced before — but languid, savouring, each pull a molten spill of heat down my throat. Her blood tasted impossibly alive. Sharp, iron-sweet, threaded with something that was only hers. And with every slow swallow, I felt something in me unfurl that had been clenched so tight for so long it almost hurt to let go. 

Her hand stayed tangled in my hair, claws grazing my scalp in little, unconscious circles. Not to control me. Not to tug me away. Just there — a weight that was startlingly tender. Each drag of her claws sent small, traitorous shivers down my spine.

I pressed closer, breath ghosting hot against her skin between swallows. My hand slid up, curling around her thick neck, thumb stroking the ridged lines of her goliath throat. I could feel her pulse there — fast, strong, under my palm — and gods, it did something to me. Made me dizzy with it. Dizzy with her.

She let out a slow, shaky sigh. Her other hand settled at my back, splayed broad and protective, holding me to her. I sank into it shamelessly, half-wanting to climb into her lap. Half wanting her to crush me to her chest until there was no room for fear or thought at all.

So we stayed like that — entangled on the old furs, wrapped in the hush of the warded lodge. My mouth at her throat, her claws at my hair and back, the only sounds our rough, uneven breaths. Her blood pooled warm in my belly, a decadent weight that made me tremble.

Eventually, when I’d taken enough — when her hand gave the slightest uncertain twitch, reminding me she was flesh and fragile in ways even I sometimes forgot — I eased back.

But not far.

My lips found the small twin holes at her neck, and I licked them softly and slowly. Little kittenish strokes of my tongue that tasted faintly of salt and iron. Cleaning her. Soothing her. It was instinct, yes — but not the cold, drilled-in habits Cazador beat into us. This was different. This was mine.

She made the faintest sound — not pain, but something like a soft catch of breath. Her hand cupped the back of my head, guiding me without pressure, as though she understood exactly what I needed. I lavished the wound with delicate passes of my tongue, pressing the pads of my fingers to her jaw to tilt her just so.

I didn’t want to stop.
Not because I still craved her blood — though gods, I did—but because this quiet, this small, tender ritual of caring for what I’d taken felt more intimate than the feeding itself.

We ended up tangled, somehow — my legs half draped over hers, one of her big hands splayed at my lower back, the other still in my hair. I rested my forehead against her throat, breathing her in. Smoke. Old blood. Pine. That strange undercurrent that was just Elenya.

Her chest rose and fell against mine, steady and alive. And I realized, with a sharp twist in my gut, that I was pressing closer not out of need for more blood, but simply because I didn’t want to lose this. Didn’t want to lose her.

So I stayed there, lips brushing faintly over her skin, licking at the last traces of blood as though savoring the end of some exquisite confession. My claws dug lightly into her side, anchoring me.

I was full, sated in ways I didn’t have the language to name.

And for one fragile, terrifying instant, I let myself believe I was safe.
Right there. In her hands.

Mine — and somehow, impossibly, hers too.

---

The dome held around us like a breath suspended in glass.

Outside, the mountains grumbled with the slow weight of wind through pines. Snow fell in whispering flurries, catching on the curved edge of her magic, never touching us. Within the hut, all was still.

She’d fallen asleep again.

Her face had softened just a touch, one hand curled beneath her cheek, the other resting over her ribs. Like she had to hold herself in place. Like, if she let go, she might drift into nothing.

I laid there, watching the fire gutter lower, hands laced in front of my lips, and tried not to think of how easily this could all fall apart.

Tried.

And failed.

Because I remembered too well what it was like to kneel on cold stone floors, waiting for orders that were etched into my bones. I remembered the taste of obedience—sour, coppery, like old pennies and dried rot. And I remembered what it cost to resist.

But now… that leash?

Frayed.

Threadbare.

Cazador’s voice—once a storm in my skull—was now a murmur. Drowned. Stifled.

Like something holy stood between us and held up a hand.

And that something had her eyes, too.

---

She woke a few hours past midnight. She had shifted during the night back to the leonin form at my request. 

The dawn was a pale, grudging thing by the time we spoke again.
I’d been drifting — not quite trancing, not quite conscious, just lost in the warmth of her shoulder pressed against my ribs.

But the longer the sun threatened to break, the more I could taste that thin wire of worry in her scent. It tangled with the old blood on her leathers and the salt at her throat. A reminder that comfort was only ever borrowed.

Finally, she shifted, pulling back enough that the cold found my side again. Her golden eyes narrowed slightly, thoughtful and still faintly hollow. Then, with a long breath that looked like it hurt her ribs, she said:

“We need to decide where to go next.”

I let out a low sound, almost a laugh, though there was nothing truly amused in it. “Isn’t that your specialty? Directing the fragile spawn to safety?”

But her look silenced me — gentle, patient, and somehow more cutting than any retort. Because she was including me. Not steering me. Including me.

So I swallowed down whatever brittle joke wanted to climb out, and listened.

She rubbed her temple once, then spoke:

“Daggerford is the practical choice. It’s a town that’s friendly enough, used to travellers. We could find shelter there, stock supplies, give ourselves time to grow stronger before Cazador sends something worse than Gur or hunters. But it's expected. The next biggest settlement. If we are attacked by more than we can handle before we are able to retrieve the attunement rod. It's going to be difficult. We could teleport quickly back to the gate to retrieve the one I ordered there. which brings its own set of dangers. anywhere we go, we would need to at least send a night as delivery offices are not open at your normal working hours. ”

My lip curled slightly. “And the other option?”

Her mouth tightened. That little line between her brows deepened — a crease that was quickly becoming my least favorite thing to see.

“Warlock’s Crypt.”

Ah. Gods. 

Even saying it felt like a shiver ran through the room. Her breath plumed in the chill, curling around words that should not have been spoken so easily.

“It’s dangerous,” she went on, quiet, careful. “Infested with creatures old and foul. Laced through with magics that could snare even me. But… high risk, high reward. The kind of place where we could lose the trail of any of Cazador’s lackeys entirely — or where we might find texts on vampirism that simply don’t exist anywhere else.”

I ran my tongue across one fang, tasting the small pulse of blood where I’d bitten the inside of my cheek. Dangerous. Mad. The sort of plan that would have made me snarl before — because it didn’t guarantee my survival.

But now…

I found myself staring at her instead. How her mane still smelled of smoke and iron. How her claws fidgeted against her knee, betraying nerves she’d never speak aloud.

And gods help me — I wanted to follow her. Even there. Into the deep dark.

She must’ve caught the softness in my face, because her eyes narrowed slightly. Not suspicious — just calculating. Measuring what we’d risk, what we’d gain.

Then she said, almost like she was trying to reassure us both:

“Daggerford could still be a start. Safer. We gather strength. Resources. When we’re ready, we can go hunting for things buried and cursed.”

The silence after felt heavy. Not uncomfortable, just… full.

I sucked in a slow breath. Let it out with a thin smile.

“Why not leave it to fate?” I suggested, digging into one of the pouches at my belt until my fingers found a coin — old, drow nicked, still faintly warm from her skin.

Her ear twitched. “You want to flip a coin on this?”

I let the grin widen, sharp and thin. “Why not? The gods owe me little enough. Maybe they’ll take pity and nudge the damned thing for us.”

She huffed — that small, weary half-laugh of hers — then nodded. “Alright. Daggerford if heads. Warlock’s Crypt if tails.”

I flipped it.

We both watched it spin in the gloom — a tiny flash of silver, the brief glint of firelight on worn metal.

Then it landed in my palm.

Tails.

Warlock’s Crypt.

Her eyes met mine, unreadable.

“Warlock’s Crypt it is,” I said. My heart was beating a little too fast. Not entirely with fear. But dread as well

She only nodded, slow and grave. But then — gods — her hand found mine, nails pressing gently against my palm.

“Why not rig the throw if you don't want it? We both know you can,” she whispered.

“Yes,” I breathed back. “But you said not to lie.”

And somehow — for reasons I couldn’t name — that was important.

Chapter 25: Amber and Velvet

Summary:

Eleyna organizes the spoils of their descent, but what begins as inventory becomes something deeper—a quiet, staggering act of trust. Astarion chooses his weapons. And, maybe, chooses something else too.

Notes:

This chapter started as a simple inventory check. And somehow, it turned into one of the longest, most emotionally vulnerable moments between them. It's about care disguised as preparation, rituals and acts of service hidden in labels and scrolls and games.

Elenya POV

---

The fog betrayed me.

It almost cost me the body.

Almost cost me Astarion.

Almost cost me everything.

If the body had slipped—if it had truly given in to the spidersong—She would’ve killed them all in that ambush. Every last one. Astarion included.

Lolth would have commanded it. And the body would have obeyed. Unable to defend against the curse 

The fog should have protected her at all cost.

Should have held her steady as well.

But it didn’t.

It pinned me when I tried to help. Held me down when I tried to fight. Whispered hide. Hide, no matter the cost.

Why?

I don’t understand.

I am the fog. I am what coils in her lungs, what stirs behind her eyes. I’ve been with her since the first scream in the dark.

I am what eats her emotions, her pains, her desires and buries them deep in the fog realm. 

I am her as well. The body is me. The best of me. 

So, how can The Fog betray us? 

So how can I betray myself?

Am I truly that afraid?

I thought dividing us would help keep us safe. 

She agreed as well. 

Am I such a coward that I won’t even stand beside myself?

Is that why the friend hates the fog? 

Because it’s not power. Not magic. Not shield or veil.

It’s fear. Ancient, clinging fear, so dense and hungry it wears my shape.

Does it truly control me to that extent?

Is my sanctuary really only a prison of my making?

I feel the fog stir within the realm as it attempts to repair the damages. 

The losses were heavy indeed. 

But what does it matter? What does any of this matter if we lose her? If we lose me? 

How can the fog not see that? How can I not see that? 

That’s what I am to them, isn’t it? A creature made of retreat. Something that says: survive, even if you lose everything doing it.

Even if it means letting someone else die. Letting the best of you die. 

Even letting him die.

No wonder they hated me.

I always thought about what I was hiding from. 

Maybe I forgot what I was hiding for. 

Maybe it's time for at least one person to see me. 

I knelt in the middle of the fog realm. Near the Crystal cave entrance. I still did not dare to go there. last I tried it hurt too much. 

But I will call him here. 

I am tired of hiding from who I love. 

I do love 

I love the body 

I love the friend.

Let’s call him here.

I began to pray.

Not with words. Not at first.

Just with breath.
With stillness.
With the soft, desperate shape of need curling in my chest like something half-buried.

The fog stirred. It always did when I called.
It wrapped me in slow tendrils — not cruel, not this time. Just curious. Protective. Possessive.

But not enough.

“Move,” I said aloud.

The fog hesitated.

“You don’t get to shield me from him. Not this time.”

It recoiled, like a hound uncertain of a new command.

“He is my friend,” I said, louder now. “Let him see.”

The fog shivered around me — curling in tighter, as if to protest. As if to whisper of shame, of exposure, of all the small cracks it was made to hide.

But I had already knelt.

My claws sank lightly into the soil of the realm — soft, damp, memory-soaked. The space before the crystal cave. The one I still didn’t dare enter.

“Friend. Witness. Old guardian.”
I whispered it like a name.
And this time, it was a prayer.

The fog rippled at the sound.

I lifted my chin, though I still couldn’t quite meet the cave’s mouth with my eyes.

“You are welcome here,” I said. “To this place. To me.”

Something shifted.
A pressure in the air — like breath held just behind the veil of this world.

The churn of memory stilled. The realm grew quiet, expectant.

“I don’t want to be hidden from you anymore,” I said. My voice didn’t shake, though everything inside me did.
“You who carried me. You who heard me in the dark. Come. Look.”

The fog pulsed once — deep, slow, almost in pain.

“Let. Him. Through.”

I didn’t shout it — but the force of the words cracked through the stone beneath me.

“No more cloaking. No more veils. You are mine — but I command. You will part.”

The fog wailed softly in the distance — not in defiance. In mourning.

And then… it refused.

It parted just enough to allow him entry. But not enough to unveil me.

Not fully.

Ilmater came anyway.

No burst of divine light. No wind. No tremor in the realm. Just presence.

He stepped forward in silence, the air around him dim and gentle, like candlelight caught in weeping cloth. And he knelt — beside me, not above.

He did not demand. He did not peel the fog away by force.

He only gathered me in his arms and held me.

The fog and the butterflies still clung to my form — hiding, trembling, desperate to preserve what little safety they believed they offered. And it hurt. Gods, it hurt to be held like that. To want to be seen and still be trapped behind a veil of my own making.

But Ilmater only whispered:

“One step at a time.”

His hand found mine — not to pull me up, but to let me know he would wait.

“Let me teach you what I can.”

Then, with a softness that cracked something in my chest, he turned — and gestured into the fog.

There, flickering like a memory in half-light, I saw him:

Astarion.
Not real, not fully. Just a spectre of him — running through the fog. Not hunting. Not hiding. Just… moving.

And Ilmater said:

“Let him show you the rest.”

---

The lodge had long since emptied of the heavy hush of grief. It was still quiet, but a different kind now — no longer the silence of blood cooling on snow. This was the kind born of small rituals, of mundane motions that pretended at peace.

She needed it. Gods, did I need it as well. The fog was busy repairing the realm, repairing me and itself.  Because the fog still lived inside me. I could feel it when she closed her eyes: that cold, spidery thing whispering its gentle invitations. Promising I could hide forever, drown in it, let it slip between her ribs and keep me soft and blind.

But I had started to fight it. Not just resist — shape it. Little by little, hour by hour. At first, it shivered away from my will, like an animal startled by a thrown stone. But the more I worked, the more it began to answer. To twist under my hand instead of running from it.

The friend helped. He put more wards around. to keep the spider away for longer. to keep me strong. The stronger I was, the more I could control it. The friend told me he helped someone with their fog, too, in the past. To take it slow. 

As the body was lost in Astarion hold that night, hidden from the world by a stolen ritual. The friend taught me how to find the resisting pocket. Told me that this magic wasn't normal for Mortals. Went against Mystra's Ban. He told me that he knew it was a ritual. He explained that I must have inherited it or consumed it.

It made sense that I couldn't fully control it. 

So we focused on finding what I can fully control.

Tiny progress. But progress.

I exhaled, slow and deliberate, and watched a small spiral of white coil off her finger before it evaporated. Contained. Controlled. Not the mindless flood it had been. A fragile mastery, maybe — one that trembled every time her heart beat too hard — but it was ours. 

If I control it. So can she. He said. 
Maybe we can become one again one day. Become whole. 
Become Elenya. 

The fog still obeyed most of the time, except for the few orders it did not want to. 

Hiding me, though? 

That it did without even blinking.

Happily,

Good. I would need it.

The friend told me that the body will not be able to fool the true seighted like himself. 

This is scary, 

How can she be safe if she isn't hidden. 

The friend told me to use the cloak.

Fuse it with my fog.

The cloak would hide her to all who see true. 

Erase her. 

Like my fog erased me. 

The fog protested. it wanted to stay true. 

To stay pure. 

but i needed to rework it 

Because they were going to Warlock’s Crypt.

---

It wasn’t simple.

Not by any means.

She rummaged through the packs, laid out her makeshift lab, ground roots and petals and tiny pale mushrooms they’d gathered along the trek. The lodge stank of alkaloids and crushed mint, a smell both bitter and faintly sweet. Eleyna hunched over the warped table, candlelight stuttering over scattered notes and grim vials. The Crypt’s intelligence was too precise. Too arcane. She would never pass as a mage. But a vampire? 

That was possible. Not easy. Not safe. But possible.

Astarion would be fine there — he was already undead. The City would see him as kin, or at least close enough to ignore. But her? Her pulse still ran hot, her breath still steamed in the cold. She was very much alive, even if she was empty, and anything that nested in that wretched hole would scent it on her in an instant.  Magically, I could protect her with the help of the sigil pin— Nondetection woven into my fog , Candlekeep symbols etched around her robes. But biologically…

She needed to pass for dead.  She needed to mimic the dead — heart slowed to a crawl, skin cold, breath shallow.
Feign Death wouldn’t be enough. It left the body inert.

Her hands shook as she uncorked the first bottle.

“If I can thread the needle… balance the numbing with just enough stimulant—”

She spoke aloud to herself. To the fog. It helped her think. Grounded her.

She laid out the ingredients like weapons:

• Foxglove — dried, powdered. Cardiac toxin. One pinch too much would stop her heart. She measured with a jeweler’s hand.

• Belladonna — black as ink, viscous, bitter. She diluted it with frostblossom water until the surface tension told her it wouldn’t burn.

• Mandrake and henbane — their earthy scent grounding the potion, dragging her into a chilled calm.

• Poppy resin — thick and tarred, scraped into the mix to depress her nervous system.

• Valerian tincture to muffle anxiety.

• A dash of silverleaf and cold resistance draught, to make her flesh cool to the touch.

And finally — a stimulant. Redroot powder, rare and volatile, to keep her upright.

On the floor nearby, Astarion sprawled with that smutty little book she picked up in the gate, eyes half-lidded as he read some absurd passage about scandalous elven duels ending in tangled sheets. He laughed under his breath now and then, a low, lazy sound. Every time, it sank into her and further her resolve like warm oil, grounding in its own way. Proof that he was still here. Still hers to protect, for whatever cursed span the gods would allow.

She worked while he read. Heated tinctures over small candles, poured them back and forth between bowls until the color changed from muddy red to slick black. she needed a modified potion of feign death — something far stronger. Enough to trick the sense. But it couldn’t be purely soporific. she needed to walk. Talk. Think. So she added ground bark from a stimulant root, something that would keep her nerves awake even while the rest of biology lay in that gruesome mimicry of death. Dangerous, incredibly so. The line between a slow pulse and a stopped heart was knife-thin.

The mix frothed into a soft grey, like fog over dead skin.

“This is not a potion,” she thought, “It’s a gamble. he will be worried again.”

The Undeath Formula

She tested doses with cold precision. Just a sip — and the world slowed.

Her fingers tingled. Her pulse grew faint. Cold sweat broke across her back. She grabbed the wall, panting through lips gone numb. Vision swam.

She staggered to her mirror. What stared back could fool the dead:

• Pupils were wide.

• heart slowed, skin clammy and cold.

• Breath slowly enough to count.

Too strong. This will render her dead in less than two hours. She needed a way to fight the necrosis. To combat the rot brought by the reduced bodily functions. 

Necrotic resistance! 

Just to be sure, she mixed in crushed pearl, Vitriol of Oleander and a drop of necrotic-resistant ichor.  

She brewed a new batch immediately and measured different dosages until she found the one. But she saw the tremors in her fingers. The slight spasms in her thighs when she tried to walk too fast. This was working — barely.

When she was done, I’d made thirty small vials. Enough for repeated doses — or to risk and refine if the first failed. Astarion rolled onto his side to watch her, one leg kicked up lazily, book still dangling from his claws.

“By the hell, what is this stench you are brewing?” he spat, brows frowning. “You hunched over there brewing a hag pustules concentrate or what?” He flipped the book over, smirking. “ It smells like death.”

She gave him a flat look. “You know what hag pus smells like? I knew your taste was questionable enough, but pustules! To each their own, I guess.”

He smiled widely, all teeth. “Darling, if I bedded a hag, believe me, I would have made it count.”

Her shoulders shook with a laugh despite herself. It felt good. Wrong, but necessary. 

She didn't lie. She deflected. he did it all the time. Doesn't make it right. I supplied. 

She promised not to make him worried. Telling him that she is brewing a dangerous death brew will surely worry him. Next to her journal, she scratched a note with trembling fingers:

“No more than a third vial every hours.
Fourth dose = cardiac failure.
Fifth = convulsions.
Sixth = probable death.”

She drew a small skull beside the final line. Not for drama. Just clarity.

She licked the blood from her lips where her teeth had chattered too hard. She only has to last until they are inside. Then they can find me somewhere to rest and heal.

She paused, fingers tapping the parchment.

And if she timed it wrong, If she made a mistake — or hesitated— She would end up dead. Or worse.

Her smile was bitter.

Almost amused.

She would walk into a city of the dead, pretending she already belonged.

maybe she wouldn’t have to pretend for long.

Her throat tightened, a small hitch that made the steam catch painfully in her nose.

Good. Fear meant we hadn’t lost our mind entirely.

If it comes to it, the antidotes are easy enough to make.

She stoppered the dose and slipped it into the lining of her coat.

And started making the antidote. They were simpler — just a rush of bark resin and salts of Mugwort. It would taste vile, but it would force her heart back into something close to proper rhythm if she started to slip too far. Or so she hoped.

When the last antidote vials cooled, she lined them carefully in the leather roll she’d stitched for exactly this purpose. Most are strong enough to combat death, and three are strong enough to fully detoxify.

With a little bit of luck and Ilmater's healing light.

She should be fine. 

Key word being...Should. 

It's fine, 

If it comes to the worst-case scenario,

Astarion could heal her.

She could give him an antidote set.

He won't like this.

She promised not to worry him anymore. 

He fusses too much now for that promise to be kept. 

---

Astarion had gone to scout the perimeter—whether to give her space or escape the intensity of her task, she couldn’t say. Likely both. She preferred it this way. The silence let her think. She exhaled softly, cracked her knuckles, and muttered, “Let’s begin with brewing.”

Eleyna started brewing more potions, using up all the gathered and looted ingredients. She worked in a slow, deliberate rhythm, her hands stained with shadowroot resin and balsam ash as the alchemical fire hissed softly beneath the copper still. Vials clicked against one another like glass chimes as she laid them out in two neat rows—red for restoration, blue for resistance, green for enhancement. She began with the Potion of Greater Healing, swirling the ashes of balsam into suspension, its scent warm and forest-sweet. Autumn crocus petals dissolved next for Feather Fall, followed by wispweed, which smoked violet when sublimated, lending the Vaulting potion its faint shimmer. Her mortar crushed Mergrass into a verdant froth for Mind Reading, then bark and ash became Elixir of Barkskin, thick as sap. She worked without pause, grinding down Worg fang into a spitting brew for Bloodlust, its edges sharp with heat. The Xorn scales yielded reluctantly, but gave way to the Remedial Potion, smooth and silvered. She scraped copper shavings from a broken gear for Lightning Resistance, humming under her breath as sparks danced in the mixture. Then came the hard ones: the Intellect Devourer fluid, still cold, clouded the Psychic Resistance elixir with a soft blue opalescence; the Shadowroot sac bled black into the Elixir of Viciousness, staining the glass like ink. Eventually, her bench was lined with colour and purpose—tools of mercy, memory, and war.  She catalogued and labelled them and then started sorting and identifying what they plundered during their journey. Six healing potions, two greater ones. Invisibility. Mind Shielding. A rare Potion of Speed—so rare she almost missed it, misidentified it first as a potion of vitality. She sniffed the contents, compared it with alchemical guides, and corrected herself with a faint grin. Oil of Taggit, potent enough to paralyze a giant if used properly. Drow poisons—three matching vials. Two Alchemist’s Fire. And one unmarked glowing bottle. She carefully uncorked it, caught its scent, and confirmed it—a second Potion of Speed. That would be useful.

It was a blur of vial and cork. They were fully restocked now in almost all she could make on the move. She divided them into two equally stocked bundles and added more elixir of bloodlust and the potion of speed to Astarion's. This complemented his fighting style quite well. He was deadlier before others could gather their bearing. At least from what she observed in the Gur fight. 

Next, the scrolls.

She laid out two lengths of soft leather—creased, scorched, stained from years of use—and began binding scrolls into portable bundles. One for her. One for Astarion. She punched tiny holes along the binding edge and stitched the seams with waxed thread, murmuring labels under her breath. Then came the colour-coding—an old monastery trick: red for offence, blue for mobility, gold for utility, black for death and its relatives. The bundles would roll tight, buckle at the sides, and fit neatly beneath a cloak or coat.

Then she started sorting the scrolls. Dozens and dozens were scattered like leaves after a storm. She grouped them by school and utility. Scroll of Fly, Jump—kinetic spells, meant for movement, escape, momentum. She placed them beside Dimension Door and Misty Step, forming a neat cluster labelled "Tactical Retreat or Entry." The cantrips—Fire Bolt, Ray of Frost, Shocking Grasp—went in their own pile, common but useful. Astarion had duplicates—six copies of Ray of Frost alone. She made his kit easy to navigate, the redundant scrolls tucked into labelled loops, quick to draw and discard. Grease and Ice Knife were disruptive—elemental mischief. She smiled faintly as she added them to his kit. Disguise Self, Mage Armour, and  Pass Without Trace joined the stealth cluster; spells a rogue might actually find delightful, even theatrical. For herself, she kept the denser scrolls: Protection from Energy, Stoneskin, Remove Curse—rare, complex, and dangerous to waste. Spells of preservation. Of undoing. She lingered on Remove Curse, sliding one into her own kit, two into his. Just in case. Wall of Thorns—druidic, beautiful but not hers. She had better options to concentrate on, but it fit Astarion strangely well: visceral, defensive, brutal when provoked. She labelled it "territorial control—natural, volatile," and packed it with a tiny note: Try it once. Just once. Scroll of Confusion followed—chaotic, jittering with unstable runes. She hesitated, then added it to his bundle too, scrawling a margin warning: “Unreliable. Use only when cornered.” And then, the intimate scrolls. Two copies of Sending—she nearly bound all to her own bundle, then stopped. Astarion needed one. Maybe more. She gave him one just in case, kept one in the pack. Scroll of Aid went into his; not dramatic, but reliable. And Speak with Dead—two scrolls, both fragile, both already curling at the edges. She wrapped one in cloth and placed it beside her alchemy pouch. The other she tucked into Astarion’s scrollbook, quiet as a secret. Just in case someone had answers. Or needed to be heard.

The findings in the tunnels and the house were generous — they always were. Secrets and wealth alike lined the bowels of the earth like marrow in ancient bone. The Bhaalite shrine, especially. The runes, the blood-script, the chambers with their strange, spiral geometry…, and the documents so many documents, from the drows, from the yan-ti, the Zenth the shrine. It would keep her occupied for weeks, maybe longer. A scholar’s dream. A warning, too.

There would be much to study. Once she was done with—

She didn’t want to think about that.

She wanted to be done. She wanted him to be safe. To be free. To be happy, in that elusive, glittering way she’d glimpsed in the eyes of people she’d helped before. Free to rest, to laugh, to dance, to flirt and hunt and build a life without debt or danger stalking every shadow.

And when that happened — when the leash was broken and his name was finally his own — she would disappear.

Go her own way.

She always did.

To another pull, another thread in the world, another place where pain begged for an answer. While he… he would find a home. A moonlight-drenched cottage somewhere. Velvet, laughter, music in the courtyard. Books. Stories. Lovers. A life that didn’t scare him.

I know we would miss him.

But he’d be safe. Whole. Unshackled. And like the others, she’d only be a living reminder of the worst time of his life. A scar walking on two legs. She didn’t want that for him.

I hope he remembers us fondly, sometimes.

She left the documents for another time. Instead, she picked up the spellbook salvaged from the serpentfolk ambush. Several spells she already knew—Alarm, Charm Person, even Comprehend Languages—basic tools she could already cast with a flick of her harp. Others were less useful to her style—Alter Self was clever, but awkward in her repertoire. But the rest... she paused on Arcane Lock, Chromatic Orb, Burning Hands, Cloud of Daggers, and deeper entries like Animate Dead, Bestow Curse, Blink, and Counterspell. These, she whispered to herself, these are worth learning.

She wasn’t a wizard—had never been formally trained. Her magic came from practice, from music, from reading alone under candlelight and risking her mind to understanding the flow of the weave through rhythm and resonance. Transcribing spells required not just copying sigils, but interpreting why they worked—how they sang. She’d have to study each individually, decode their principles, and transpose them into something she could play. A lifetime’s work, if she let it be. But once she cracked the pattern, her bardic memory would ensure she never lost them.

She set the arcane spellbook aside and turned to the shadow-based one. It held only a few spells she didn’t already know—Shadow Blade, Summon Shadowspawn, Darkness. All difficult, but useful. Then she blinked at one entry and smiled: Tiny Hut. She’d already copied it. Her ritual casting affinity made it easy; rituals came to her like breathing. These she could keep, expand, and always rely on.

She would decide what to learn and what to turn into scrolls later. No point in wasting. The weapons were less subtle: two short swords, a light crossbow with bolts. Three enchanted short swords from the Zhents, poison-laced. A set of light crossbows enchanted to fire silently. Smuggler’s armour—flexible, reinforced, lined in black silk to muffle sound. She inspected every seam. Quality. A bandolier of darts tipped with toxins. Boots of Elvenkind, still holding a soft enchantment of silence and lightness, a teleportation ring and another cursed ring disguised as a healing charm, and—she wrapped that one in silk and set it far from the rest. Just in case. Once that was organized, she focused on dividing the arrows and different poisons stocked from the looted bodies and the Zentharim's hideout.

Was it racist to assume Astarion would be better at a bow than her?

She did it, regardless.

Many things were better marksmen than her. It was a skill to learn, to train. not something you can pick up out of desperation. Thus, she prepared for him the better enchanted crossbow with the bulk of enchanted and tinkered arrows. 

Next, the magical items. These require time.
They required a ritual.

She pulled the black pearl from her pack—smooth, cool, and thrumming faintly with potential—and rolled it between ink-stained fingers. She loved this ritual. Not for its drama or mysticism, but for the clarity. The moment the veil lifted, when knowledge spilled raw and unfiltered from the Weave itself into her waiting mind. Knowledge was always good. Even when it hurt.

She set her rothé-leather-bound spellbook on the stone floor, opened it to the worn, precise inkwork of the Identify ritual. The circles were already drawn. She traced them anew, sharpened the sigils, then placed the pearl in the center and whispered the invocation beneath her breath.

The first item lay beside her—a small, inconspicuous dagger, pulled from the Zhentarim’s vault, still wrapped in cloth. She unwrapped it slowly. Sleek. Curved. Greenish sheen along the edge. Near silent when turned in her hand. Perfectly balanced. Deadly without needing to shout about it.

She touched it to the circle.

The magic pulsed—and the knowledge came rushing in. Fast, hot, intimate.
Whisperfang. Enchanted for silence and speed, its blade thirsted for vulnerable flesh. It amplified sneak attacks—striking where it hurt most, echoing pain along the nervous system, adding venom through the blood. A weapon not of brutality, but of precision. A lover of things that hunt shadows, a whisper of death. She let the name settle, then nodded once. This one wasn’t hers.

Wrote in neat little parchment label cards what she learned and turned to the second item.

This item waited in a silk-wrapped bundle, tucked tightly between a shattered mask and a ledger soaked through with ink and blood. Eleyna unwrapped it slowly, reverently. A cloak—no, not just a cloak. The fabric drank the light. Dark, velvety, flickering at the edges like smoke that hadn’t decided whether to burn or vanish. The black thread along its seams moved subtly, like it remembered the fingers that stitched it. She laid it gently into the circle. The pearl pulsed. The Weave parted like a breath held too long—and the cloak responded. 

The magic set into the air, thin and chill. Not evil. Not even malevolent. Just... still. Waiting. The ritual unveiled its name in a whisper that wasn’t spoken: Cloak of the Gloaming. The cloak basically granted three boons. The first being Shadowveil, it not only aided the wearer in stealth, but also expected, almost quaint. But also allowed them to be effectively invisible while hiding in dim light or darkness to all that sees through darkvision. The second benefit, Gloamstep, permitted twice a day—to step through the world as shadow, incorporeal for a heartbeat and a breath, capable of slipping through stone and flesh alike. Dangerous, yes, but gods, what a tool. And finally, Shroud, once a day— the wearer is able to cast Silence or Darkness on themself, and have it move with them, rather than stay behind.

It would have been exceptional as-is, but the cloak wasn’t finished revealing itself. A deeper enchantment curled out from the stitched black seams: the ability to speak and understand Deep Speech and Thieves’ Cant while wearing it. Languages not meant to be learned. Languages of void and velvet. Of back rooms and buried names. Of secrets not written but passed hand to hand in the dark. Lies and whispers.

She pulled her hand back slowly, eyes narrowed, chest tight.

“Astarion,” she murmured, not calling him, just acknowledging.
This one… she wasn’t sure.
It felt made for him. Yet something in it called to me.
She wrote the card label either way. 

The third item was the ledger she just pushed. She opened it with gloves.

Bound in cracked, blackened leather and sealed with an iron clasp etched in script, the book felt wrong in her hands—weighted, like it remembered every name written inside. She laid it on the floor outside the circle, unwilling to place it in the same space as her spellbook. With a careful pluck of her finger to the weave, the black pearls shone.

The reaction was immediate.

Ink bled up from the fibres and filled her vision like veins surfacing beneath the retina.Names appeared—some ancient, some fresh. Contracts. Soul-debts. Oaths taken in secret and sealed in blood. Lies made binding. With each pulse, more secrets surfaced: betrayals, bindings, obsessions. She turned a page. Another name. Another truth.

The magic was clearer now.

The ledger functioned as an augmented spell focus—specifically for Divination and Enchantment. It could also allow the casting of Zone of Truth or Detect Thoughts once per day, pulling knowledge and lies directly from the air, from the minds of others. But that wasn’t its only gift.

There was a curse stitched between the ink. 

A paranoia. A gnawing suspicion that grew with every use. The book whispered at the edges of her thoughts, suggesting betrayal even where there was none. It would hollow out anyone if let. Make them see plots in every kindness. Treachery in every glance.

Child's play. Not a single whisper it made hasn't been already screamed thousands of times over by the Spidersong. She snapped it shut, tied the clasp tight, and whispered an Arcane lock over the cover. Not for her, she knew my fog was stronger than this. The curse will only whisper to the emptiness I left in her. No, she bound it for Astarion. This will eat him up. Still, she kept it.

Her eyes shifted to the three core Bhaalite relics.

She started with the ritual dagger. The moment her fingers brushed the hilt, it hummed in her hand—low and hungry. It didn’t sing like other weapons. It whispered. Violence, images, urges—wet things, intimate and raw. Its edge gleamed with a sheen like obsidian glass, dark and too reflective, as if it remembered every face it had kissed. When she tilted it, the blood-groove caught the torchlight and refracted it in thin red pulses. The blade was etched with worm-prayers, curling, indecipherable sigils that writhed faintly when her breath caught them.

She knew even before the ritual: this wasn’t an enchanted item.
This was worse.

She placed it gently in the circle, not to bind it—only to know it.

Identify revealed its nature clearly:
Forged in the hidden temples of Bhaal, this dagger had drunk the blood of hundreds—perhaps thousands—in sacrificial rites. The blade itself held no magic. It didn’t need to. It was the god who empowered the wielder, not the weapon. Its history was soaked in murder, its aura saturated with intent. It had once belonged to the infamous assassin Naelith, a name spoken in the same breath as martyrdom and massacre among Bhaal’s followers. She had disappeared after a failed rite, and this dagger was all that remained.

It wasn’t cursed in the arcane sense.

But it was a conduit.

A vessel of something watching.

Eleyna wrapped it again with steady hands, her mouth dry.

She didn’t hear Bhaal’s voice. But she felt the dead murder lord's patience. 

This feeling was confirmed with the next relic. 

The silver ritual bowl.  She unwrapped it slowly, letting the cloth fall away in folds like old robes. The bowl shimmered faintly in the low light—beautiful, almost deceptively so. Intricately crafted from glimmering silver, its surface was etched with ancient, curling symbols that flowed like veins down its outer rim. The patterns didn’t form words exactly—more like invitations. Warnings dressed as worship. Inside, grooves spiralled inward, designed to catch and cradle liquid. Blood, most likely. The kind that mattered. The kind that meant something. As she turned it in her hands, the center gave off a faint, almost imperceptible pulse, and a red glow shimmered at the base, subtle but constant, like an ember refusing to die.

She placed it in the circle and whispered the words. The ritual answered immediately, too easily.

Much like the dagger, the bowl was not just a vessel.
It was a magnet for death.

Forged in devotion, it responded only to sacrifice—true sacrifice. Every drop of blood poured into it during ritual murder added to the devotee's aura of murder potency, a supernatural presence that clung to them like a second skin. The more blood it accepted, the more that aura grew—making the wielder harder to detect, easier to trust, deadlier. People would look at them and see what they wanted to see… until the blade came down.

She stared into it a moment longer. It wanted to be used.

She rewrapped it quickly, cinching the cloth tight and binding the corners with string.
She didn’t trust it exposed. This should be sold to Candlekeep. Can't put that in the world.

Next came the sealed vial Astarion had found in the Bhaal chambers—small, tightly stoppered, sealed in black wax that had cracked faintly around the edges, like old bone under pressure. It radiated danger, even before she laid it in the circle. She nearly didn’t cast Identify. Something in her recoiled. But she did. She had to know.

And when the truth bloomed against her mind like a blade parting skin, she stared.

Divine blood.
Not metaphor. Not a metaphor at all.
Malar’s divine blood. The Beastlord. The god of the hunt, of bestial rage, of claw and fang and rutting violence.

She sat back, breath held too long. This didn’t make sense.

Bhaal and Malar? There was no canonical link—no temple alliance, no divine pact she knew of beyond a vague proximity in portfolio: blood, death, urge. Maybe through Bane, their mutual connection to conquest. But still… this vial wasn’t found in a temple.
It had been locked in Bhaal’s avatar’s private chambers.

Who was he hunting?

And why would a god of planned murder need the blood of the wild hunt?

She turned back to the vial. Its Weave signature was ancient. Thick. Heavy. This was a relic, not a potion. Attunable, and not without cost.

The blood of Malar granted terrible power. For one hour, the wielder became the apex predator—either their strength or dexterity surged beyond mortal limits, muscles coiled with supernatural precision. Their senses sharpened, instinct eclipsing thought; they could track anything that bled, that feared, that ran. The scent of prey—especially those already wounded or afraid—became tangible, traceable even through walls. Every heartbeat was a signal. Every moment of hesitation, a weakness to exploit.

Their strikes—be they claw, fist, fang, or blade held like an extension of self—carried the weight of something older and crueller than magic. They tore through flesh and armour alike, necrotic power leeching through each wound. And when they drew blood, when they felled a target, others felt it. Creatures nearby instinctively recoiled, seized by terror without knowing why. It wasn’t a spell. It was dominance, raw and unspoken.

But Malar's gift was no blessing. With the first kill, the bloodlust took root. The wielder had to fight to keep themselves—because with each corpse, the frenzy deepened. Failure to resist meant losing control entirely, lashing out at anyone near, friend or foe, until the frenzy burned itself out. And even once it ended, the mark remained.

Diviners, clerics, druids—they would know. The wielder carried the Beastlord’s taint, treated as a lycanthrope by spell and ward alike. Animals would sense it and flinch. Druids would narrow their eyes. Something about them would always reek of fur and blood and midnight.

And then came the hunger.

It lingered long after the blood cooled until the next night rest—meat tasted sweeter, and sleep grew thin. Dreams turned red. Empathy faded beneath the pulse of imagined footsteps in the brush. Even when the power faded, something primal remained—watching, waiting, licking its teeth.

She trembled slightly and carefully put it back again, and wrote with her hands slightly trembling.

Then there was Curse Eater.

Its blade devoured light even as she held it—not reflecting, not absorbing, but negating it, swallowing illumination like the void between stars. The veins of crimson threading its length pulsed faintly, like blood through arteries, alive with ancient purpose. The jagged crossguard curled like clawed hands around a gemstone that pulsed—slow and steady, like a heartbeat underground.

It whispered in her mind. Not in words.
In pressure.
In gravity.
In history.

The name wasn’t a metaphor. It wasn’t flair.
Curse Eater was a promise.

Forged long ago to sever corruption at its root, the blade was once wielded by Kelemvor Lyonsbane—before godhood, before the mantle of death, when he was still a man fighting the rot of his own bloodline. Meant to cleave through the chains of soul-bound curses, the sword had tasted the grief of revenants, the madness of wights, the sorrow of lich-bound oaths. It had wept black light into the night and screamed without sound as it consumed the twisted magics that lingered long after death.

Its hunger was not evil.
But it was real.

It longed for curses. Thrived on them. Each one it consumed made the edge keener, the weight heavier, the presence darker. It could even rip a curse from someone’s soul—ally or enemy—and drive it, blade-first, into another. A retribution born of shared pain.

Eleyna’s breath hitched. Her hands trembled against the leather-wrapped hilt.

It didn’t feel like holding a weapon.
It felt like holding a verdict.

What if it could eat the spider?
The thought came unbidden. Cold. Raw.

What if it could do what no spell had managed?
What if it could take the thing inside her—the curse beneath the fog—and cast it out?

She wasn’t sure if the shiver running through her was fear or hope.
But she did not let go.

The thought slithered up from that cold place inside her, the one wrapped in fog and old pain.

The spider.

The song.

The memory she couldn't claw out of her bones. 

It had no name, that curse. No sigil. No neat phrasing. Just the pounding itch at the back of her mind — move the right way, speak the wrong word, and it will wake. She could feel it sometimes. Breathing behind her eyes.

She clutched the hilt tighter. Could this thing tear it free? Could I be… me, without it?

The blade pulsed in her palm, as if it understood the shape of her thoughts. As if it were waiting.

Waiting for her to ask.

She almost did.

Her heart was hammering. 
Even the fog couldn't contain it. 

What if we could be free? 

No, the last time we tried, we almost turned into a drider.

TRY!!!! 

"Is everything alright, darling? I could hear your heart from outside the lodge... Well, someone's been busy."

I blinked, 
Astarion is here?  When did he get back? 
I looked through the window, and the sky was turning that paler shade of purple, betraying the incoming dawn.
He left right after sunset. 

How long have we been here?

" Darling ?!" Astarion reappeared in the dome.

The fog yanked me back before I could answer. 

Astarion strolled in, still towelling his hair from the snow, drops of half-melted frost clinging to the tips of his curls. His shirt was open at the collar, the edges damp from the cold. He paused just inside the warded dome, sharp eyes flicking over the organized chaos she’d assembled. The potions lined up in rows like little soldiers. The scrollbooks, stitched and colour-coded. The ritual circle, still humming faintly. And at the center of it all—her, frozen in place, Curse Eater clenched in both hands, its obsidian blade casting no reflection, just a hollow where light should have been.

“Darling…” he said again, softer this time. “You’re shaking.”

She was. She hadn’t noticed.

Her grip on the sword hadn’t loosened.

He approached with deliberate unhurriedness. His voice was gentle, but the mirth didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Should I be concerned?”

She blinked, finally releasing the breath that had locked in her chest.

“No, sorry. Just lost track of the time."

He looked at the array, one eyebrow rising. “Darling… is this an inventory or a spring cleaning?”

“It’s both,” she said lightly.

He crouched beside her, hands braced on his knees, gaze flicking between the sword and her face. “You’ve been busy,” he repeated—this time not as a joke, but something nearer to awe.

She gave a small, half-shrug and finally—finally—lowered Curse Eater to her lap, the blade’s weight a lingering pressure in her wrists. She didn’t sheath it. Not yet.

“Figured it was time to get organized. You know. While you were off...” She huffed, a ghost of laughter tugging at the corners of her mouth. Then she reached to her right and pulled a tightly bundled scroll kit into her lap.

“This one’s yours.”

He tilted his head. “Scroll book. Categorized by function, colour-coded by urgency.” She began unfolding it, explaining as she went. “Red tabs are for offence, Blue is mobility. Gold is for utility. Black is…” Her fingers hesitated, brushing the edge of a folded scroll. “Black is for necromancy. Use them sparingly.”

He took the bundle, fingers grazing the soft leather cover, brows furrowing in quiet amazement. “You made this for me?”

“I made one for both of us,” she said, deflecting the softness in his voice. “But yes. Yours is tailored.”

“And these loops?” he asked, sliding a finger into one of the leather rings.

“Duplicates. So you don’t waste time shuffling through six copies of the same cantrip." Next, she passed over the potion pack—two belts’ worth of clinking glass, each vial cradled in stitched, padded sleeves. “Red for healing, green for enhancements, blue for resistance. I added the stronger stuff to your side—Potion of Speed, Bloodlust, and many poisons in the bandolier as well. You hit harder and faster than I do. Better to lean into that.”

He blinked. “Eleyna...”

She stood, knees popping faintly, and retrieved a crossbow from the weapons pile—light, elegantly carved, enchanted for silence. The arrows followed—sorted by type, damage, even condition. She pressed it into his hands next, along with a narrow bandolier. “Sorry if it's racist. I don't mean to offend. I really am just bad with it.”

'“What ?!"

" You know, giving you the bow and crossbow because you are an Elf."

"What? Wait, never mind that. I didn’t—”

“It’s fine.” She smiled faintly. “This one fires silently. It won’t give you away in a dark corridor.”

“By the nine hells, would you slow down for a minute. You... made me an entire arsenal.”

“I didn't make anything. Ah, no, I did brew some potions. I mean, we already had all this.  I just organized it,” she said gently. “But yes. I thought it through. I always do.”

He looked up then, truly looked at her.

And there it was—that flicker behind his eyes. Not just the usual mischief, not just amusement or flirtation, but something rawer. Something surprised by tenderness.

Overwhelmed.

“Darling,” he said at last, voice quiet, “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you like me.”

She crooked her head, confused. Something caught in her chest.

“What do you mean? I like you, but what does that have to do with preparing gear ?” she said. " Wait, before I forget, these are the things I knew would be better for you. There is also the dagger." She picked up the Whisperfang dagger and twirled it, satisfied with the soundless arc it made. “This one seems almost made for you. Here, have a look at the label." She said. 

"Beautiful,” he said, not looking at the label at all.

She tssked and added " for the rest, there are some very powerful relics and items. Choose what you like, but please be careful with the Bhaalite ones, those two in particular. I don't think they should be used. The ledger is a bit, how do I say this? I don't believe you are stable enough psychologically to use it, and it's not worth it for you to risk madness just for some mind-reading."

He chuckled, eyes dancing across the remaining spread. “ Wait, there is more? And I am actually choosing my gifts? How delightful, one can only wonder what I did or what I would be asked to do to be spoiled rotten to such an extent.”

She didn’t laugh. “What do you mean by gifts? You earned your share. You found most of these. Disarmed all the traps and picked all the locks. Wait, you thought I was keeping them to... Astarion,  I just kept everything because my pack is enchanted and I needed to identify the items; some of these... need caution. I’ve marked the cursed ones. They’re... persuasive.”

Astarion didn’t respond right away. His hand lingered on the scroll bundle she’d handed him, thumb brushing along the seam where her careful stitching ended in a tiny, uneven knot. His eyes flicked back to the relics, then to her face again, like he didn’t quite know what to say.

“You’re giving me some of these,” he said finally. “Just like that.”

She blinked. “You earned it.”

He laughed—short, disbelieving. “No, I mean... I didn’t expect you to actually give me much. I thought maybe you’d organize things. Hoard the good stuff. Pass out the rest. Potions, low-level scrolls, and gold, yeah, I figured that much, maybe not to this extent, but these... I didn't think I'd see them again, to be honest. ”

Eleyna frowned, genuinely confused. “Why would I do that?”

“Because,” he said, voice low but edged, “that’s what people do. Even the good ones. Especially with things like this. Power. Magic. Knowledge. It all gets hoarded in the end.” His fingers curled loosely around the Whisperfang dagger. “I thought maybe I’d get one thing. Two, if I were lucky. Certainly not this. Don't get me wrong, I didn't mind. Figured I owed you that much.”

She shook her head slowly, still not following. “You don't owe me anything! I told you all I want is fucking dinner and probably to not slit my throat or anyone's undeserving throat while I sleep. You carried just as much of this as I did. This isn’t charity. And it sure as hell isn’t pity. Why wouldn’t it be yours, too? ”

He didn’t answer immediately. Just stared at the gear arrayed in front of him like it was an altar. Or a test.

A long silence stretched, and when he finally spoke, his voice was soft. “Aren’t these... your stories? Your purpose.”

She tilted her head. “What?”

“The scrolls. The weapons. The relics.” He gestured vaguely at the piles she’d so carefully organized. “This is how you survive, isn’t it? You collect people’s stories. Their problems. Their pieces. You make something out of them. Stitch it together, write it down, move on. That’s the rhythm of you, darling. Live a little. Fix what’s broken. Pack it up. Leave. But your real goal was what you found along the way.”

His eyes found hers again, bright and unflinching.

“I didn’t think I got to keep any part of that. I thought I was just another thread you’d sew into your next story. The one about how you discovered Bhaal's last chambers and vestment, or uncovered Balder's gate's vampire lord. ”

Eleyna didn’t flinch—but her throat tightened.

“That’s not—” She stopped. Bit her lip. Tried again. “I don’t think you understand. Is that really what I am to you, a collector? Yes, I was fascinated, but some of what we found, and I can still study it and record it, even if you have it. but the key word here is We, We found this. These aren’t my stories, Astarion. They’re ours. You’re in them. Every spell I recorded, every thing I brewed, every note I wrote in the margins—it all changed because of you. You watched my back when I was sketching the temple. You earned every single thing here. You trekked for it, just as I did, bled for it. You risked your neck. Hell, you found the fucking shrine. Taking this would be using you. Does that seem like a thing I want to do?” She spat before slowly adding. " And if I fucking was, why would you be okay with it ?"

He blinked at her—just once—and for the first time that night, something fragile cracked behind his expression. Not vulnerability. Not even disbelief.

Recognition.

The way someone looks when a lifelong assumption falters.

When a wound realizes it’s being seen, not dressed.

She took a breath and stepped closer.

He sat back slowly, the dagger loose in his fingers now, the sarcastic veneer sliding off like old lacquer under heat. The silence between them was thick, not tense—but charged. Not empty—but listening.

She didn’t push. She just breathed. The echo of her last words—“why would you be okay with it?”—still hovered in the dome’s quiet warmth.

“I don’t know,” he said, almost too low to hear. “Maybe I thought that’s just how it worked. You let someone use you in the least painful way, because at least then you know how you’re being used. Because it means you still have a choice. Some illusion of control.”

She said nothing. Just watched. The fog in her mind shifted—not suspicion, not fear, but stillness. Listening.

“I spent centuries,” he continued, fingers flexing on the leather-wrapped hilt, “making myself useful. Pretty. Efficient. Charming. I’d wake up every night wondering if I’d done enough to be worth not being... And if I hadn’t… well. Then I’d smile harder.” He looked at her then, his red eyes very clear. “You have to understand. When you start from there, gifts don’t feel like kindness. They feel like a test. like a burden.”

Eleyna didn’t move. Her expression softened, but she didn’t reach out. She wouldn’t touch something that raw.

Instead, she said quietly, “Easy then. Those are not gifts. They are rights. This isn’t a test. Or a trap.”

“I know,” he said quickly. Then slower: “I think I know.”

He stared down at the bundle again. Then back at her.

And something in him wavered—some piece of armour he’d worn long before he met her. Something brittle and lonely that had clung to him like a second skin even when he laughed, even when he danced.

It cracked, just a little.

“You’re a strange woman, Eleyna,” he said, voice thick with something that didn’t quite settle as humour. “Do you know that?”

She smiled, soft and a little sad. “You say that a lot. Now, could you please choose what you want? By the heavens, please, just take it. You are a martial class. God knows you need all the help you can get. Just avoid the murder god prayer shineys.”

His laughter exploded

—sharp and sudden, startled from the gut like a bird flying through an open window. It echoed in the dome, bright and real, and for a moment, he couldn’t stop—his shoulders shaking, hand pressed over his mouth like he could trap the sound and keep it. She watched him with that crooked little smile, the one that meant she’d done it on purpose. And not because she wanted to mock him.

Because she wanted to break the spell.

He exhaled hard, still grinning. “Saints above, woman, that was—”

“True?” she offered.

He wiped a tear from the corner of his eye, shaking his head with that helpless sort of fondness usually reserved for disasters you can’t help but love. “—insufferably accurate.”

“Then I rest my case.”

They stood there for a moment longer—two silhouettes framed in the fading shimmer of the ritual dome, surrounded by the spoils of battle and the echoes of old gods. The silence wrapped around them, no longer hollow, but thick with meaning. Not absence, but presence.

Astarion chuckled softly, more breath than sound, before turning toward the rows of magical items. “Mmm.”
His eyes narrowed as he plucked up the Ledger of Broken Promises, running a claw along the warped edge of its spine. The book’s leather cover flexed beneath his touch like something alive. He didn’t flinch—but he set it down with delicate disdain, as one might return a cursed gift to an altar.

“Not that one,” he said plainly. “You’re right. I already have too many voices in my head.” His tone was dry, but not cold. “And it's more suited to someone with arcane discipline. But you—can you handle it? That curse smells like... unravelling.”

“Easily,” she answered. No bravado. Just a fact.

He nodded once, as if accepting that answer was easier than challenging it, and moved on.

His hands moved now with the precision of someone assembling a kit—not a thief choosing spoils, but a professional curating instruments. He slipped on the Boots of Elvenkind, their enchantment activating like a sigh, muffling even the creak of leather.

“To the risk of advancing racial stereotypes further in your mind,” he drawled, “but silent, stylish, and clearly made for walking into trouble. Seems like my kind of footwear.”

“I said sorry,” Eleyna murmured from her perch.

He gave her a wink over his shoulder.

But his next choice made her sit up straighter.
He picked up the vial of Malar’s divine blood, uncorked it just enough to catch its scent—then recoiled slightly, eyes wide.

“Are you serious?” he asked.

“Unfortunately,” she said, dryly. “I couldn’t believe it either.”

He held the vial up to the firelight. The dark crimson liquid shimmered faintly inside, viscous and ancient. He fixed the leather thong around his neck and let the vial rest against his chest like a charm.

“For when everything needs to die,” he murmured.

“The backlash is severe,” she warned.

He smiled without humour. “I’m used to this particular type of backlash.” Then, more softly, “And just imagine the clerics’ faces when they realize a vampire is walking around with the Beastlord’s mark. A lycanthropic vampire—divinely touched. Sacrilegious on so many levels. It’s... delicious.”

Her lips twitched. “Only you would find desecration fashionable.”

Then his hand hovered over Curse Eater.

She didn’t breathe.

He didn’t reach for it right away—just looked. The blade lay there, devouring light even now, pulsing faintly like it could hear them. Like it was waiting.

“This one doesn’t have a label,” he said.

“I didn’t have time to write it,” she replied. “It was the last I identified.”

So she told him. Quietly. Thoroughly. No dramatics. Just the truth of it: what it was, what it did, what it cost. Who had once wielded it. Who might need it now?

“You found that one,” she added, her voice barely above a whisper.

“I did.” He stared down at it. “I feel bad keeping both blades.”

“You don’t have magic,” she said simply.

He looked at her, as if testing her for protest. But she offered none. Only a nod. A permission without need for further justification.

Let him have it. Let him choose for both of them.

And he did.

He reached out and lifted Curse Eater, its obsidian length catching no reflection, only absence. The sword responded with a faint pulse in his grasp—not malevolent, but aware. Heavy. Hungry.

He settled it into his belt without a word.

Finally, his fingers grazed the ring of teleportation. Sleek, unassuming, but carved with runes that shimmered faintly beneath the surface.

“I need to be everywhere,” he said. No trace of irony in his voice.

She nodded once. “Then that’s your kit.”

He stepped back and reached for her hand, catching it lightly between his own. She squeezed his fingers gently in return.

“Promise me you’ll use it well,” she said. “Not just to win. To keep yourself safe.”

A pause.

Then a slow, solemn nod. “I will.”

They packed in near silence after that, but it was a peaceful silence—mutual, companionable. She kept what mattered to her: the Cloak of the Gloaming, the Smuggler’s Armor, the ledger (because someone had to watch the lies), and the twin shortswords that still whispered in her hands like familiar ghosts.

The rest they stacked carefully. Gear to be sold, traded, or bartered at the next safe outpost. All except for three items.

“These,” she said, holding the velvet-wrapped bundles reverently, “go to Candlekeep.”

Astarion glanced up. “Even the blood-bowl?”

“Especially the blood-bowl.”

He didn’t argue.

They worked side-by-side, organizing their packs, preparing before facing the nightmare that was Warlock’s Crypt.

But it was there.

Curse Eater glimmered faintly at Astarion’s side, its pulse steady, like a second heartbeat.

She would watch it closely. She had to.

An undead vampire now wielding the blade once held by the God of Death himself. A damned Anathemma inheriting the Judge of the Damned sword, the one forged to sever damnation.

She had always been a sucker for a good story.

And this?

This was a damn good one in the making.

---

Sleep found her quickly. 

Work was good,

Work tired us both.

Stabilized the fog. 

The warding dome shimmered faintly around us — light catching on the snow outside, bending through the enchantment into soft, shifting ribbons of colour.

Blues became lavender, reds deepened to wine.

Within, it was warm. Not just from the thick goliath skin I’d slipped into for insulation, nor just the spell's heating. No — the warmth came from something quieter. A steadiness in my chest I hadn’t felt in weeks.

Something slow and anchoring.

I needed to get out of the fog,

Now that I knew it was keeping me.

It was able to yank me back against my will. 

It allowed me at least some time with the body when guarded and protected under the dome. 

Allowed me. 

The word tasted sour in my mouth. 

I know now that the fog isn't me. 

It's not just me. 

Something powered it.

Corrupted it. 

I need to find the resistance. 

I need it quick.

By early afternoon, Astarion lay draped across a tangle of old furs found in the back room. He is nestled in the far side of the lodge, where the few straying sunrays seep through the cracks of our makeshift shutters. One pale knee was thrown over a bundle, foot tapping lazily in the air while the other was languidly extended on the ground. He looked absurdly comfortable like a cat sprawled on blankets near a nice hearth. That gaudy little book — the one with the scandalous cover art — was propped open on his stomach. He flipped pages with idle flicks, eyes skimming like he was reading a court transcript rather than torrid fiction.

Then came the sound — a low, amused snort — and I didn’t have to look to know he’d found another choice passage.

“Honestly,” he drawled, voice smooth, filled with amusement, “The things these people think can be done in impolite company… authors nowadays truly have no sense of mechanics.”

I knelt back over my makeshift brewing rig, struggling not to grin. “Still reading that nonsense?” I rasped, without looking up.

He peered at me over the book, mischief flickering behind those too-sharp eyes. “Don’t judge so harshly, little dove. You'd be surprised. It’s quite educational, really.”

“Oh! Is it? Please do enlighten me, what secret knowledge have you learned?”

“For starters, that mortal anatomy can apparently accommodate five lovers at once,” he said, lifting an elegant brow, “provided you keep the dialogue flowery enough.”

A laugh scraped out of me. “ Allow me to salute your earlier skepticism then. Seems rather impossible for regular anatomies indeed.”

He stretched languidly, muscles shifting beneath pale skin. “Oh? And how would you know that?” he purred, voice taking on that slow, velvet-laced cadence that always made the air feel warmer than it was. “Have you tried it, darling? Perhaps you’re underestimating the elasticity of mortal creativity. Given adequate company, of course.”

His lips curled into a grin — the barest flash of fang. Playful. Almost innocent, if you didn’t know better. Then, with infuriating grace, he tilted his chin and watched me over the tops of the pages.

“Or is this you inviting me to test some theories?” he murmured. “For science, of course. Purely academic rigour.”

I rolled my eyes skyward, huffed, shaking my head, hair fluffing out with the motion. The exasperation on my face only made his grin sharpen.

“For science, yeah sure,” I echoed dryly. “ But if you mean to enlist me in your anatomical experiments, you’ll need sturdier equipment than a tattered novel from Baldur’s Gate, more healing capability than what I can brew in a fortnight, and considerably more willing participants. There are only two of us, may I remind you? ”

“Ah, there are those Pesky observation skills and frustrating logic, ” he said, rolling languidly onto his back, one boot propped on the edge of the small crate he was using for a footrest. “Tragic, really. I was so looking forward to brandishing this prose in bed tonight. ‘O shimmering pomegranate of my deepest sighs…’”

I made a strangled sound, halfway between a laugh and a groan. “If you ever call me a pomegranate, I will personally see to it that your undead heart stops.”

He clutched at his chest with mock injury, eyes wide. “Cruel woman! Crushing my poetic spirit. And here I thought we were beginning to build something special.”

Despite myself, my mouth twisted into a small smile. Watching him tease, watching him lounge there in the dim lodge light, was like watching frost melt off stone — cautious, thin, but there. A glimpse of warmth. Of life.

“Pardon me the discouragement of a youthful, tragic poet,” I said, brushing the last of the powdered herb into its tin. “I shame all bardic etiquette and oaths alike by attempting to sniff out an artistic streak. As humble as it may have been. I blame my scholarly side — it simply cannot fathom how flowery language would assist with any biological constraints. Nor,” I added, glancing up at him with mock gravity, “do I see any prose worthy resemblance between myself and a pomegranate.”

Astarion made a soft, scandalized noise. “Oh, how little you know! Pomegranates are symbols of fertility, mystery, blood, and temptation. Quite apt, I’d say. You do indeed resemble a pomegranate — glistening, bleeding rubies and all — I’ll write you a sonnet so wretched, you’ll have no choice but to stake me or fall at my feet.”

I raised a brow. “Fertility?! My hands are deadlier to any plant matter than the Blight spell. I can hardly be called a temptress when dressed mainly in rags and changing form every nightfall. Blood—well, at least now we know you see me, the mysterious bloodbag indeed.”

“You wound me deeply.”

I busied my hands, wiped down the pestle. “Oh tragedy! Are you going to pout for ten minutes like that last ti...?”

“I was brooding, thank you. A noble, seductive, brooding,” he interrupted

I shook my head, but my smile stayed — small, private, unwilling to leave. “Yes, noble, seductive, brooding, of course. One can only wonder how my body was able to resist such charm. Must be the lack of flowery language.”

“Keep going,” he warned lightly, “and I will leave you to your dull, boredom-filled existence and leave. Go try my luck in search of a more appreciative crowd.”

I met his eyes. “Deal. But I’m keeping the pomegranate sonnet. Although you said much of the same last time, too. And yet here you remain. Undead, unrepentant, and deeply in love with your own voice. I think your jolly company is secured for a while.”

He rolled his eyes, but his smirk didn’t falter. “Admit it. You’d be dreadfully bored without me. And why would you want the sonnet if you have no use for flowery language?" 

I bit back the reply that rose instinctively. I would be bored. She was bored, but instead I answered, " I never said I had no use for flowery language. I only said I fail to see how it could override anatomical impossibilities as suggested in your fine manual."

He gave a faux gasp, placing a dramatic hand to his chest. “Darling, are you suggesting my book is not a reliable source of academic truth? I’ll have you know it was written by a Duchess. Or at least someone claiming to be one. Possibly drunk.”

I arched a brow. “Ah, yes. Nobility-reviewed erotica. The height of scholarly truths.”

He beamed. “Exactly. Now you’re learning. So you do admit you have a use for poetic filth.”

I turned back to my kit, tightening the stopper on the cold-draught vial with deliberate care. “There is plenty of use to it. Comedy being one. But I said I had a use for poetry. I didn’t say I’d survive hearing myself called a ‘shimmering blossom of aching moonlight or a succulent fruit’ while trying not to die.”

He laughed — properly, this time. Not the guarded chuckle he used when testing the air, but something easier, fuller. The kind of sound that made the lodge feel warmer by degrees.

“Noted,” he said between chuckles. “No moonlight nor fruits metaphors." He looked at me curiously and said half interested, "So I gather it's not really helping you. You know, to get in the mood? "

I looked over at him again, and for just a moment, he wasn’t smirking. Just smiling. Softly. Like he hadn’t expected the moment to last this long, and didn’t quite trust it not to break.

"Is it supposed to? Is that why people do it?"

He tilted his head, his smile tilting with it. "So not your thing, huh? Pity, I would have pinned you for a closeted romantic."

I smirked without looking at him. "Now that's something I have never been accused of." 

“Mm.” He stretched, bones popping faintly as he draped himself sideways across the nearest fur like a painting of debauchery."What were you accused of then by past lovers?" 

My hands paused. "What defines a lover? " 

Astarion was quiet for a beat too long. Then, with a half-laugh, "Easy enough, Someone you bedded."

That pulled my eyes back to him — and I caught it again, that flicker in his expression. Like something inside him wasn’t running, for once. Just… resting. " Already told you, Frigid." 

He tilted his head, one silver brow arching, studying me in that faintly predatory way that never quite lost its edge — even now, draped over the crate like a bored cat. The smut book lay forgotten on his chest, one pale hand idly tapping its spine.

“You’ve said that before,” he murmured, voice lower, a bit rougher. “But I don’t know… I refuse to believe it.”

I let out a short huff. “Believe what? That anyone might find my skills on the matter or my company… lacking? You really should. Nonetheless, try to keep your expectations modest,” I said. “I have no intention of proving you right or demonstrating how much you are wrong.”

Astarion grinned — not wide, not sharp. Just enough to show that he wasn’t letting go of the thread.

“Oh no,” he said, voice curling like smoke. “I have the opposite problem. I suspect I’d find you maddeningly good at it — and utterly unaware. I can't believe that you would be cold,” he clarified, sharper now, eyes narrowing just slightly. “I’ve been around long enough to spot these types, darling. And you—”

He sat up, elbows on his knees, the firelight catching on the sharp angles of his face.

“You may not be some swooning maiden reciting garden poetry, nor particularly expressive, but frigid? No. Never that.”

I snorted, busying my hands with a bottle, checking the swirl of the brew though I didn’t truly need to. “If you say so. I don't know where you got that notion."

Astarion’s smile deepened, but it wasn’t his usual razor-thin smirk. It was quieter. More amused than amused-at. “From observation,” he said simply. “I watch you, you know. When you think I’m not. When you’re not looking.”

That stilled my hands more than any flirtation ever had. He leaned forward, fingers lacing loosely between his knees, voice dropping a register. “You hold your breath often. You don't fidget, but you tense, as if breathing might let the feelings in or out too deeply. You hum when you stir potions, but only when you forget you're not truly alone. And when you touch someone — even by accident — your fingers hover first. Like you’re asking permission, even if you don’t say it.”

He wasn’t teasing now. Not really.

“You think that’s frigid?” he asked. “Because I think that’s someone who feels too much and doesn't know where to put it.”

I looked away — not because I was embarrassed, but because I knew he meant it. And worse — he’d seen it.

I corked the bottle gently. “You should get back to your book.”

“I will,” he said. “Eventually. But humour me by answering this. Why do you think yourself frigid?"

"Preponderance of proof, first-person accounts, as well as expert opinions. Take your pick. You only argue the opposite because you’ve never seen me with anyone else, nor in that context.”

A ghost of something flickered across his features, then settled into an amused smirk. “And whose fault is that? You’re hardly transparent about your grand love affairs. Or lack thereof.”

“There was nothing to be transparent about," I added. 

"Then why the secrecy?" he followed. 

I sighed and spoke, "I just didn't know it warranted disclosing, really. Is that the next part of the story you wish to know, or whatever you said? Do you think it pertinent as well?". 

He tilted his head and answered simply, "Absolutely. And please make it entertaining, dear lorekeeper. in rhymed stanzas preferably"

I sighed. 

Stanzas he said.

"As you wish: and I answered, teasing—though my voice was low, nearly reverent—feeling the words clunk down into the quiet between us. I didn’t reach for my lute. Didn’t strike a dramatic pose. I simply let the rhythm bloom from my breath as my fingers traced idle circles into the frost-laced crate still hosting most of my alchemist tools, the cadence of verses stirring without flourish.

No grand overture. 
Just my voice—bare, melodic, and tired.

Then I spoke—
not loudly, not gently—just truly.

"Hear thee, hear thee. 
The story of the century. 
Your fellow bard travelled long and wide,
Yet has no story of love, grand or otherwise,

Only fleeting mistakes. Mimitism really. 
Doing what others did until you realize it wasn't for you, eventually
Parts you play, Games you see
Of what I was told love ought to be.

I took the roles, rehearsed the lines,
Accepted kisses under borrowed signs.
Laid when I should, and sighed on cue,
Did all the things they said to do.

But paper hearts burn fast, you see,
And masks grow tight eventually.
So one by one, I shed each name,
Each empty glaze, each frozen flame.

I wasn't taught the gentle art—
Of how to hold, or play that part.
No maps for touch, no songs for trust—
Just quiet rules and skin like dust.

No maps were drawn on where to start?
It’s hard, you know, pulled far apart
Left me cold, No hands were kind,
Just ice that warped a tender mind.

Just borrowed shame, no safe reply,
Just flinches dressed in lullaby.
No grand romance, no final kiss—
Just pages filled with what I missed.

'Twas never mine, that sweet cliché—
The poems, the roses, the cabernet.
Just echoes worn like someone’s shoes,
Until the fit began to bruise.

And now I sit, with empty hands,
No castle built, no wedding bands.
But wiser for the scripts I broke—
The lies I lived, the truths I spoke.

So no, no love to proudly sing—
No ballads carved in silver ring—
Just ink, and scars, and lessons earned,
And pages where the fire never burned.

No thread of fate, no lover's vow—
But I still carry it, even now.
A tale not told for hearts to swoon—
Just one soul humming a quiet tune."

I didn’t look at him when I finished. Just exhaled softly and tapped ash from the palm of my hand, watching it fall like snow. There was no bow. No flourish. That had never been my kind of art. Just the truth, given rhythm.
A ballad for no one. A memory set to meter.

The silence afterward wasn’t uncomfortable—just full.
And I let it stay that way. Because sometimes a bard doesn’t sing to be heard.
Sometimes, we do to remember who we are.

When the last line faded, Astarion didn’t speak.

Didn’t quip. Didn’t grin. Didn’t raise a single arched brow.
He just watched me — with that unreadable expression he rarely let slip, the one he wore when something actually pierced through all his layers.

He’d gone still.

Not the feline stillness he wielded when calculating his next jest, or when he was about to strike with words or blades. No—this was a hush that seemed to settle from the inside out. Like a storm that had sat with him too long, and now found its echo in someone else's words.

He blinked once. Slowly. As if he’d forgotten how.

Then, voice low — too low for performance — he murmured, “That wasn’t what I expected.”

His gaze didn’t leave mine. Something soft tried to rise behind his eyes, but didn’t quite make it to the surface.
“I thought you’d deflect. Turn it into some clever joke. Or recite a bawdy tavern verse just to mock me for asking.”

" I live to surprise," I offered with a broad, open smile.

He leaned forward slightly, elbows on knees, book forgotten. The fire threw gold and garnet shadows across his face.

He tilted his head again, that same sharp glint in his eyes — but it wasn’t amusement anymore. Something else crouched there, low and restless. His gaze softened, the firelight painting the faintest shimmer in his eyes.

“Mimicry,” he repeated, low. “Gods, darling. That’s… bleak.”

“You asked. Didn't you?” I said with a shrug, though it felt too sharp in my mouth. “It was practical, learn the shape of things. Try them on. Observe how others fit. It’s what one does to learn, no? Fake it till you make it. And for a time, I thought that was enough.”

After a pause, his lips curled into a sardonic little smile. “Still bleak,” he murmured. “And dreadfully familiar.”
His voice dipped lower, softer—more dangerous for it. “I know a thing or two about playing parts to please.”

Then, quieter still, like he was peeling something open with deliberate precision:
“But tell me… was it truly that? Just going through the motions? Or did you ever at least want it?”

I frowned, turning the vial in my hand until the glass squeaked faintly under my thumb. The motion was restless, precise.

“I don't think I did,” I said slowly. “But I didn’t not want it, either. I wanted to want it. That’s different.”

I glanced up, met his eyes, then looked away again.

“And wanting… wanting isn’t the same as enjoying,” I added, softer. “Wanting didn’t come easily back then. Not when the body was only ever something to survive.”

Astarion’s expression shifted. No smile now. Just stillness.
His eyes lost that habitual glint of performance—gentle, unguarded in a way that scraped raw. The kind of softness that cost him to show.

And he let it show, just then. Something scraped raw in him. 

“And now?” he asked, voice low. “Do you still feel that way? About wanting. About… not enjoying.”

I didn’t answer at first. The vial stilled in my fingers. My thumb pressed the cork down too tightly, just to feel something press back. The fog stirred as I answered, "I stopped trying that altogether."

He looked down then, lashes sweeping low, mouth twitching at the corner. 

A beat passed.

Then another.

The fire crackled in the hearth, and for a moment, neither of us breathed.

When he looked up again, there was no smirk waiting on his lips — only that quiet ache he never quite let anyone see. The one that lived in the seams of his voice when he forgot to wear his mask.

“I understand,” he said softly. His gaze dropped to my hands — the finger still pressed against the vial’s cork like it might keep the whole truth sealed inside.

He said it like he knew. Because he did.

He asked again, gentler. “Do you ever… want to try again? to want”

My mouth opened — then closed.

The truth swelled, thick and brittle, behind my teeth. I smiled and then just said

“I still don’t know how,”

And there it was.

Astarion didn’t move for a long moment.

“I stopped trying long ago, too, I think, but in a different way,” he admitted, softer.

" I know," I just said. 

“Though to be fair, survival demanded other… performances. Want had very little to do with it.” His tone was light, almost mocking, but it didn’t hide the truth coiled underneath. I could hear it — like old ghosts whispering in the dark. Maybe he could hear it now? I set down the vial. Watched the swirl of residue settle. Then, without quite meaning to, I said quietly:

“From my experience....That’s not the same. Choosing something you don't want and being forced to … What he made you do, that’s not the same as simply not wanting. That's not someone you bedded. Believe me, it's much worse. It strips you down until you’re hollow, until there’s nothing left but the shape you’ve been forced to wear. The other… the other is still yours. Even if it’s empty. At least it’s yours.”

His head jerked slightly at that — just a breath, but enough. Like a string had been plucked somewhere deep inside him.
He didn’t answer at first. Just stared at me, red eyes sharp, unblinking. The smirk was gone now, peeled away to bare something far more fragile.

“I don’t know,” he rasped, voice low, almost hoarse. “It all blurs together after a while. Choice. Want. Being wanted. I stopped separating them centuries ago. Easier that way.”

I didn’t push. Gods, I wanted to — to reach across that small, fraying distance and pull him into the warmth of what I’d tried to say. But I saw it then. The flinch behind his lashes. The way his fingers clenched and unclenched like he didn’t know what they were supposed to be doing.

He couldn’t hear it. Not yet.

Didn’t see the olive branch for what it was. Didn’t recognize the confession in my voice — or maybe he did, and simply wasn’t ready to accept it. The weight of truth could be heavier than chains, sometimes. And he had worn enough of those. So I just nodded. Once. Quiet. Like closing a door that could be opened later.

“It is easier,” I said, not disagreeing. “Blurring things. Common coping mechanism. Makes surviving cleaner. Simpler.”

His jaw flexed — but he didn’t argue. He tried for a smile — gods, he tried — but it faltered before it could form, leaving his mouth half-open, caught on some unsaid ache. I turned back to the brewing rig, hands steady now, each motion careful. Ritual, not avoidance. A silence formed again, but this one had teeth — not cruel, just protective.

It's okay.

I just watched him. The way he twisted that strand of silver hair around his knuckle, pulling it tight until the roots must’ve stung. The way his throat bobbed on a swallow was clearly hurt. His fingers unwound from his hair and dropped into his lap, slack. He blinked at me, eyes shining just a little too bright in the lamplight. The edges of his mouth twitched — not toward a smile, but more like he was searching for where it might live on his face and coming up empty.

“Is that…” His voice cracked. He cleared it, tried again, softer. “Is that why you say no to me all the time? Because you don’t want?”

It cut deeper than it should have. Because there it was — the question laid bare. All the teasing barbs, all the offhand provocations, all the times he’d pressed close with that sly smile that never quite reached his eyes. Testing. Watching. Wondering if he could make me want what he didn’t. Or worse: hoping he couldn’t.

I exhaled slowly, feeling the shape of it break against my teeth.

“Not mainly, no,” I said quietly, letting it fall between us as plainly as I could. “I say no because you don’t.”

I hope he hears it.

For a heartbeat, the only sound was the small, pained rasp of his breath. His head tipped just slightly, silver hair spilling forward to curtain part of his face. When he looked up at me again, it was through that pale veil — eyes red and raw, mouth parted on some confession he couldn’t quite land.

He looked shattered.

Not theatrically. Not with grand tragedy or sharp-edged flair. Just… human. In that hollow, aching way that comes when someone has never been given the language to name their own pain — and is only now realizing it was pain at all.

I didn’t move toward him.

Didn’t reach. Didn’t soothe.

I just stayed.

Present.

Still.

And in that quiet, where neither of us flinched, he finally asked — barely louder than a whisper:

“…Then what have I been doing?”

The question wasn’t for me. Not really. It was for the ghosts behind his eyes. For the centuries curled around his spine like a cage. For every night, he’d laughed when he wanted to scream. For every touch he’d endured with a smile that cost him a piece of himself.

“Not my place to tell you, Astarion,” I said gently. “But you don’t have to keep doing it with me.”

“I—” he started, then stopped, biting it back. His tongue darted out, wetting lips that had gone dry. “You think that’s… I thought you meant that you weren't enough. That's what you thought.. I mean, gods, what if I did want it?”

I didn’t look away from him. Couldn’t have, even if I’d wanted. Not when he was staring at me like that — eyes shining with something bruised, uncertain.

“You don’t,” I said, voice rough from too many swallowed truths. “You learned this. It’s expected. Because it’s what kept you alive. Not because it’s yours.” 

His mouth twitched, pulling somewhere between a smile and a grimace. The effort it took just to hold my gaze was plain on his face — the tiny shudders in his lashes, the faint clench of his jaw. 

“That’s terribly presumptuous of you, to think you can read me that well,” he tried to say, teasing, that old velvet bite curling around his words — but it landed wrong, cracked at the edges.

“I know,” I said quietly. “But it’s still true. It’s not even about reading you. It’s simpler than that. I know what desire looks like, feels like, when it’s pointed at me. I’ve known lust. Crude, hot, grasping, reverent, destroying, claiming. And you…” I hesitated, felt my nails curl in toward my palm, felt the ache of them wanting to dig deep, to anchor somewhere."You’ve never looked at me that way.”

His mouth parted. A small, startled breath. His eyes darted away, then right back, as though drawn by a hook in his gut he couldn’t cut free. And gods, it should have eased something. It should have felt like mercy to speak it clean. But the way his shoulders sank, the way his hands twisted in his lap until the knuckles whitened, made me wish I’d lied.

A faint, humourless huff slid past his lips — so close to a laugh that it nearly fooled me. But there was no light in it. Just hollow exhaustion.

“Well,” he rasped, voice cracking around the edges. “That must have been disappointing.”

“It wasn’t,” I said simply. Blunt. And meant it with a depth that startled even me. “It still isn’t disappointing,” I repeated. “It’s just is.”

For a heartbeat, the lodge was nothing but our breathing. The rasp of my lungs was still bruised from the fog. The faint hitch of his breath caught on something I couldn’t see. Then he did something I didn’t expect. His hand lifted — slow, as if moving through water. And with painful care, he touched two fingers to his own lips. As if to test that they were still there, that he could still feel something. The gesture was so small it might have been meaningless. 

“You… truly think there’s nothing in me that could want you?” he murmured, almost to himself. The words sounded strangled, brittle as thawed glass.

I watched him for a long moment. My heart twisted in my chest. Then, softly — so softly — I shook my head.

“I think there’s nothing in you that wants anyone. Not right now. Not in a way that would ever be fair to you. And I am hoping you understand that you do not need to want me. Ever.”

And that was it. Or so I thought.

“I think I did once,” he whispered again, a fraction clearer. “After the fight. I think I… did look at you that way.” His voice was so low I almost thought I imagined it — just the hiss of wind through the cracked lodge walls, or the low grumble of the stove settling. But then he swallowed. Hard. The motion worked down his throat like something jagged. "It didn't last long," he added.

He looked wrecked by the confession. As if just speaking, it had stolen something vital. It landed in me like a blade driven slow, twisted gently — agony made tender by how carefully he gave it voice. I couldn’t speak. Could barely breathe. My chest went tight. The lamp’s dim glow haloed his hair, silver strands catching each tiny tremor that ran through him. He didn’t meet my eyes. Couldn’t. Just stared at the dirt floor, where hours ago I’d left gouges clawed deep in the cold earth.

His hands lay open in his lap, claws dull, limp — twitching sometimes, like he couldn’t quite keep them still. He looked wrecked. Not by hunger, not by old violence, but by the truth he’d forced out past his own teeth. A truth that seemed to echo in his bones, hollow and bruising.

And gods — it undid me.

This was not the velvet purr of a predator turning charm into a snare. There was nothing practiced in the line of his shoulders, curled slightly forward like he was bracing for a blow that would never come. No cunning in the way his mouth twitched — struggling to decide if it should tremble into a ghost of a smile or collapse under the weight of everything he’d never learned how to want.

He looked afraid of his own admission.

Afraid of me. Of what I might do with it.

I tasted salt. Realized only then I was biting my tongue, holding the ache there because it was simpler than letting it spill out. My heart fluttered, hard and uneven, sending little shocks all the way up into my throat. I wanted to reach for him — gods, I wanted to. Wanted to press my palm to his cheek, feel the small tremors there, remind him that sometimes a confession didn’t mean losing anything. Sometimes it meant being given more.

But I stayed still. Because this was too delicate. Too real. A living, shivering creature that would bolt at the wrong touch.

So I only watched him. Watched the rise and fall of his chest, sharp and shallow. The way his breath snagged in his ribs. The faint, vulnerable pull of his brows — a question he couldn’t seem to shape with his mouth.

And I realized with a terrible clarity the extent of his bravery. This was all the proof I’d ever need.  That's what the friend was talking about: his hunger for life, for identity. for connection. His desire to want, to matter. He had everything I lacked. Able to want is what I lacked, deeply. He was a creature of want. His strength staggered me. Maybe I could stand to learn from him. The fog was weak to want.

Then—without quite meaning to—I added, softer, “ It's okay. Thank you. For telling me. It means you’re… healing, I think.”

He may save me as much as I saved him.

He laughed. A thin, shattered thing that scraped through the cold space between us. His head tipped back, silver hair spilling down the line of his throat, exposing the fragile pale skin there that I had fed from not two nights past.

“Fuck,” he breathed, a whisper that almost shook. “You really don’t play fair.”

“No,” I admitted. “I also never learned how.”

He only smirked, returning lazily to his book, one pale claw idly twisting a lock of his silver hair. Content. Safe.

I needed to leave. 

This was too much.

---

She spent the next hours in a quiet churn of cleaning and then more sorting of all the miscellaneous remains. After almost being done, she moved on to the coffers last—not because they were least important, but because they were easiest. Mundane wealth was heavy, and heavy could be counted. One large chest groaned open under her foot, revealing a layered arrangement of gold, platinum, and blood-slick electrum—roughly 2,500 gold worth, all gleaming in the firelight. She sorted the raw-cut gems: deep-veined bloodstones prized for necromancy, polished and uncut garnets for secrecy and power, and obsidian shards sharp enough to split light—one carved into a fang. These she packed into a padded box, already imagining trades in Neverwinter’s black markets. The illicit goods came next: two phials of luhix—deadly, addictive, illegal even in Luskan—and three inhalers of dreammist, the prophecy-inducing drug that left eyes bleeding. She found a nightglass veil woven of spider-silk and shadows, banned in Baldur’s Gate for its ability to hide faces from True Seeing, and a small trove of Chultan spices and Sembian silks, still fragrant and salvageable despite bloodstains. A cracked idol of a forgotten god, faintly magical and ominous, went directly into the cursed pile beside the disguised ring and phylactery shard. A bundle of ciphered codebooks followed—dense with symbols, hinting at blackmail networks across Elturel, Baldur’s Gate, and Neverwinter. She logged it all in the repurposed Zhentarim ledger: coins, gems, smuggled relics, and finally, a master keyring marked with the crest of a Zhent Master named Valt—implying another vault they had yet to find.

 

The body fiddled with this and kept bugging me about how I left her, how I left him. 
bugged me to come back; she kept missing me. 
She spent so much time empty, alone. 

If only she knew, ...

Out of the two of us, I was the emptiest.

When I surfaced back. The body had settled into something almost resembling calm — the brewing kit cleaned and stowed, my vials arranged in neat rows on the old crate, every knife and talisman in its place.

But I wasn’t settled. Not really. 

I kept returning to the same scraps of parchment, shuffling them into new stacks, cross-checking older notes with cramped margin scribbles about necrotic aura thresholds and physiological responses to induced near-death states. But none of it stayed. The numbers blurred. The words tangled. My fingers tapped a nervous staccato at the edge of the crate.

I wasn't used to spending so much time naked. 
The fog beckoned me to go back. But the friend has been clear, the more I spend time with it, the less I can see it. 

It didn't just hide me. 

It hid everything

So I stayed here, protected, away. 

Yet ... restless.

Because the fog wasn’t the only thing inside me anymore.

It was him, too. That look on his face earlier — that raw, startled wound of a look when I told him it wasn’t disappointing, when I thanked him for speaking at all. It haunted me. Danced through my mind the way the fog curled around my ankles, soft and uncertain.

It felt like the closest thing to something precious I’d ever touched. And it terrified me.

The body is used to handling the threads, knows how not to snap them, and not to tangle them. 

I am not.

So I busied myself. Read on vampires, and tried to make notes. Advance the research dossier before the dead city.

My notes are bad. I am bad at this. Bad at everything when naked. 

Only good with the fog. 

And even that, I am failing it.

She is better at this than me. 

She is better off without me.

I recounted doses.

Anything not to dwell on how my chest still twisted in unfamiliar ways.

Across the room, Astarion had been watching. Not openly at first — just the occasional flick of his eyes over the top of that smutty book. But I knew the weight of his gaze now, knew the prickle of it along my skin. It set every old scar humming, not with dread — but with something more complicated. Something that left me raw. Finally, he shifted, the soft rustle of furs catching my attention. When I looked over, he was lounging on his side, chin propped in his palm, the book forgotten somewhere behind him. His grin was lazy — too lazy. I knew that look. It meant he was plotting mischief.

“Darling,” he drawled, voice low and warm in the way that always seemed to pry my armour apart one scale at a time. “You look about to explode.”

I scowled faintly. “I’m fine.”

“Mmm. You’re miserable, is what you are.” His eyes sparkled, almost unkind in their delight — almost. “What you need, I think, is a distraction.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Such as?”

His smile sharpened. “A game.”

I groaned. “No.”

“Oh yes.” He rolled fluidly onto his stomach, kicking his heels up behind him like some decadent cat. “Something simple. humiliation optional — entertainment guaranteed.”

I fixed him with the flattest stare I could muster. “I don’t play games I know I’ll lose.”

“That’s precisely why you should.” His grin turned conspiratorial. “Besides, you’ve already recast the dome, layered on your Nondetection, and very nobly not tethered yourself to me with that charming little ward. We’re perfectly safe, you reorganized, labelled, scrubbed, magiced and read everything, so you’re out of excuses.”

I sighed. Pinched the bridge of my nose. “I could still ...Fine. What kind of game?”

His eyes lit, predatory and bright. “Questions.”

I glared. “That’s not a game, that’s just conversation.”

“Oh, but with rules.” He sat up fully now, cross-legged, elbows braced on his knees. “You answer honestly, or take a dare.” 

" I always answer honestly. This is a handicap for you."

He actually laughed at that — a sharp, bright sound that cracked across the hush of the lodge like a thrown pebble on ice.
Gods, it was a terrible thing, how much I liked to hear it again.

Astarion’s grin spread, all sly delight, fangs just peeking over his lower lip.
“Is that so?” he purred, leaning forward on his elbows, pale hands draping carelessly over his knees. “Then consider this an act of self-sabotage. I’m feeling charitable.” He tilted his head, silver hair slipping across one sharp cheekbone. “Or perhaps I simply enjoy losing to you, darling. Though that does seem terribly out of character. Must be something in the lodge air.”

I rolled my eyes — but it was already a losing battle. My mouth tugged, faintly, toward a smile I tried very hard to flatten again.
“Fine. But keep it civil and light. I’ve had enough confessions to last me a full year.”
“Civil,” he echoed, lips twitching. “On my honour. But light, I only promise you five rounds of that.”
I gave him a flat look. “Do you have any of that left?”

He clutched dramatically at his chest. “Darling, you wound me. I’ll have you know my honor is—”
“—mostly compost at this point?”
A bark of laughter. Sharp and delighted. “Yes, well. I prefer the term fertile. Gives the impression of future growth.”

I shook my head, finally sitting back on my heels, hand resting lightly against my thighs. The vials were lined up neatly now, labels smudged by my own sweating palm. Nothing more to fuss over. Nowhere else to hide.

I exhaled. “Fine. You go first.”

Astarion’s eyes gleamed — bright, hungry in a way that had nothing to do with blood. He shifted forward, elbows sliding to his knees, chin propped in one pale hand. From anyone else, it would have been a sloppy sprawl; on him, it looked like a deliberate invitation.

“Alright,” he said, voice low, lazy, curling around me like warm smoke. “First question — truly harmless, I promise.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Your promises are worth exactly nothing.”

“Which makes it all the more thrilling, doesn’t it?” He smiled, then let it slip into something softer. “What did you want to be, before all of… this? When you were a child,” The worst about this question is that it was light by all normal standards. But not to me. 

" I will take the dare."

His brows shot up, mouth dropping open with a little puff of startled amusement. Then he barked a laugh — bright and sharp, echoing off the lodge’s timbers like something reckless finally given voice.

“Already?” he said, delighted. “Gods, darling, we’ve barely begun! It was hardly a question worthy of scandal.”

I rolled my shoulders, forcing a casual shrug. “Not everything needs to be scandalous to be unwelcome. Dare, please.”

His grin only grew, fangs just peeking over his lip — playful, dangerous, but not cruel. Not now. “As you wish. But, know you’ve set a precedent. You forfeit the ease of a simple confession; you pay with something else.”

“I’m aware.” My voice stayed level, though my fingers itched where they curled against my thighs.

“Good.” He leaned in, shadows licking across the fine angles of his face, eyes bright as fresh blood. “Then I dare you to shift into the most ridiculous face you've ever seen and remain like that for 10 minutes.”
My ears twitched. I stared at him, long and flat.

“Truly?” I deadpanned. “Of all possible tortures you could have devised…”

“Oh, this is far more elegant than torture.” Astarion’s grin was wide and bright, almost boyish in its glee — which only made it worse. “I’ve spent enough time with horrors to know there is no sharper agony than voluntary humiliation. Come now, darling. Show me.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, exhaled slowly through my teeth. I could feel my skin already crawling, every instinct shrieking that this was a terrible idea. But it was only a face. A shape. Less costly by far than anything else I might have had to reveal.

“Fine,” I muttered.

And let go. The shift was quick — practiced through years of survival, of deception. Flesh re-knitted, bones cracked inward, shrank. My body folded in on itself until I was nearly half my usual height, my shoulders ballooning outward with soft, sagging fat. My fingers turned into stubby, knobbed fingers. My nose flattened into a wide, rubbery grin lined with tiny, needle-like teeth. And there stood — or rather waddled — a short, squat, obese kuo-toa, with particularly bulbous eyes nearly crossing over a flattened nose that leaked mucus in tiny, pathetic globs. The stupid smile was the worst part. It was too wide, too joyous. Like I was delighted with every horror the world had ever conjured. I even gave a small, involuntary little hop — it came with the muscle memory of the form.

Astarion made a noise. A strangled, horrified little keen, then absolutely exploded into laughter — sharp, bright, helpless. He doubled over on himself, hands covering his mouth, shoulders shaking so hard he nearly pitched off his pile of furs.

“By— by the hells—” he wheezed, tears springing at the corners of his eyes. “Is that— gods— that is truly the most ridiculous creature nature has ever crafted?”

I tried to cross my arms. Found instead two pudgy little flippers that smacked awkwardly against my sagging chest.  “Yes,” I said in a voice that came out high and froggy, horridly nasal. “Yes, it is. Are you satisfied, you vile little peacock? He was particularly ugly.”

That only set him off worse. He fell back on his elbows, head thrown back, peals of mirth spilling into the cold lodge air. The warding dome rippled slightly with the vibration of it, motes of dull color chasing themselves across its curve.

“Oh gods— don’t— stop— please never stop,” he gasped, clutching at his ribs. I glared — or tried to. It was difficult with bulbous eyes that wouldn’t quite align. “You have nine minutes left.”

His laughter finally ebbed into hiccuping breaths, one hand lifting to swipe under his eye where a tear had started to slip. He looked at me then — properly looked — and it was unguarded in a way that twisted something deep in my gut. Not hungry. Not even amusement anymore.

Affection. Pure and bright and inexplicable, shining right through the ridiculousness of my shape. As if I could have been anything at all — bloated fish, towering beast, fragile girl — and he would still have found something in me worth softening for.

“Thank you,” he murmured, voice still rough from laughter, but something else threaded through it now. “Truly. That was… gods, that was everything I didn’t know I needed.”

I giggled. Then, I made a face that probably looked horrifying on this blubbery countenance. “If this becomes a recurring request, I swear to every half-hearted deity that ever pretended to care for mortals, I will drown you in your sleep.”

His grin sharpened. “Darling, if it did — it would only be to see if I could make you giggle like that again.”

I goggled at him — one eye slightly off-center. “I did not giggle.”

“Oh, but you did. just now.” His fangs just barely peeked over his lip again, smug as sin. “Adorably. rediculously”

“I hate you,” I rasped.

“Likewise, my terrifying little pond toad.”

The laughter, the game — it didn’t fix anything. It didn’t quiet the fog inside me, or banish the tremor in his hands. But for a brief, stolen breath, it made the darkness seem small. Manageable. And for that, I’d have endured far worse humiliations. I let the shape fall off me like old water. My skin stretched, bones lengthening, spine popping with sharp relief until I stood again in the broad, cold-resistant lines of my goliath form. My hands flexed — bulky fingers returned, blessedly long, still faintly stained by crushed reagents.  Astarion was watching every moment of it, eyes bright with leftover mirth, but edged now by something softer. His breath shivered in his chest, slow and almost content. For the first time in days, the haunted edge in him seemed to have smoothed — not vanished, never that, but quieted.

I sank down again, folding my heavy limbs neatly beneath me. Felt the strain of shifting slide down into my bones like the aftertaste of sour wine.

“Alright,” I said, voice deeper now, steady even if my pulse still jittered. “My turn.”

He perked up at once, all sly expectancy — the smirk trying to rebuild itself on his lips. But I didn’t want to strike deep. Not yet. Not after the rare softness we’d just found.

“What’s your favourite colour?”

It startled a small, honest sound out of him. His mouth parted, then closed again — a tiny line formed between his brows, as if he couldn’t quite fathom how something so harmless could knock the wind out of him.

“Truly?” he said at last, blinking at me. “That’s what you want to know?”

I shrugged. “It matters. More than most of the filth you keep rattling about. And you always complain when I get you stuff.”

A pause. Then — slowly — he tipped his head back, letting silver hair spill down the graceful line of his throat. His eyes fluttered shut, a breath easing from him like it was the first he’d taken in days.

“Red,” he said, on the exhale. “Deep red. The colour of old velvet. The kind that catches candlelight and turns it into little rivers of orange and shadow.”

Something in me lurched. Not quite pain. Not quite delight. Just a rough edge that snagged and held.

I watched him — really watched him, the way his lashes still trembled faintly against pale skin, the way the corners of his mouth softened instead of pulling cruel.

“A bit on the nose for a vampire, don't you think? But it does suit you,” I murmured. “It’s lush, shameless. Hungry.”

His eyes opened again, fixing on me — sharp, red, impossibly bright in the dim lodge light. “Is that so?” His voice went low, curling like smoke. “And what would yours be, then?”

I almost said grey. Or the blue-white of moonlight on hoarfrost. Colours that meant distance, solitude. Safe things. But the truth curled up from somewhere deeper.

“Amber,” I admitted, rough. “The way fire looks through resin. Like something old caught inside, still struggling to get out.”

He blinked. And for a heartbeat, he just stared — unblinking, unguarded. His breath actually caught, a tiny hitch that drew my eyes to the hollow of his throat.

Then, soft and almost disbelieving, he said, “That suits you even better.”

He held my gaze, then came closer and held my hand, something amused flickering in his eyes. “Next question,” he murmured. “Simple. Truly. What’s the last dream you remember that wasn’t a nightmare? a good dream rather.”

Too easy, too close. But his hand stayed, thumb still tracing gentle lines that did nothing to ease the ache unfurling under my ribs.

“A winter market,” I said, voice rough, “months ago. I dreamt I was wandering stalls piled with bright fabric, honeyed nuts. No one noticed me.  I just… existed. Alone. It was peaceful.”

His thumb paused, then resumed — slower now, as though trying to soothe something he couldn’t see. “That’s lovely,” he said quietly. And meant it.

I swallowed. My pulse thundered against his palm. “My turn. What's your favourite dance ?"
His brows lifted, surprise sparking first — then something almost shy, almost wicked, flitted through his eyes. The thumb on my hand slowed, pressing just slightly deeper, as if trying to anchor himself there.

“Ah,” he breathed, the faintest curl at the edge of his mouth. “That’s cruelly sweet, you know. Asking me for something so frivolous after such a tender little confession.”

I glared, half-heartedly at best. “Answer the question.”

He huffed a laugh, a sound that seemed to catch somewhere low in his chest. Then he tilted his head, eyes darting up as if searching memory for something less bloodstained.

Finally, with a breath that almost resembled relief, he said, “The volta.”

My eyes narrowed. “The volta? That ridiculous court swirl with the lifts and the scandalous pressing of thighs?”

Astarion’s grin bloomed, sharp and unabashed. “Yes, exactly that one. So improper, so wonderfully intimate — the gasp of the crowd when you lift your partner by the waist, skirts swirling, boots scraping marble. The sheer spectacle of it.” He leaned a little closer, voice dropping, playful but tinged with something older — a memory flickering behind his eyes. “You see, it’s all very dramatic, very showy. But when done right, it isn’t just about the crowd. It’s the hush that happens at the very top of the lift — that single breathless moment when it’s only you and them suspended above the world. Nothing else matters. No eyes. No chains. Just the thrill of the fall.”

My throat worked, tight. I tried to imagine him like that — smiling, flushed, arms around some laughing partner, the two of them spinning in velvet and candlelight. Free. Whole. Alive in a way that hurt to picture. He still held my hand — thumb tracing slow arcs against my palm, as if he needed the small weight of me to keep from drifting somewhere dark. That amused spark had dimmed into something fragile, almost boyish. Almost tender.

“It’s an old favourite,” he murmured again, eyes darting across my face, searching. “But I suppose the best things always are. My turn, then, little dove.”

The endearment scraped something raw in me. He didn’t say it like the tavern drunkards did, or the slick merchants who pawed at my wrist for luck. With them, it was mockery, a little bit of power twisted sweet. But from Astarion — gods, it felt like he was naming me. His thumb pressed just a little deeper into the heel of my palm, as though trying to memorize every thin line of my hand. Then he asked — low, careful, so deceptively light it almost passed for a joke, if not for how carefully he kept his gaze pinned to my face:

“When’s the last time you took a day off? And I do mean leisurely."
" I couldn't tell you really, years, I think more than five, less than 10. Didn't, really want to. There's so much to do."

His thumb stilled. Just for a breath, but it was enough — enough for the pause to carve itself into me like a thin blade. Then it resumed, slow again, deliberate. Almost like he was soothing himself more than me.

“Years,” he repeated, so soft I almost missed it. His eyes hadn’t left my face, though they’d lost their usual glint. What remained was quieter, stranger. A hollow sort of curiosity, as if he was trying to understand something he’d never quite held in his hands.

“And… you didn’t want it,” he echoed, voice scraping low. It wasn’t a question. More like he was tasting the shape of it on his tongue. Testing how it felt.

I shook my head, a small motion that still felt too large. “Not the way people seemed to. I think. Does it really matter that much ?"

" No." He went quiet again. Not the teasing, calculating hush he used to lure confessions from me, but a true silence — one that pressed close, heavy and strangely tender. His thumb was still tracing my palm, each pass slow enough to brand. Then, softer even than before, he murmured, “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

His grip on my hand tightened, just slightly. Enough that my pulse leapt under his fingers. I felt the way he noticed it, too — his breath caught, shoulders giving the faintest hitch.

“Your turn,” he rasped. It was almost an apology.

" What's your favourite scent?" I simply asked.

Surprise flashed across his face, and he laughed before answering, " I will have to go with the dare here to keep a bit of mystique on my preferences."

I couldn’t help the tiny pout that pulled at my lips, more reflex than anything. It felt absurd to be disappointed, after everything we’d already dragged into the open. But some small, bruised part of me had wanted to know — to tuck it away somewhere deep, a secret softness I could hold against the cold.

" I am not good with dares! " I added.
Astarion’s grin curled, sly but softened by the faint hitch of breath he hadn’t quite smothered.

“Oh, darling,” he purred, voice a velvet drag that couldn’t quite hide the raw edge beneath. “That only makes this sweeter.”

"Okay, I know, I dare you to lick your elbow," I said smugly, and before I could even finish the sentence, the prick had already done it without issue.

Damn his flexibility.

He laughed again, at my face, his other hand still interlaced in mine. His laughter slipped between us like warm smoke, curling around the fragile hush we’d built, daring it to break. It didn’t. It only softened — settled deeper into the marrow of the quiet, as though even the silence had decided to keep us a little longer.

Astarion was still laughing when he lifted his head, pale curls spilling forward to brush my knuckles. He didn’t pull his hand from mine. If anything, his thumb pressed firmer — a small, grounding weight, so startling in its gentleness, I almost pulled away on instinct.

Almost.

“Truly,” he said, breathless, eyes glittering. “You might be the only creature in Faerûn who could look me dead in the eye and demand I embarrass myself with such delight.”

I smirked, claws drumming lightly against the back of his hand. “You didn’t look embarrassed. You looked smug.”

“Smug?” He leaned closer, so close I felt the brush of his breath along my cheek. “Darling, that’s simply my face. I can’t be blamed for symmetrical bone structure.”

A small, incredulous huff broke out of me — half laugh, half groan. Gods, how did he do that? How did he dig under my scars, under the fog and the blood, and pull out something that felt almost like life?

His thumb was still tracing slow, idle lines across my palm. The same touch he’d kept through every question, every little confession. Like he didn’t quite trust I’d stay if he let go. Or maybe he didn’t trust himself not to run.

I let it happen. Because I didn’t want to run either.

“Alright,” I said, voice rougher now, mouth twitching around something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Your turn."

He smiled — a small, feral curl of his mouth that somehow managed to be both boyish and predatory all at once. His eyes glittered under lowered lashes, the way they always did right before he decided to be dangerous.

But then his question slipped out soft. Almost shy. Like it startled even him.

“Tell me one thing you’d want? And I mean you.”

Just that. His thumb stilled on my palm, pressing there like he might anchor the words to me so I couldn’t squirm away. He knew what he was doing.

My throat tightened. The truth rushed up too quickly to swallow. So I swallowed anyway. Forced myself to breathe around it. Gods, what was it with him — how did he always manage to cut past every armoured layer I wore?

To be fair, I came here naked. 

left the safety of the fog. 

But his hand was warm. Or as warm as he could be. The thin tremor in it hadn’t stopped. His eyes were fixed on mine with a soft hunger I hadn’t seen before — not the sharp, possessive glint of wanting to take, but something almost gentler. Wanting… to know. To understand.

“I…” I started, then faltered, claws twitching in his grasp.

What did I want? Not to survive, not to protect, not to endure. Want.

The word itself felt like a stone in my mouth. Heavy. Unpracticed.

But I tried. Because it was him asking.

“I want…” My breath shook. I closed my eyes for a moment, felt the fog curl low and curious in my chest, not hostile for once. Just waiting.

When I opened them again, he was still there. Watching like he might learn to breathe from me.

“I still don't know yet."

He smiled at me and then added, "Your turn then?"

"What was your favourite food growing up? Before you were turned?"

The last confession fell between us like a dying ember — small, soft, still hot enough to burn.

“I don’t remember,” he said again, quieter now. As if testing the shape of the loss on his tongue, seeing if it might taste different the second time. His thumb had stopped tracing my palm. It just rested there, flat, warm in a way that was almost trembling.

I didn’t say anything. What was left? No gentle lie would stitch that kind of emptiness closed. Some things simply stayed hollow. So instead, I squeezed his hand. Just once, careful not to press claws into the delicate bones of his knuckles. Enough for him to feel it. To know he wasn’t left alone with that gap where memory should have been.

He breathed out — long and low, shoulders easing like he’d been braced for something cruel. Then he laughed, soft and rough, like it had caught in the back of his throat and scraped on the way out.

“No more games tonight, I think,” he murmured, eyes dropping to where our hands lay tangled. The words were almost tender. Almost an apology.

“No,” I agreed, voice just as raw. “No more. Are you hungry?” I asked.

" For your blood, always, but you gave too much recently and -"

" I cast Lesser Restoration earlier. I am fine. Can cast it again as well."

His head lifted at that. A flicker of something almost startled danced across his face — quickly chased by hunger, yes, but not the same sharp-edged ache that used to seize him. This was softer, confused by relief.

“You… did that for me?” he asked, voice rasping low.

I huffed. “I did it for myself. I’d rather not stagger into Warlock’s Crypt half-drained and listing sideways. But if it so happens that it means you can feed without guilt tripping yourself into a sulk — then yes, fine, it’s for you too.”

A breath left him that might have been a laugh. Or might have cracked. His eyes darted away, lashes lowering — then flicked right back, pinning me with a look so bright and searching it made my throat tighten.

His hand tightened in mine. Just slightly. As though he was steadying himself. Or maybe making sure I wouldn’t slip away.

“Come here then,” I said, surprised at how steady my voice sounded. My free hand rose, claws gentle at his jaw. “Before I start worrying again and decide I can’t risk it.”

His eyes gleamed, mouth parting on a faint sound that was almost a plea. And then he was moving — so quickly and smoothly it was almost instinct, his body pressing close, knees braced between mine. The cold weight of him settled against me like he was afraid he might drift apart if he didn’t cling tight enough.

When he bit, it wasn’t like before.

It was careful. Slow. His mouth warm at my throat, breath shaky, hands ghosting up to grip my shoulders — not to pin, but to hold. His fangs sank in with a pressure that was almost tender, a sigh shuddering out of him the moment my blood touched his tongue.

I let my head fall back. Let my hands rest lightly on the back of his neck, sifting through the fine spill of silver hair there. It felt absurd how soft it was, how easily it threaded between my fingers — like spun frost that might melt if I held too tightly.

The first pull of blood made my breath catch. Not from pain. From how carefully he did it. It felt more like being sipped than devoured.

And gods, the sound he made.

A low, shivering moan, muffled against my skin. Like he was starved not just for the taste but for the permission. The grace of being allowed.

My pulse fluttered under his mouth, too quick, too bright. I felt the fog inside me stir — not in malice, but almost curious. Watching this strange act of trust from some quiet distance in my chest. The fog didn’t try to curl up my throat, didn’t tighten around my heart. It simply lingered, listening.

I felt the faint tremor still running through him, the way his breath stuttered between swallows, caught on tiny, helpless sounds he tried and failed to smother. I closed my eyes. Let my fingers slip deeper into the silver spill of his hair, cradling the back of his skull. It was so soft — impossibly so. Like silk dusted with snow. When I combed through it, he made a small, startled noise against my throat, and his hold on me tightened by a fraction. 

it was becoming somewhat of a ritual as well. 

He drew again. Slower this time. Almost cautious. As though he was trying to savour it — or prolong it, because he couldn’t quite bear to let go.

My breath hitched. Not because it hurt. Because it didn’t. Because it was something else entirely — a warm flood that started in my chest and spiralled outward, curling around every old wound like tender roots finding fresh earth. Each pull was a warm tide through my chest, radiating out along every nerve. My breath came shallow, uneven, threading tiny shivers down my spine. The fog inside me pulsed — once, twice — then settled, strangely pliant. As if it, too, was soothed by the slow rhythm of his drinking.

He made another small sound, rougher this time. A sigh that slipped out ragged, like it scraped something raw on the way. His fingers flexed at my shoulders — claws grazing lightly, almost uncertainly, as though he wanted to anchor himself deeper but didn’t trust he had the right. I didn’t stop him. I just kept my fingers gentle in his hair, combing through the fine strands with slow, deliberate care. Each time I did, he shivered. Pressed closer. His hips brushed mine, a subtle, helpless lean that felt like instinct more than intention.

He drew again. It felt good to be needed without pain. 

And this time it was less careful. Less measured. As though something in him had finally slipped the leash — a shiver of hunger too deep to keep locked behind his ribs. The pull of it rippled through me, sharp and sweet all at once. My breath stuttered out on a quiet gasp. The fog inside me shivered, curling tighter for a heartbeat — then loosened again, stretching almost luxuriously through my chest as if savouring the same warm rush I did.

Astarion let out a sound against my throat that was devastating. A low, hungry whine that scraped raw with relief, like it was being dragged out of some place too deep for pride to reach. His hands slid from my shoulders down to my waist, claws skimming lightly along the fabric before digging in — not to hurt, but to hold. To anchor. The noise he made at that — gods — it was almost obscene. A strangled little groan that vibrated right through where his mouth pressed to my neck. His hips shifted again, pressing closer to mine in a way that felt unconscious, driven by something older than thought.

He broke for a breath — just long enough to pant against my skin, his lips slick and parted, fangs scraping gently in a way that made me shudder. Then he buried them again with a soft, desperate sound, like he couldn’t stand to be parted from the taste for even a heartbeat.

My own breath was coming in short, uneven rushes. Not from weakness — though my head did spin faintly from the slow, relentless draw — but from something hotter, stranger. A bright coil low in my belly, winding tighter with every pull of his mouth.

“Astarion…” I breathed, not really meaning to say anything at all. Just his name, torn from somewhere hushed and fragile.

His answer was another low moan, almost a sigh, muffled against my skin. His hands flexed at my waist, claws dimpling the fabric. Then one hand slid up — slow, almost unsure — to rest just beneath my ribs. As if he needed to feel my chest rise and fall, proof I was still there. Still living beneath his mouth. I started moving my hand in his hair, and he shuddered under it, a full-body quake that left his breath ragged against my skin. Then — gods — he pressed closer still, until his chest was flush with mine, the faint tremor in his muscles rolling through both of us. His hips slotted tighter, a subtle, desperate grind that wasn’t quite deliberate nor quiet sexual. That made it worse. Made it feel like something pulled out of him, raw and unwilling, as if the instinct to cling, not to take, was older than even his hunger.

When he drew again, it was deep. Hungry in a way that felt nothing like those careful sips. His mouth sealed tight against my throat, his tongue lapping slow and greedy between swallows as though trying to coax out every last taste. A strangled noise broke in my chest — half gasp, half wince— and the sound of it only made him clutch harder at my waist, claws dimpling fabric and skin alike.

The fog inside me pulsed, thick and warm, not tightening this time but unfurling like a slow tide, threading through my ribs, my belly, down between my thighs.

I shivered with it, breath catching on a helpless whimper I couldn’t swallow down. My fingers twisted deeper into his hair — felt the delicate pull against his scalp, felt the soft give of it through my fingers.

I didn't want to be choked in the fog again. 

Astarion made a sound for that. It wasn’t elegant or playful. It was a rough, shivering keen that scraped low in his throat, as if he was the one being undone. His hips ground forward again — a subtle, needy press that left no question of how sharply he felt this, how greed and some other darker ache twined together just beneath his skin.

“Astarion…” I whispered again, voice breaking right over his name. I didn’t even know if it was a plea. Maybe it was simply proof that I still could. That I still remembered how to breathe at all.

For the final time, He broke from the bite with a gasp — sharp and wet, mouth slick with my blood. His eyes fluttered open, pupils blown so wide that the red was nearly swallowed by black. He looked ruined. Lips parted, a faint tremor in his jaw like he was still trying to swallow what he’d taken. His breath came in sharp bursts, each one ghosting hot over the tender skin of my throat.

And then — before I could even draw a full breath — he ducked back in. Not for my neck this time. But lower, pressing his open mouth to the hollow of my collar, his tongue dragging hot and slow over skin still damp from blood. A shiver tore through me, sharp and bright, arching my back just slightly into his mouth.

The fog tried to wrench me back again, but I resisted. It won't tear me from her, from my own body. 

You are mine, I screamed to the fog. 

A whimper clawed out of me, sharper than before. My grip tightened on his hair, tugging just a little harder, and he groaned again, a low, wrecked sound that vibrated straight through where his mouth still pressed to my upper chest. His hips moved again, more purposeful now, a slow grind that felt less like hunger for blood and more like he couldn’t help it.
Then he went back to my neck wound and started sucking and licking. When he lowered his mouth again, it was different. No careful bite, no controlled sip. Just his lips parting against the small wounds he’d left — tongue sliding out to lap slow, languorous strokes over the slick skin, gathering what little blood still welled there.

Each pass of his tongue sent shivers skating out across my nerves, down my arms, pooling low in my belly where the fog now curled warm and heavy, simmered more like a purr than a snarl.

His mouth pressed closer, sealing over the wounds, sucking lightly. Not to draw more blood. Just to hold. Just to taste. It felt like being claimed, but not owned. Marked, but not shackled. Needed. 

His hands stayed on my waist, claws flexing in tiny, restless motions that betrayed how tightly wound he was. Each small shift ground his hips closer, a subtle, involuntary rhythm that had nothing to do with feeding.

What was going on?

“Thank you for not getting scared,” he whispered, voice breaking on the edges. It wasn’t slick. It wasn’t smug. It was raw gratitude, edged with something I didn’t know how to name.

Still not lust. Not really.

I was happier for it. 

My own breath stuttered. I managed a rasped, “You’re welcome,” though it came out thinner than I meant it to, catching on the way up my throat.

I melted right there. His hands slid from my waist, slow and uncertain, as though he was afraid of what might happen if he let go entirely. But he didn’t move far — only enough to press his forehead against mine, his breath still hot and unsteady. I felt the tiny shivers that kept coursing through him, like the echo of a storm slowly rolling itself out.

I closed my eyes. Let my hand slip from his hair to curl at the nape of his neck, pulling him just a fraction closer. His breath caught for it, a tiny hitch that was almost a sob.

And there, tangled together in that dim, warded lodge, with the dome shimmering faintly overhead and the snow still falling silent beyond, something fragile wrapped itself around us. Not safety. Not quite trust. Just… the bare, trembling fact that we were still here. Still warm. Still holding on.

Sleep came for me first. It always did — a soft drag at my bones, heavier than even his careful weight pressing close. My grasp loosened, sliding down to rest lightly on his shoulders. I felt him breathe out a slow, careful sigh against my cheek. Then his hands curled back in at my waist, anchoring me even as my mind slipped.

The last thing I felt was his lips brushing my temple — so light I might have imagined it. A tiny shudder went through him. His breath broke against my skin in a hushed whisper I couldn’t quite catch.

And then everything blurred. Fell away. The fog inside me didn’t surge. Didn’t claw. It just settled, humming quietly and dark in my chest like it, too, was finally, blessedly

---

That night, the fog obeyed me a bit more. I could see better. 

Not completely. Not yet. But for the first time since I’d clawed this magic. With the friends’ gentle teachings, they listened and showed me some of the restraints. Tiny eddies curled around my ankles as I paced the edge of the dome, like cautious hounds. When I pressed two fingers together, concentrating until sweat pricked beneath my braids, the fog gathered in a thin, wavering line. A crude shape. It dispersed the moment I exhaled.

Progress.

I almost laughed. Or cried.

Hard to tell which these days.

Notes:

If you made it through all that gear, lore and all that potion-brewing and soul-weighing—thank you. I didn’t want this chapter to be about loot and clues. I wanted it to be about worth.

Chapter 26: THE SCREAM

Ilmater’s POV – Year of the Rack, −243 DR
Sanctum of Quiet Suffering, Mount Celestia

---

My creed is broken.

Not discarded.
Not denied.
Broken.

Like bone that bore too much weight.
Like rope frayed from too many hands.
Like the flesh of saints dragged through thorns in silence.
Like me.

The sanctum no longer consoled.
Its stillness, once sacred, now shivered.
The vow he had wrapped around his ribs like sacred iron wire now hung in the air like incense turned to ash.

The stones remembered.
They remembered her.
And they ached in their foundations.

Ilmater sat on the edge of the altar.

Hands open.
Mouth dry.
Ribs weeping blood not his own.

No—that wasn’t true.

It was his.
All of it.

The grief.
The guilt.
The gaping hunger of consequence that had no name but hers.

He had taken it in.
As he always did.

Suffering without reason.
Pain without shape.
Agonies born not of malice, but of neglect—the kind left to rot in orphaned souls and hollow temples.

The things Null whispered when her breath burned soft against his neck:

You want me to scream?
Then scream first.

She had said that.

And he hadn’t.

Not truly.

He had knelt and endured.
Wept and endured.
Loved and endured.

But he had never screamed.

Not yet.

---

Far below the sanctum, the Vilhon Reach howled in fire and thunder.
Empires cracked open like ancient bones.
An old wound was being cauterized—screaming, smoking, righteous.

He felt it ripple through the Weave like a blade drawn across the soul of Faerûn.

Justice. Absolute. Blinding.

Tyr had opened a gate — a wound of holy light and wrath.
Through it spilled his host:

Archons in radiant armor.
Wings like razors.
Blades like verdicts.

Their footsteps crushed rebellion.
Their halos scorched sky and stone alike.
Law was not spoken.
It was enacted.

A divine procession of punishment without pause.

Even the stars above Mount Celestia seemed to flinch.

---

Ilmater watched.

He saw how Tyr carved order into chaos.
How rebellion was stripped from the body of the world like infection.
How beauty bloomed in the wake of destruction—brief, clean, false.

And how, in all of it, suffering remained untouched.

He bowed his head.

“It is not enough,” he whispered.

Justice can cauterize a wound.
But it cannot sit beside it while it bleeds.

It does not hold the hand of the mother who watched her son hanged for stealing bread.
It does not cradle the child screaming in the dark.
It does not gather the broken and say, “You may rest.”

It does not carry pain.

But I can.

---

He stood.

And every part of him screamed.

His joints groaned with ancient vows.
His breath caught on ribs where Null had kissed him—scarred him—marked him.
His mouth still tasted of her: bitter, sweet, ruinous.

He was not whole.
He was claimed.
He was ruined.

And in that ruin, he found something terrible and holy:

Purpose.

Not the blind endurance he once wrapped around himself like a burial shroud.
Not the stillness mistaken for sanctity.

But something deeper.
Something louder.

To suffer on purpose.
To hurt with meaning.
To open himself wide and say: Put your pain here.

To be the scream that shattered the silence of divine apathy—
So that no one else ever had to scream alone.

This was no longer enduring.

This was creed remade in agony.
Tempered in heartbreak.
Sanctified in choice.

---

He walked slowly through the cloister’s halls.

The spiral stream murmured forgotten hymns, water curling over stone like memory weeping in circles.
Stained-glass saints bled colorless light across the floor.
Shadows curled like broken prayers.

He passed the bench where a dying monk had once whispered, Let me go.
The archway where he had first seen her—Null, not yet named, not yet undone.

He stepped beyond the sanctum’s threshold.

And the sky met him like a bruise ready to burst.

---

Far below, he saw it.

Tyr.

A silhouette of war-forged mercy.
An arm of law.
A spine of flame.

Wreathed in a fury that was neither cruel nor kind—only right.
His host marched behind him—wings outstretched, judgment in their stride.
Crossing the ruins of Jhaamdath like a storm born of oaths and fire.

Ilmater watched.

And in his ribs—beneath the vows, beneath the blood—
She whispered:

You think this will save you from me?
You are already mine.
But go ahead, sweet Weeper—scream.

He smiled.

“I’m not doing it to be saved.”

He stepped forward.
Each pace was agony.
Each step a vow sharpened to a blade.

“I’m doing it… so no one else has to carry you.”

---

The scream was not sound.

It was choice.

It echoed through the Weave.
It bled through the seams of Celestia.
It carved itself into the history of gods.

He walked into the world.
He let himself be seen.
He chose martyrdom.

And in that choosing—

He screamed.

---

Somewhere, Null trembled.

With pleasure.
And with recognition.

And far below, Tyr looked up—eyes unseeing, but gaze unwavering.
Surprised. Rejoiced.

He had felt it.

Not the scream itself—
But the reason behind it.

He knew him only by a title:
The One Who Endures.

Unseen.
Uncelebrated.
A shadow at the edge of sanctity.

An ancient god—older than even the myths whispered.

But now, as Ilmater descended beneath a sky scorched by judgment and repentance—
the world looked up and saw.

Not the silent endurer.
Not the unknown cloister-lord.

But the Crying God.

---

Ilmater met Tyr not with sword nor scale,
but with open hands.

Scarred.
Shaking.
Sacred.

He did not preach.
He did not command.
He did not cleanse.

He carried.

He bore no helm.
No crown.
No weapon.

Only chains—his own—taken freely.
Wound around his arms like garlands of penance.

Chains not to bind,
but to carry.
To take the weight others could not.
To bear the unbearable—so that no child would ever scream into silence again.

---

And in the carrying, Tyr understood.

That justice, alone, can silence a cry—
But it cannot heal it.

That to judge rightly, one must know the weight of mercy.
That to punish wisely, one must learn how long the hurt has lived in the bones.
That to lead, one must kneel beside those who cannot walk.

Ilmater taught him.
Not with words.
But with his wounds.

---

And when Torm joined them—faithful, loyal, steadfast—
Ilmater did not stand at the head.

He stood at the center.

The still point around which justice and duty could orbit.
The gravity of grace.
The aching, radiant hush that followed the scream.

---

With the gift she gave him—
The one Null seared into his marrow eons ago—
he endured.

But now, he also used it.

The divine wound in his ribs flared like a second sun.
And from it: a curse twisted into a sacrament.

He could feel it.
All of it.

The moment a child was struck in Calimshan—he felt it.
When a widow wept in Rashemen—he felt it.
When a man drowned beneath the docks of Waterdeep, nameless and unclaimed—he felt it.

Every pain. Every loss. Every lash.

It flowed into him.
Pooled beneath his skin.
And he hoarded it—

Not for power—
But so no one else would have to hold it.

---

And the world began to name him.

The Rack-Broken Lord.
The Lord on the Rack.
The Martyred Father of All Mortal Children.

His brokenness was no longer hidden.
He wore it openly.
Shining like stigmata.
Bleeding like grace.

A scream made flesh.

---

He did not hide the ruin of his ribs.
He let them show.

He let the world look upon him and know:

There is good in being broken—
if you use it to stop the breaking of others.

From the shattered rib of grief, he made sanctuary.
From the kiss of Null, he remade a creed.
From the scream of a forgotten god, he made a god remembered.

---

The world would call them the Triad.

Tyr, the Sword.
Torm, the Shield.
Ilmater, the Shroud.

But only one of them had screamed first.
Only one had let himself be torn open.
Only one had let her live in his ribs—
and still chosen them instead.

Only one whispered back to Null, every time she pressed her lips to his scars:

“You are mine.
But you will never be theirs.”

---

He was still on the floor of the battlefield when he felt the gentle light arrive.

Ilmater's was ...
Still broken.
Still raw.
Still echoing.

Still weeping

But no longer just empty. 

Not just pain

Lathander came without fanfare.
Just light.

Warm. Not burning.

“You screamed,” he said.

Ilmater nodded.

“It was beautiful.”

He wept harder as the arms of the morninglord wrapped around him. 

---

They just sat.
Held each other.
Like they used to.

When they were just beginnings.

---

“So you remember me now, you remember what I was?” Whispered Ilmater.

“Yes,” said Lanthander. “But I love what you’ve become more. talk about a renewal.”

---

Ilmater shook his head.

“I didn’t change, Amau. You know what I am.”

Lathander smiled and touched Ilmater's ribs—the ruined ones.
Where Null still lived.

And he said, “You are the reason I remembered again. I burned bright, but I never understood why… until I remembered what you carried.”

“I carried her,” I said.

“You carry all of us,” he said.

Chapter 27: The Edge of Damnation

Summary:

He stitched it with borrowed hands and a name he still doesn’t trust.
She saw the truth in every thread.
At the edge of damnation, identity isn’t what you were made to be—
It’s what you choose when no one’s watching.

Notes:

This one got away from me.
What started as a quiet moment planning kept unfolding—thread by thread—until it became something much larger. I debated splitting it, but it felt wrong. There’s a cohesiveness here, a rhythm to the stillness and revelation, that needed to stay intact.
So yes, it’s long. But I think it had to be.

Astarion's POV

---

I learned one thing since my death.

Survival was a performance.

With the marks, you dress the part. Smile right. Move right. Touch just enough—never too much. Let them want you—just a bit more than they’re comfortable with. Let them think it’s their idea that you’re theirs.

And it worked.

Gods, it worked so well, didn’t it?

I became what they wanted, again and again. Became it before they could even ask. Before he could hurt me for not being enough.

I did it for him. 
He made me do it for him.

With Cazador, I played the tool, the slave, the pet. Be useful, be needed, be used, then be forgotten.

And even now… even after I crawled out of the dirt and bit back at the leash, I still do it. I offer myself before I’m asked. I reach. Flirt. Give. I tell them exactly what they want to hear before they know they want it. I turn myself into a prize or a tool.

Because if I give first, maybe they won’t take.

Maybe they’ll see me as valuable. Maybe they’ll let me be.

Maybe I will be safe.

But she didn’t ask.

She didn’t take.

She gave.

Gods, she gave me so much, it hurts to hold it.

Scrolls. Weapons. Potions. Relics. Trust. Things I didn’t earn—not the way I was taught to, not with blood or seduction or suffering. I didn’t bleed for her. I didn’t fuck for her. I didn’t flatter or flinch or beg.

She handed them to me like they were already mine. Like I was hers—not a possession but a partner.

I am so confused.

I felt it. That awful, terrifying stillness. The kind that doesn’t ask you to perform. The kind that just… holds.

Against all odds and sense, I believe her. I BELIEVE she means it.

But it doesn't make sense to me.

Nothing does since I was unearthed.

When she let me drink, it wasn’t a transaction to her or an information hunt. It wasn’t a game. It wasn’t even pleasure—not the kind I’ve always worn like a mask.

It was quiet. Reverent.

Like kneeling at a shrine and being told: You are welcome to stay.

She is feeding me because I am hungry.

She combed my hair.

Gods. Like it mattered.

Like I mattered.

And I wanted to believe her wholly. I still do.

But something in me keeps whispering—it’s a trick. A test. Maybe not by her. Perhaps she really is what she seems—gods help me if she is—but the world isn’t. People aren’t.

Not all of them.

Not most of them.

None of them.

Only her.

I can't disregard the rule for the exception.

So I fall back into the pattern because I know it. Because I survived it. Because somewhere in this cursed body, I still know I’m property.

His.

Cazador made me a thing. And I—I’ve made myself into a tool ever since. I keep trying to trade myself like I still have nothing else to offer because I have nothing else to offer.

But she doesn’t ask.

She looks at me and calls it mine.

EVERYTHING. 

Being seen is dangerous. Like being treated kindly means I owe something back.

That's the rule.

Yet she doesn't take.

I am so confused.

I knew she didn’t lust for me. Not yet. I thought it was due to her general prudence and disinterest in the matter. 

And, to an extent, it is also due to that. 

But not how I understood it. Not at all how I understood it.

I read it all wrong.

Even the why she didn't lust for me, I read it all wrong.

She kept telling me, though.

And it kept going over my head.

She said it as early as our third night together, and I had never understood.

She doesn't want me because I don’t want her. 

I thought it meant she needed to be desired, to be pursued. I believed she thought I was uninterested because she wasn't attractive enough.

When she spoke repeatedly about me being the one to suffer if she were ever to say yes, I saw it as her telling me I shouldn't settle for less. To not bother with games.

All along, she was telling me that I was forcing myself and hurting myself. Whoring myself. Using myself the same way he used me. For something she is willing to offer for free.

And it never registered before.

Never even passed through my mind.

Not because it wasn’t true, but because it was so painfully obvious to me.

Yes and?

Why would she care? 

Why does she?

I was consenting and willing.

But that's not enough for her. Willing to bleed doesn't cut it.

She sees too much. I don’t see enough.

She sees more than what he  left  behind.

And I—I don’t know what to do with that.

Because if she’s right—if I’m more than a tool, more than a debt, more than a blade or a pretty mouth—

Then what the fuck am I?

And if I’m wrong—if she’s the exception, the only one who won’t take advantage—then what happens when she’s gone?

What happens when I’m left with all this… self, and no one left to hold it?

I want to be free.

Gods, I want to be free more than anything.

Free from him.

From me.

But if freedom means becoming the monster he made me into—if it means selling myself to someone new every time I want something—

Then what’s the point?

What am I even fighting for?

But...

Maybe it’s not about breaking the leash.

Maybe it’s about learning to stop tightening it myself.

Maybe.

But gods, it’s hard.

And I’m so tired of being good at surviving.

I want to try living.

Just once.

Even if I don’t know how.

Even if I fail.

Even if the only place it’s safe… is with her.

Gods. How long have I been like this?

No—no, not even a proper “how long.” That part I know.

Since the coffin. Since always. Since the moment my unlife became a leash instead of a self.

But why—that’s the real rot she uncovered.

I knew what I was doing. 

Or so I thought.

That smile I wear. The smirk. The quips. The little bow at the end is like a gift to be unwrapped, admired, and then put away.

I thought it was mine. My style. My charm. My survival.

But she—she didn’t laugh like the others did. She didn’t melt. She looked.

She said it was learned, expected. 

Gods. She looked at me.

And then said:

“You don’t want anyone. Not right now. Not in a way that would be fair to you.”

And I laughed, didn’t I? Because what else could I do? What else do you do when someone peels your soul open without drawing a blade?

I remember thinking: She’s wrong. I could want her. I do want her.

But then the words sat too cold on my tongue.

Because I didn’t know anymore. 

I am so confused.

Because I didn’t know the difference.

Between hunger and desire.

Between safety and servitude.

Between being wanted and being used.

I tried to blur them. All my unlife, I’ve blurred them. Because blurred lines don’t have sharp edges, they don’t cut as deeply when they’re pulled away.

But she pointed at it.

Gods damn her, she saw it.

She didn’t mock it. Didn’t twist it.
She just pointed it out.

Like someone asking why you’re bleeding, while pressing a finger to an old wound you forgot never healed.

She asked me why I would be okay with her using me.

The clarity of that question was like a mirror.

I would be okay with her using me.

I would be okay with her doing many things to me.

No one else deserved it.
No one else would hurt less while doing so.

But not only did she say she didn’t want to—she was offended by the idea.
Saddened, even, by the fact that I was okay with it.

How broken must I be… for that to be what breaks her?

That she would look devastated at the idea of me helping the person who is saving me to collect relics and pick some locks.

What was so wrong about that?

I am so very confused.

She looked at me like I’d offered to slit my own throat and asked her if she wanted to watch.

Why wouldn’t I be okay with it?
She saved me. Unearthed me. Resurrected me. Dragged my undead husk through monster dens to hide me from my master. She fed me. Offered me her blood. She gave me gear I didn’t ask for. Scrolls I never thought I’d be trusted with. Potions. Daggers. Relics she should’ve hoarded. A kit made for me—not to earn, not to barter, not to seduce my way into—but just… given.

Because I’d “earned it.”

That’s what she said.

Why wouldn’t I be okay with her using me to disarm traps?

Why was she looking at me like I’d offered to let her cut me for fun?

That’s nothing.

What am I missing?

Why is this what she is pitying me about?

What the fuck am I missing?

Then … the feeding.

I’ve fed on her before—many times.

But this…

Gods.

Her hand in my hair. Her breath—steady. Not shaking. Not scared.

She didn’t flinch. Not once.

She didn’t want anything.

She didn’t arch her throat to tempt me.
Didn’t shudder in a way that begged for more as my hips started to rock into her.

She just… was. And she let me be, too.

And I—I didn’t know what to do with that.

I tasted her, and it felt like I was tasting grace.

Not power. Not sin. Not pleasure.

Just… grace.

I felt like a man.

Not a monster.

Not a weapon.

Not a pet.

Just a man—weak, tired, hungry—for blood, yes—but also for something I still don’t have a name for.

I kept drinking and biting. 

Again and again.

And when I pulled away, I thought she’d look at me the way I sometimes look at myself. With disgust. With fear.

But she didn’t.

Her eyes held no disappointment.
Just tired kindness, wrapped in a weary smile.

Again.

Like she was handing me back something I didn’t remember I’d lost.

Choice.

I’m not used to that.

Still not sure I trust it.

Still half-convinced she’s testing me.

Even now.

But then I remember the way she wouldn’t reach for me.

Wouldn’t pity me.
Wouldn’t sermon me.

She let me speak.
And when the words cracked my throat open, she didn’t try to fill the silence.

She just stayed.

She let me be me.

I think I want this.

Not the blood. Not the silence.

This.
This moment where no one is touching me. No one is pulling or demanding.
And I’m not reaching for anyone, either.

Just… watching.

Just… being.

And I want it to last.

I thought I was her pet project—a redemption arc for the monster.

I’m not so sure anymore.

And the song she sang—Mimicry.

That’s not a confession you make to a lesser.

Not to a stranger.

And certainly not to a monster.

So maybe I’m not.

Maybe I’m not.

Perhaps I never was.

Maybe… he just convinced me I was.

A parasite. A puppet. A whore with fangs and a painted grin. Something dressed in silk and blood, made to dance when the leash went taut.

But she never pulled it.

Gods, I waited for it.

Every day. Every glance. Every moment she touched my arm, handed me a scroll, called me by name. I waited to feel its weight—her hand tightening, her voice sharpening, the price slipping through her teeth.

But it never came.

And the silence of it is deafening.

It leaves me exposed. Leaves me raw in places I didn’t know I still had.

Because if she’s not holding the leash…

Then why do I still feel it around my throat?

Is it memory? Habit?

Or fear?

Because freedom—true freedom—isn’t a door you walk through. It’s a mirror. One you can’t look away from.

And gods, I see myself in her eyes and don’t know who I am.

Not Cazador’s spawn. Not anymore. But not yet… me, either.

Something in between.

Something still forming.

And it terrifies me.

Because if I’m not a weapon, a lover, a tool—

If I’m not useful or beautiful or needed—

Then what’s left?

Will she still look at me when I’m none of those things?

Will I?

And yet—there’s something in the way she sees me. Not the mask. Not the myth. Not even the monster.

Just me.

Wounded. Wanting. Wondering.

And when she sang… gods. That wasn’t a song. That was a wound turned into music. A confession stitched into melody. And she didn’t perform it.

She gave it.

To me.

I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

That song—haunting, delicate, bare.
It’s stayed with me like the echo of a wound I didn’t know had a voice.

She sang it so quietly, like she was afraid of waking something.
Not in me.
In herself.

And I listened.

I always knew she was a performer. That she crafted words and melodies like a mage crafts spells— softness woven into precision, meaning buried in rituals. Brokenness masked as altruism. 

I thought her masks and her performance were like mine. 
Something to hide the ugly truth behind.

But this wasn’t that.

This was no performance of a lie. 

No grand tale, no dazzling trick, no clever seduction.
Just a truth.
Unvarnished.
Raw.

She performs the truth. 
Not to hide it. 
To amplify it.

And when she said “Mimicry”, when she named the act of becoming what others expected—
Gods. I felt that.
To my bones.

That part—I know. I live that.

The rehearsed lines. The borrowed signs. The kisses are accepted with a smile you don’t feel.
The way your body moves is because that’s what they want, and you’re too afraid not to give it.
Because if you don't, what’s left? Just silence. Just rejection.

I know that mimicry. I’ve mastered it.
Refined it into an art. A blade. A leash.

And yet…

She sang it like it broke her.
I wear mine like armor.

She said she took the roles, did the things they said to do—
But she never made it her home.
Never let it sink teeth into her spine and hollow her out like I did.

That’s where we part.

She walked away from it. Eventually.
Bit by bit, she shed it.

I wrapped it tighter.
Called it power.
Called it control.
Called it survival.

But gods… what if she’s right?
What if all I ever did was copy how power looked, how desire sounded, how control moved?
What if I never learned the “gentle art” either?

She said no maps were drawn—no songs for trust.
That line—
It hit me like a stake to the ribs.

Because what did I learn?
Seduction, manipulation, obedience.
Blood and submission.

I never learned what to do with kindness.
Never learned what to do with someone who doesn’t want anything from me.

And I’ve been fumbling since.

Why wouldn’t I be okay with that?

That’s what I’m for, isn’t it?

But that song…

That song makes me wonder.

She never got the love story either. No castle, no silver ring.
But she sang like she earned something deeper.
Like the absence taught her truths, I’m only just starting to touch.

And now I hear her words echoing in my skull:

“Masks grow tight eventually.”
“Pages filled with what I missed.”
“Flinches dressed in lullaby.”

I wore every one of those lines like a second skin.

And yet… when she sings it, it’s a lament.
When I live it, it’s just another day.

Like we danced the same steps—
But she moved to grief,
and I moved to claim.

She mourned the loss.
I clung to the script.

And it’s like watching someone dance the same dance on a whole different tempo.
Slower.
Sadder.
Braver.

I think… I think she’s further along than I am.
Not healed. Not whole. But aware.

And gods, I envy her for that.
For being able to bleed like that and still call it music.
For holding her emptiness like something sacred instead of something to bury.

She hums her quiet tune and doesn't ask to be saved.
Doesn’t even ask to be seen.

And I sit here, still unsure if I want to be either.

But I listened.

I heard it.

And I think maybe, just maybe…

That song wasn’t for a crowd.
It wasn’t for pity.

It was for someone else walking the same broken path.
Someone who forgot how to hold a heart.

Someone like me.

She told me before why she writes. Be it history, lore or stories. So another no one can find it and make their world a less scary place. 

Another thing that went right over my head.

Why can I not understand what she says until after the fact? 

Oh,

I know

I keep searching for the lie.

And she hides the truth in plain sight.

I don’t know what to do with that.

Except… keep listening.
Keep trying.

And maybe, one day—
I’ll find a song of my own.

The sun is setting. Cutting and slow, bleeding  gold across the wooden floor like a last threat.

And we’re gathering our things.

No rest. No time to linger in the warmth she gave me last morning. No chance to pretend the world doesn’t still burn beyond her voice.

We’re heading to the city of the undead.

Another den of monsters.

Another place that could be my home, if I’d let the rot take root all the way through. If I bowed lower. Bit harder. Killed more of myself than I already had.

It’s strange.

The closer we get, the more I can feel it—the echo of what I could become.

I envy the shadow king as much as I fear him. 

So much power. 

A king of corpses.

I am not even the Prince of Ash. Just another pretty face hiding the stench of centuries.

Cazador would have seen it as a throne.

I see it too. But my mind itches with a slight warning.

Not the fear. 
Something of a dark mirror. 

And yet… I’m walking toward it.

On purpose.

With her. With this strange little thing that doesn’t treat me like a weapon. Or worse, like a prize.

And the irony?

It terrifies me more than the city does.

Because I know how to bow to monsters.

I don’t know how to protect people from them.

But the sun is setting.

And I’ve made my choice.

I pack my doubts with my blades.

Wrap the ache in leather and silk.

I shoulder my pack.

Follow her.

And I remind myself:

The leash is still on.

I am still his.

I do not have many choices.

But I should make those I have count.

Find who I am beyond the shadow of his rules, his lessons.

Let’s see what becomes of a monster… who chose to walk into the dark.
Not to serve it. 

But to survive it.

Or maybe—gods help me—

To change it.

To remember who I am. 

I am Astarion.

---

We reached the crest of the hill just as the moon rose above the jagged spine of the Troll Hills, smearing the horizon in bruised silvers and sickly purples. The last daylight had long since died, clawing feebly at the rocks before surrendering to the ink. Twilight here was not gentle — not the violet hush of forest groves or the golden fade of tavern windows. No. It was hollow. Gnawing. As if the light hadn’t just vanished — it had been stripped. The chill seeped in, bypassing my coat and the warmth of blood stolen earlier, digging deep. I was used to cold — had lived lifetimes with it curled around my ribs — but this was different. This was a remembering cold. The kind that crept in from graves and sealed crypts. The kind of cold that made you remember what it meant never to be warm again.

The Troll Hills stretched in every direction — thorny, uneven, indifferent. At our backs, the last ridge crumbled into shale. Below us, the path wound like a scar through the hills toward the mouth of something old, something rotting, something waiting.

I couldn’t help but watch the fanning moonlight. The way it struggled, as if desperate to shine onto the world just a little more, only to be swallowed by the suffocating blackness that rose from the city below. 

Sprawled across the plateau below lay Warlock’s Crypt, like a wound that had never closed. The stench of undeath could be sniffed from even here. It wasn’t a city. Cities live. They breathe, flicker, churn with noise and light and quarrel over bread and coin. This place did none of that.

This place endured.

It unfurled like some monstrous nest of black iron and ancient bone, a tangle of towers and bridges rising claw-like against the dim sky. No hearth warmed it, no lanterns bobbed in cozy windows. Instead, the place was shot through with thin veins of phosphorescent blue-green — ghostly illumination running through dark gardens, new buildings and old Netherese restored ruins that pulsed with stolen, corrupted magic. Pulsing from underground ley-lines, and a polluted spring. The eerie light only seemed to deepen the shadows, casting the stone in unnatural hues, as though the very city was trying to pull the darkness closer to ensure it was never too far away.

Even from here, it was... wrong. The towers rose at impossible angles, sharp as broken promises. Bridges like ribs linked one dark shape to another, creating a skeletal maze over sunken plazas, ashen courtyards, and wards. Magic that had never stopped hungering. 

Even from miles away, the city radiated a cold, deliberate malice. Not the frantic chaos of feral ghouls, but something older, more settled. Structured. There was a method to the madness of Warlock’s Crypt, a logic woven into its very foundation. The view from here showed no mindless undead horde but an organization more akin to an ant colony. It was a necropolis by design, not by accident. Its denizens were not mindless rot, but citizens under grim, unyielding laws, each with their own task to fulfill, each contributing to the twisted society that had taken root here. There was no chaos. No disorder. Only a cold, unfeeling precision, the discipline that turned death into something as efficient and predictable as the sun's rising.

I could feel it, deep in my gut — the weight of it. The inevitability of it. This place wasn’t just a city. It was a machine, a cog in some unholy, undead empire, and we were about to enter it. The thought made the air feel heavier, the wind colder.

And yet.

And yet it called to me.

A whisper at the edge of the soul. A pull I hadn’t felt since the day I first rose, dirt in my mouth, chains in my bones. It wasn’t fear. Not exactly.

No, it was worse.

It was recognition.

Like the city knew me.

Like it had waited.

I tightened my grip on Curse Eater, the blade at my side thrumming faintly. Not loud. Not desperate. Just aware. I didn’t have to draw it. Not yet. But I could feel the weight of it—like a verdict waiting in the dark.

“We’re here,” Eleyna said softly beside me, her voice a ghost of sound in the wind, barely audible above the howl of the gusts. I didn’t respond. I didn’t need to. The city was already closing in, drawing us in like moths to a flame. There was no turning back now.

I turned my eyes back to the towering spires of the crypt, my heart pounding. It wasn’t fear. Not exactly. But something about how the city felt to me — how it seemed to pull at the edges of my soul — made my skin crawl.

No. Not fear.

Curiosity. And the knowledge that we were about to learn far more than I was ready for.

“Stay close,” I said, glancing at her. My voice was quieter than I intended, frayed at the edge. “And don’t stray. Not in there. Not until we’ve found safe ground to stand on.”

Elenya nodded. Her eyes didn’t leave the city, but her fingers twitched once near the hilt of her short sword. Not fear. Anticipation. Calculation. But there was something else there, too. Something quiet. She took a step forward, then half-turned to look at me.

Her mouth tilted. Not a smile. Not quite a grimace either. A shared understanding.

“We’ll find a place,” she said. “Something defensible. And then…”

She trailed off, but I knew what she meant. Then we’ll go looking.

For truth. For curses. For names and chains and maybe a piece of how I can be free — buried somewhere in the city that forgot how to breathe.

We moved down the hillside silently, feet muffled by frost and old pine needles. The slope was steep in places, forcing us to descend in switchbacks. Even the wildlife had gone silent — no wolves, owls, or crows. Just the wind. The kind that didn’t howl.

The kind that whispered.

Elenya moved ahead of me, her boots nearly silent on the loose stone. Her cloak caught the wind, snapping like a warning flag — or a surrender. She didn’t speak. Just kept walking, one hand occasionally brushing the hilt of her blade.

When we reached the treeline, the forest closed around us like a secret that didn't want to be told.

Mind you, not the inviting kind of woodland—not the dappled groves where sun filters through birch leaves and lovers press lips against tree bark. No, this part of the Trollbark forest was old and mean, not just in years, but in attitude. In the way the shadows hung too long between gnarled roots, and every branch reached like it remembered fingers.

Now, I walked ahead, boots crunching on soft rot and slick moss, cloak drawn tight. The air smelled of damp bone and mushrooms that grew where corpses used to be. Eleyna padded behind me, quieter than breath, her steps barely disturbing the mulch. She was vanishing into the shadows every other minute. Most of the time, even I didn't know where she was, only reminded of her presence through the few touches that graced me here and there. Leaving her the Gloaming coat has been a fantastic idea. She may have been better at stealth than most, but this puts her almost on par with me. Part of me wanted it. Even if I had already claimed many of the strongest artifacts, I know she would have left it to me had I asked for it. But I wanted her to have it. To be able to hide, disappear, and escape in all situations. I was already pretty stealthy, and the boots complemented that even further. She needed more. That's how I explained the bone-deep satisfaction and feelings of rightness that seized me as soon as she put it on.

Now, she can always run.

We kept to the tree line where we could, slipping between sparse, skeletal firs and stunted scrub. The branches snagged at our cloaks, brittle with frost and old spiderwebs, but they gave cover. Concealment. We were ghosts on the hill. And yet I couldn't shake the feeling that something further below already knew we were coming.

Ahead, the mist rose low.

Thick and clinging. It clutched at my calves like old memories. The forest grew denser the lower we got. Hill became incline became crawl. At some point, I stopped trying to track our descent in distance or time. Everything here felt circular. Ritualistic. Like we weren’t walking to Warlock’s Crypt, but being pulled into it. Spiralled down.

Eleyna didn’t complain. Of course, she didn’t. She never did, not about pain, not about fear, only about silence, and only when it mattered.

She glanced toward me once more, gesturing south.

“South ridge flattens into a stone rise,” she whispered behind me, pointing with two fingers low. “Might be cavework. The cliffs could shelter a hollow.”

I nodded. “Let’s see it.”

The slope levelled just enough to make the descent more manageable. A gully opened ahead, veined with broken shale and streaks of dried black moss. We skirted around it and found the ledge she’d mentioned. The stone jutted like a broken tooth, half-buried in bramble, and a narrow gap yawned beneath it.

Cave.

Concealed. Dry.

“Not terrible,”  I muttered, crouching low. “Smells like mold and bones, but that might be us.”

Elenya knelt beside me, her movements quiet as the fog that always seemed to cling to her. She drew out her spellbook with the reverence of a priest unveiling a relic, fingers brushing the worn leather as if she feared the weight of the words within. A flick of her wrist, casual and careful, unraveled a thin ribbon of incantation—not Elvish, —but something sharper. Deeper. 

For ten minutes, the silence held—broken only by the quiet chime of arcane consonants and the pulse of magic gathering at her fingertips like coiled breath.

Then her eyes opened.

Not storm-grey now—but silver. Cold and full, like moonlight poured into a blade. Detect Magic.

She scanned the gloom, gaze flicking from wall to floor.

“Wards,”  she murmured. “Old ones. Faint. Defensive. An alarm spell nearly faded. Someone was here about seven to eight hours ago.”

“No traps?”

She shook her head. “None I can see.”

Thus, we waited.

The moment the magic released—a faint shiver through the stone—I was through the threshold in a breath, boots whispering against damp flagstone. The scent caught me halfway into the first chamber.

Blood.

Not fresh, but not rotted either. That iron tang, unmistakable. It clung to the air like a memory, woven through mildew and mold like a buried heartbeat. The floor was slick in patches. I moved carefully.

I drew Whisperfang and Curse Eater, each blade familiar in my hands. Eleyna vanished into the veil, her form melting into darkness like a secret.

We advanced.

The growls reached us before the shapes did—wet sounds, hungry and raw. Snapping jaws. Tearing flesh. A damp crunch that turned the stomach.

Then we saw them.

A pack of ghouls , hunched over three mangled corpses. Their claws worked greedily, jaws smeared in gore. The cave held no one else—not yet.

I nodded once.

Then we attacked.

I jumped and engaged with the first ghoul. Curse Eater screamed silently, its black blade cutting through its neck like a judgment. Whisperfang sang a softer song—a lover’s kiss laced in venom, striking the second one where it hurt the most. The ghouls reeled in confusion.

Then I heard her voice. It wasn’t loud—but it echoed. Briefly, her words were double—layered with a tone not hers alone, but one of a thousand forgotten voices lending their strength.

" All hunters know that the clumsy steps woke the beast, not the screams. Be swift, but not loud.”

It struck something in me. Not just encouragement. Memory.
A courtyard. A heartbeat. A moment of clarity. A hunter’s breath before the pounce.
The sensation hit like a whisper pressed to the skin—cool, electric.

I felt inspired right when her spirit fog roared. It surged into the cave like a beast untethered. Her form still hidden, shrouded beneath the Gloaming Cloak’s shadowveil, but I felt her—fierce, wrathful, silent.

The fog reached four of the ghouls and left them shrieking in pain. While the two others turned toward me, snarling, fangs dripping with rot. Ready to pounce.

Too slow.

Curse Eater sliced through the first—its head spinning once before falling like a wet stone. Whisperfang lodged in the ribs of the second, and something—someone—helped me find the gap between bone. A ghostly hunter, barely more than instinct, flows through my veins. My strike landed with uncanny precision.

Two bolts of crackling crimson light exploded from the fog—Eldritch Blasts, aimed with unerring calm.

The third ghoul crumpled before it even turned.

The last four we finished in a heartbeat.

The silence afterward was thick with the stink of blood and ozone.

I sheathed Curse Eater slowly, breath still tight in my chest. Whisperfang, I kept drawn—its blade slick but steady, a comfort more than a threat. The ghouls’ bodies twitched faintly where they lay, caught in those awful postmortem spasms. The scent of rot clung to my throat.

Elenya knelt beside the corpses that were being devoured.

Three adventurers. Human, maybe half-elf—it was hard to tell through the blood and claw marks. Their armor was modest but cared for. The wizard's robe was plain, his hands still clutched around a snapped wand. The fighter wore a half-plate with the remnants of a Daggerford crest etched into the breast.

Elenya sighed. “New adventurers. From Daggerford, I think.”

I leaned over one and kicked aside a dropped satchel. “Slim pickings, then? Burned-out arcane focus and worse luck?”

“Don’t,” she murmured. “Not yet.”

She pulled a scroll from her scrollbook and began preparing the spell. The parchment shimmered faintly as she read aloud in that soft, measured tone. Speak with the Dead. A shimmer passed over the dead wizard’s face. His eyes didn’t open—but something behind them listened.

Eleyna’s voice was gentle. “What is your name? And your companions’?”

A pause. Then: “Tarev. The others are Kala and Mintar.”

“Where are you from?”

“Daggerford.”

“Why were you here?”

A rasp, like memory straining against decay. “We followed an undead convoy. Saw it by chance, South of Lizard Marsh. We thought—smaller force. Cut them off. We were wrong. Tried to run. Hide. Lost too much blood.”

“How many were there?”

“Too many. They waited. Ambush. Took others.”

Last question. She hesitated, then asked softly, “Do you have anyone or anywhere left to return these to?”

I stood back, arms crossed, resisting the urge to groan aloud. Again with the mercy.

A pause. Then faintly: “Lyntha. My wife. Daggerford.”

The magic faded. The corpse fell still. She exhaled and gently closed his mouth with one gloved hand.

Of course she did.

“Let me guess,” I said dryly. “You’ll return their things to this ‘Lyntha’ and deliver a heartfelt letter. Maybe a musical number?”

She glanced at me. “No music. Just what matters.”

I gestured at the carnage. “Darling, we’re about to enter a city full of undead. You want to play post office?”

She didn’t rise to the bait. Just opened the wizard’s pack and began sorting. She did the same for the others and slid the satchels into her bottomless pack.

“They mattered,” she said simply. “Everyone does. If there’s someone left to remember them, that matters.”

I made a sound between a groan and a sigh, leaning against a stone outcropping.

“Must we collect every sob story we stumble across? You’ll need two pocket dimensions just for the grief. I don’t remember you doing this for the drow or the other broken meatbag we found.”

"We weren’t headed for Menzoberranzan when we found those others. Same for the Zhentarim. This, however, is literally on our way. It costs nothing to carry what’s left and give news to their passing." She added flatly. 

"It cost me plenty, I hate heroics!"

She glanced at me over her shoulder. “ This is hardly heroics, Astarion. It is passing on a message. Why does that upset you this time? I am not wasting your time or supplies. What new reason could you possibly have to guilt me into abandoning compassion?”

“I’m not trying to guilt you. I’m trying to protect us. From being sidetracked. From being sloppy. From getting attached and invested in every whimpering thing we cross paths with. You keep tiring yourself out over things like that. God's you are hopeless! Someone needs to knock some sense into your head.”

She smiled faintly—dangerous, that smile. “Oh, I don’t know about that. From where I stand, you’re the one hopeless without the other.”

There it is, finally—the mask peels. I am almost disappointed because I believed her when she said she valued me. But hearing her spit my weakness right back to my face actually hurt. I am hopeless without her. She is protecting me, guiding me, feeding me, and arming me. She has said nothing untrue, yet it hurt to hear it. 

I knew it! 

She's always been too good to be true. 

Like she could have really respected me.

I arched a brow. “Excuse me?”

She stood and brushed the dust from her knees, her expression soft with just enough smugness to make me itch. “What? Did I lie? Are you gonna stand there and tell me you are not hopelessly attached, under all that fanged bravado? I am not blind, Astarion. Play the aloof prick all you like, but I know you like me.”

WHAT! 

As soon as the words left her mouth,  relief flooded every fibre of my being.  She wasn't calling me weak. She doesn't think I am pathetic. 

She just thinks I like her.  Wait, what now?!

I scoffed. “I am not—”

She stepped closer, just enough to make gravity shift. Her voice dropped, quiet but certain.

“You keep pretending none of this matters. But you’re always the first to check if I’m behind you—the first to watch my flank. You grumble, you tease—but you never walk away. You hover worried when I am sick, try to comfort me when I am sad and distract me when I am worried. Sounds awfully like care in my book.”

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

She tilted her head. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

I didn’t.

Because I wasn’t sure I could.

She returned to the corpses, carefully packing the salvaged items into her enchanted satchel. No ceremony. Just quiet efficiency. But I could see it in her shoulders—how she bore their memory like a weight she’d chosen to carry.

I watched her in silence.

Then she added, quietly, “That’s what worries me the most now. If I am honest.”

“What?”

“I’ve been thinking. Planning. Looking into everything I know about Larloch’s lair. Running through scenarios. And the worst possible outcome I can think of… is you refusing to run. You're choosing not to leave me behind if I’m compromised.”

“…Wait. You want me to leave you behind if things go sideways?”

Eleyna’s smile twisted, but it wasn’t the warm, reassuring grin I’d grown used to. It was colder. More resigned. A knowing curl of her lips that sent a shiver down my spine.

She was the one with the plan.

She always had the plan.

“Yes, Astarion. Warlock’s Crypt may be undead territory—but that doesn’t mean it’s friendly to the undead.” Her voice was calm. Eerily so. “I think it’s safe to assume you’ll be able to walk right through the front gate without much trouble. The guards are probably—lesser undead, trolls, maybe some wights—they won’t care. And if someone does question you, we can pivot. Say you serve a minor vampire lord. That you’ve come for trade negotiations. They’ll take note. Might even be suspicious. But if caravans leave the necropolis, they’ll expect this maneuvering. You’d likely be ignored. Mostly left to your own devices—so long as you don’t draw attention.”

“Sounds... simple. So, what you want me to abandon you at the gate or some other lunacy?”

“No, as you said, getting in will probably be simple. Staying safe isn’t.” She glanced at me, then away. “The problem isn’t the gate. It’s what happens once we’re inside. As I said, you will mostly be left to your own devices if you don't draw too much attention. That's what worries me, as we cross paths with stronger foes—especially high-level necromancers. I fear you’ll stand out quite a bit. Your looks are noticeable even amongst vampires.”

“You could have just said beautiful.”

“I could,” she said. “But I won’t. Ever.”

“Rude.”

She didn’t smile. “The point is, I’m worried about you getting noticed by someone dangerous. Especially one of the liches or necromancers.”

“…Why?”

She paused. Just long enough to make me uncomfortable.

“Because true necromancers, not hedge-priests, can dominate the undead. Not through enchantment. Not through spells. It's an ability born of their mastery of negative energy and, for some, even the Shadow Weave. It’s not something you can counter or dispel. You can’t shield against it with potions or mindblank effects. Nothing in my skills or yours allows us to do anything about it.”

I frowned. “How is that even possible?”

“It doesn’t target the mind. It targets the energy keeping you animated. The negative necromantic energy. The force sustaining undeath.” Her voice was quiet, clinical now. “It’s not guaranteed to work, especially not on intelligent undead like you. You may resist it, but if it does work…We cannot snap you out of it or defend you against it if it goes through. Even worse, the effect might be permanent.”

I blinked. “Permanent?”

She nodded. “Yes, from what I understood from my readings of the last few days, the effect's duration depends on the target's intelligence level. The treatise I read yesterday said only undead with ‘high intelligence’ can break free if ensnared by a necromancer's command. But it didn’t define what high intelligence means. Anyway, if you’re not intelligent enough, you might not even realize it happened. You don't understand that you are being dominated. You’d just… obey, be made to feel like you want to obey. You’d be lost and permanently  enthralled. Think of this obedience as the result of your own free will. Even I would have no way to know if it's permanent. No way to help you snap out of it.”

“What a long, roundabout way to call me stupid.”

“It’s not that.” Her lips twitched. “It’s... I don’t know where the line is. And I don't want to risk guessing wrong.”

“I know... Would even a potion of focus do nothing?”

She shook her head. “Doesn’t help. It’s not about clarity or focus. It’s about identity. If your sense of self is strong enough, you can resist the command easily. Your mind kicks in only if you fail; intelligence allows you to notice the cognitive dissonances caused by the domination and the strangeness of this new desire to obey. And thus, you might be able to reclaim your sense of self. But if you cannot notice those inconsistencies... you’ll be someone else’s.”

" How about a protection from Good and Evil?"

"That can't protect you from the negative energy already present within." She added with an almost apologetic face.

I exhaled, rubbing the back of my neck. “Charming, but it still doesn't explain why you want me to leave you behind?”

“Well, because of that, we should avoid powerful necromancers at all costs. Especially lich necromancers. However, saying that is nice and all, but we don't know what awaits us once inside. There is much we don't control. We can't guarantee that we will never come face to face with one.” Her tone was deadly serious now. “If a necromancer accosts us, if you feel someone noticing you, a caster paying too much attention to you, you simply must run. Never let them get near you, no matter what. Drink an invisibility potion. Not a scroll. Potions can’t be countered. Then teleport away. Don’t hesitate. Don’t look back. Just go. No matter what, go to safety. Even if I am compromised. Especially if I am compromised. Never engage with someone you suspect to be a necromancer under any circumstances.”

“And you?”

“I’ll manage. Even if captured, I can escape, especially with the cloak. If we’re separated, we can reconnect with the Sending scrolls. I put one in your scrollbook for that reason. You simply cannot risk yourself, Astarion. Whatever happens to me is temporary. The worst I’m risking is death.”

She looked at me then—really looked at me.

“You? You’d risk something worse.”

I swallowed. “Enthrallment.”

She nodded. “And I wouldn’t be able to free you. I wouldn’t even know if I could.  Nor if it's permanent. Short of killing the necromancer controlling you, the only mercy I could give you would be… Mercy’s End.”

I stared at her. “Couldn’t you use the spell on the necromancer instead?”

“Unfortunately, Not. I am almost certain it would be of little use.  Anyone powerful enough to enthrall you would be able to cast at the sixth or seventh circle, minimum. They could counter my spell with ease and certainty in the blink of an eye. Even if the spell is not countered, they can still overpower it and nullify its effect. Even if they didn't, necromancers are naturally resistant to necrosis, which is the basis of the spell. Lich would be worse…” She trailed off. “They might not even feel it. Shrug it like nothing.”

“And then they’d kill you.”

“Likely with a single power word, you would still be enthralled.” She didn’t flinch. “This is why you need to avoid them no matter what. You cannot let them near you. At least not until we find a way to give you a buffer. A political anchor. Something to make them hesitate.”

“A what now?”

“A social shield,” she said. “Some role. A title. An affiliation that gives you political value—but not so much that they want to enslave you for it either. I don’t know how the city works yet. But if it’s exporting goods by caravan, someone somewhere is benefiting. Someone’s managing that trade. And someone somewhere must want in on it. And that means leverage.”  She folded her arms. “We just need to find you a spot in that structure. Something safe. Temporary. Until then, we don’t draw attention.”

I exhaled. “Simple, you said.”

“I said walking in was simple,” she corrected. “I said nothing about walking out.”

She turned around, concluding the description, and resumed collecting the adventurer's personal items. Once done, she simply crouched down, started harvesting the ghouls for ingredients, and filled multiple bottles with their ichor. 

Could I leave her behind?

The question nestled in the back of my mind like a sliver of bone—small, sharp, impossible to ignore. She had said it so plainly as if it were obvious. Logical. Necessary.

And my first thought—my trained thought—was yes.

Of course I could. Of course I should. No bond, no attachment, was worth eternal thralldom. I had tasted enough chains to know their weight. She knew that, too.

So yes, I could leave her.

But the longer we walked, the more that little thought started to itch. To burn. Not in my heart—never there—but somewhere deeper, quieter. Like a scent you can’t place, or a memory that refuses to surface.

Would I?

We moved silently, our boots crunching on old stone and soft rot. The tunnel ahead sloped downward, narrowing into a root and broken rock ribcage. The air grew thicker, laced with damp earth and something older—moss, bone, the faint decay of things that had never been buried.

She was ahead of me now, hood drawn low, the shadows curling around her like they were hers by right. I watched her back as she moved, steady and deliberate, constantly scanning, always thinking three steps ahead. My blade still hung loose in my hand.

I could leave her.

She’s clever, powerful, and annoyingly competent. She’d probably make it out. Probably.

But what if she didn’t?

And more importantly, why did that thought bother me more than it should?

I knew I wanted to keep her. 
Denying it further would be utterly delusional

But risking enthrallement again for her. That seems...

A sound interrupted my spiral. Wet stone shifting. A distant scrape.

We paused at the same time.

“There,” she said softly, pointing to a break in the cavern wall.

We approached carefully—both tense, blades drawn, spells on the edge of our breath. The passage was tight, half-choked with roots and slick moss, but unmistakably used. Scrapes. Drag marks. Dried blood. Ghoul tracks.

“That’s how they got in,” she murmured, kneeling to examine the claw grooves. “Recently. Maybe a day old.”

I crouched beside her, scanning the dark mouth of the hole. Cold wind filtered through it, thick with the scents of the forest—rot, bark, water. We were well beneath the Trollbark now. The ghouls' path led out into something much worse than this cave.

The Trollbark Forest had always been a place of stories. Of warnings. Of mothers whispering to children, “Stay near the fire”, and hunters swearing the trees grew eyes after dusk.

I never believed in such things.

Not really.

But now, as the branches twisted like crooked ribs over our heads and the light went grey and strained, I started to.

As soon as we emerged, we noticed a shift. Not a shift in temperature—though it was colder, yes—but something deeper. Heavier. Like the forest exhaled rot and kept all other breath for itself. 

The mist was not mist. It moved wrong—curling against the wind, clinging to the ground like breath from a rotted lung. It clung low and thick, curling around our ankles like curious spirits, brushing against my skin with a cloying dampness that felt too much like hands. Leaves hung low, furred with moisture that wasn’t dew. The trees here didn’t just stand. They watched. Gnarled trunks bent toward us as if listening. Bark peeled in flaking curls like dried skin, and sometimes you could swear something blinked where there should be no eyes.

She walked ahead of me, her shoulders square. Her jaw set. But I saw the way her steps slowed now and then—ears twitching, head tilted, like she was waiting for the trees to attack.

And perhaps they would.

This place didn’t feel uninhabited.

Just… uninterested in the living.

The fog thickened. Parted in strange shapes—figures just at the edge of vision. Too tall. Too thin. Gone the moment you turned.

“There,” she whispered, halting mid-step. Her hand shot out, curling around my arm.

I followed her gaze—left, into the gloom.

Troll scat. Still warm. I could see steam curling faintly into the air. I could smell it too. The sour, bile-thick stench of a predator’s digestion—meat, acid, and something worse. Something wrong.

“They’re circling,” I said, drawing my blade higher, the fog chilling the sweat on my palms. “And not alone.”

The forest replied.

Softly.

A low creak. A dragging sound. A hush like old breath through splinters.

Then silence again—deeper, thicker. The kind of silence that sits in a coffin and waits.

I scanned the trees.

Bone-white strands of spiderweb stretched between trunks. Something had fed recently—torn bones arranged in symbols I didn’t understand. Small bones. Bird bones. A child’s hand?

No. Don’t think that.

“Keep moving,” she muttered. “We can’t let them pin us here.”

But then the world shifted.

The fog breathed.

A whisper unfurled from the dark—not from her lips, not mine. It slithered between our ribs like a ghost remembering speech.

Come closer…

I froze.

The voice was ancient. Wrong. It didn’t echo in the air. It echoed in me.

I looked at her. Her lips parted. Pupils wide as moons.

“You heard it too,” she said.

I nodded.

Too late for silence now.

She fumbled for her satchel, uncorked a vial, and downed it—mind shielding. Then shoved one into my hand with fingers that trembled.

“Spectres. Probably,” she muttered. “Or worse.”

We drank.

And then we ran.

Not loudly. Not wildly. Like prey that knows it’s already been spotted.

The forest ate our footsteps.

No branches cracked. No leaves rustled. But I could feel something behind us, matching every pace and breathing when I breathed—moving when I paused.

We slipped beneath dangling vines like hangman’s nooses, through roots black with rot and ash. Past dead watchtowers reclaimed by bark and vines, and dead bodies long sunken, from which spilled fingers still clutching prayer beads.

In the distance, something sang.

A child’s lullaby. Wrong key. No words. Just a tuneless, hungry hum.

The Trollbark wasn’t empty.

It had forgotten the sun and forgotten warmth. It had been fed on trolls, then necromancers, then worse.

We noticed a set of double roads—identical slabs of dark slate gutting through the forest, each stone seamless and sharp-edged, laid with such obsessive precision it made my skin crawl. Some were real—other illusions. Step wrong and you vanish—not into traps, but into... absence. Gone. No trace. Not even blood.

Her silver-lit eyes darted ahead, scanning for seams and sigils. My senses prickled. The kind of ancient, crawling awareness that had nothing to do with sight. We trusted nothing. The road was too clean. Too precise. Instead, we kept to the woods—moving like ghosts among moss-choked trees, through roots twisted by shadow and centuries. Occasionally, we saw them—caravans, packs of undead trudging in unnatural synchronicity, ferrying crates and bound things down the broken trails toward Warlock’s Crypt. None saw us. None smelled us. Her spells helped. My instincts helped more. But mostly, we didn’t breathe.

And then we found it.

The edge.

Where the last of the forest slopes gave up, it crumbled into an ashen valley stretched wide and open below. Warlock’s Crypt, still two miles distant, rose from the land like something unbirthed and wrong. We paused. Close enough now to feel it.

The hum.

It wasn’t a sound but a pressure, like something breathing beneath your skin. The Weave warped here, pulsing with necrotic resonance so thick it made your teeth ache. Like sucking iron through cloth. Like mold in your lungs.

We watched. Waited. Nothing winged the sky. No drakes. No lichbound sentries. No patrols save for the dumb dead dragging goods down the blackened roads. Still, we drank our feather fall potions, just in case.

And then—down we climbed.

The cliffs were brittle, carved by wind and wrongness, cracked like graveyard bones. And just where the rock bent into a natural crease, half-swallowed by shadow, we found it.

A cave.

High above the valley floor. Tucked away like a secret. No clear path led to it. No scent of rot trailed from it. It was just... there. Waiting.

Elenya lit a torch, its light dimmed with a tattered scarf—low, amber, reverent. She moved ahead, quiet but not cautious. Not anymore. This was a ritual. Her eyes swept the space—counting exits, measuring angles, lips pressed in that focused little line I’d grown used to. She touched nothing she hadn’t already mapped in her head.

We swept the chamber, blade, magic and instinct. No wards. No glyphs. No bloodstains. Just timeworn stone and silence. A single chamber, deeper than it looked. Someone had lived here, once—long ago. A crumbled desk. A pair of broken lanterns. Scrolls turned to ash and powder. The outline of a bedroll. A warding circle, so faint it had nearly vanished under the weight of years.

Forgotten.

But not useless.

Defensible. Concealed. Ours.

She raised a hand, and I stepped back.

Twelve candles were placed around a rune circle drawn with salt and centred around a glass bead placed in a precise ring. She lit them with a whisper. Blue flames shimmered, ghostlike, barely disturbing the air. She drew her lines through the dirt—curves and sigils, warded paths. Her voice barely registered. A hush. An invocation that melted as soon as it left her mouth.

Then the dome came down.

The world outside warped, blurred—light bent. Sound dulled. A silence so deep it felt like memory was being erased around us.

Inside… warmth. 

A sanctuary.

We dropped our packs.

I stripped off my leathers, stained and stiff with old grime, and wiped myself down with the efficiency of a man too used to blood. She didn’t look up, but she had reached for the spider-silk armour across and put it in her lap now—the one we’d reclaimed from the slavers. Enchantments hoarded for weeks lay beside her: sigil chalk, potion vials, scroll fragments. 

Then she reached into her pack and brought a complete embroidery kit. 

Silver thread in her hand. She began to stitch.
Then worked on etchings. She used mending and prestidigitation, repeatedly cleaning, repairing, and elevating the armour.  She added enchantments and unknowable potions. 

She wasn't as good as I, but her embroidery was still acceptable.

“Social shield,” I muttered, more to myself than to her. What a ridiculous phrase. But not untrue.

I watched her.

She moved like always—deliberate, precise—but I saw it. There was a tremble in her fingers when she reached for the threads. There was a slight hunch in her shoulders, like someone bracing for impact. Old pain, maybe. Grief.

I didn’t ask. I never did.

We had enough ghosts in the room already.

---

So there we were.

A vampire spawn and a half-mad bard, hiding in a dead man’s cave on the edge of the most cursed city in Faerûn.

I pressed a hand to the hilt of Curse Eater. It pulsed in response—faint, eager. Like a tongue testing the air for curses. For broken spells. For things it could devour.

Yet the city's call remained persistent.

Exhilarating. 

Tempting. 

A sense of self, she had said.

A name rose in my mind. Or a lack of one.

Mine.

I am Astarion…

The thought still echoed in my mind from earlier, but it felt incomplete.

The name had no end.

I am Astarion, what?

No family. No claim. No past.

What was my family name?

I hadn’t earned remembrance. Not yet.

I sat on the stone beside her and let the thought pass—let it bleed into the silence like ink in water. She worked beside me, brow furrowed in quiet focus, her lips shaping half-spoken enchantments as she wove story and protection into silk. Each thread hummed with meaning, warding, identity—a spell stitched in patience and defiance.

She didn’t look at me.

Not at first.

But when the magic was spent and she shifted to decorating the armor—delicate flourishes blooming like frost across leather—my hands moved before thought could catch them. I reached for the needle, fingers brushing hers.

She looked at me then, a curious lift of the brow, but said nothing—only let the tool slip from her grasp. I gathered the rest of her materials, taking a quiet inventory of the well-kept kit she’d assembled. Thread in a dozen shades. A silver thimble. Fine-pointed shears. Silk and sinew and memory.

I am Astarion.

I was once an elf.

And I was—am—very good at embroidery.

Before my turning, it had been a hobby. After? It became something else entirely. A lifeline. A secret. An act of resistance stitched beneath the skin.

Under Cazador, we owned nothing. Possessions were… ornamental, frivolous. We were not meant to have things. Not even to better serve his purposes. If we needed tools, clothes, disguises—they were ours to steal, barter, or beg for. And we did. I did. Gods, I became a master of procurement.

But anything too nice… anything that smelled of pride or self-worth…

That was a mistake.

Anything too fine was taken. Broken. Burned.

Punishment came swiftly—and always publicly.

The embroidery kit had been one of my finest acquisitions. A small, beautiful thing. It allowed me to salvage the rags I wore—transform scraps into semblances of elegance. With needle and thread, I stitched dignity into the shape of a man who still remembered what beauty was. It was… a sanctuary. A place to retreat. A way to remember who I had been.

And she ruined it.

Violet.

I will never forgive her.

Not for tattling. Not for what he did after.

Not for how she laughed maniacally during

All because I refused to patch her things for free.

She told Cazador. He made an example of me.

He ensured I understood that even sanctuary was his to grant—and take.

"How are you so good at this?" The question pulled me from the depths like a line drawn through darkness.

I looked up. Elenya was watching me—not with suspicion, worry, or confusion like she had so many times before, but with something gentler. A tinge of admiration softened the strict line of her mouth. Her eyes held mine—steady, intent. Open.

And warmth bloomed in the hollow I had become.

Not the kind drawn from a stolen breath or a bloodied throat. Not the flicker of victory, the heat of flesh, or the glint in someone’s eye before they begged me. This was… quieter. Stranger. A warmth that did not demand, or hunger, or break.

Gods, I wanted her to always look at me like that.

It felt like standing in sunlight I hadn’t earned.

 It wasn’t desire, fear, or calculation behind her eyes—it was admiration. Pure. Uncomplicated.

And it wasn’t for how I moved. Or how I killed. Or how I fucked. 

Not for my looks or my blade.

It was for this—for the delicate pull of thread, the quiet act of creation, and something beautiful I had made with my hands. For something that required no blood, no bait, no lies.

I felt it like a wound. Not pain, not quite—but a tenderness I couldn’t protect. It filled my chest until I could barely breathe, until I feared that if she looked at me for one moment longer, I might unravel entirely.

I had never been admired without cost. Without price. Without expectation.

Never like this.

And it shook me.

And the part of me that knew how to preen—that wretched, polished, perfected part, so long sharpened into something seductive—reached for the performance by reflex. The practiced smile, the teasing quip, the flirtation curled around hollow praise. I'm bracing for something wicked and charming. To make her laugh. 

“It’s called talent, little dove,” I said, the words slipping out with smooth, practiced ease—a familiar mask.  A deflection. The old instinct to charm before I could be seen too clearly. Before the quiet swell of embarrassment gave me away.

Her smile tilted sideways, a rare softness lighting the edge of her expression. “You really are—talented, I mean. This is beautiful craftsmanship. I never say that lightly.”

The warmth in my chest surged further, spreading like wildfire, sudden and sharp. My heart—useless, undead thing—lurched in my ribs.

She didn’t need to add that last part. I already knew. She never flattered. Never wasted words. If she said something, it was because it was true.

And for her to say it about this—about the insignificant little needlework I was doing, the small grace I’d hidden from the world for so long. The thing I used to find refuge in. Something caught in my throat. A thread pulled tight in the chest, delicate and dangerous.

“Thank you,” I said softly, though it barely scratched the surface of what I meant. There was so much more beneath it—gratitude, longing, disbelief. But all I could manage was that single, fragile word.

She leaned in closer, eyes tracking the thread as it slipped through leather and silk with practiced ease. Her gaze sharpened—not out of suspicion, but interest. Genuine, focused curiosity. Like how she looked at ancient wards etched into stone or puzzle-locks buried beneath centuries of dust or hidden ruins.

“How did you make that curve hold without puckering the seam?” she asked suddenly, pointing at the embroidered edge. “Is that… is that reinforced from underneath?”

I blinked, startled by the precision of her question.

“A secondary stitch. Hidden loop,” I murmured, fingers continuing their work automatically. “You guide the tension across the lining, not the surface. It looks fragile, but it holds.”

She let out a soft sound—half surprise, half admiration. “That’s brilliant.”

Her voice was low, reverent as though she were looking at a spell etched in thread instead of a patch of armor.

“How do you get the thread to curve like that?” she asked, voice low, intrigued. “It’s so precise. Like it was drawn with ink.”

My lips parted in surprise. “You… angle the needle with the grain of the fabric. Let the tension shape the arc. It’s mostly a trick of pressure. And patience.”

“And this?” she pointed again. “That’s not just decorative. That strengthens the joint, doesn’t it?”

I nodded, feeling vaguely unsteady. “Vantherian knotwork. It distributes stress across the fabric.”

“Incredible,” she breathed. “I never would’ve thought of that.”

She kept going—question after question, her fascination growing with each answer. She examined every stitch like it mattered, like I mattered. Like this tiny, secret thing I’d hidden away wasn’t just useful, but worthy of wonder.

“I knew you were good with your hands,” she said, almost absently, eyes still tracing the threads. “But this… Astarion, this is incredible artistry. Delicate and functional. You could have been a court tailor in another life.”

I felt my breath catch.

No one had ever looked at me like this. Not for anything I’d made. 

And she just… kept going.

“You’ve balanced the weight so perfectly. It won’t pull at the collar at all, will it?”

“No,” I said hoarsely, “it won’t.”

Her eyes flicked to mine, bright with something close to awe. “Gods, I could watch you do this for hours.”

That nearly undid me.

My fingers trembled slightly, enough that I had to pause, steady them on the cloth.

Because inside, I wasn’t steady at all. I was reeling.

She praised me like a craftsman and admired me like I was worth admiring for something gentle. Something quiet.

I felt exposed. Unarmored. Like every wall I’d ever built had vanished under the weight of her voice. A thousand years of shame and deflection peeled back with every compliment she gave without hesitation.

I wanted to run.

I wanted to hug her.

I wanted to sob.

Instead, I kept sewing.

Her gaze didn’t leave my hands.

“It’s captivating.” She added, and the earth kept spreading to my cheeks all the way up my ears. 

She noticed, and her smile deepened slightly, but it felt like the world was tilting.

“Leave this space open,” she murmured, gesturing to the left side of the collar. “We’ll need to decide who you’re impersonating before we stitch in the sigils.”

I nodded mutely, trying to breathe past the inexplicable tightness in my chest.

She kept watching. Kept looking at me as if I were something worth witnessing. Not just a weapon. Not a tool. Not even a man, not really—but something between those things. Something that could still surprise her.

“You make it look effortless,” she said. “The way your hands move, the way you know exactly how much pressure to use—it’s like... I know it isn't.”

I laughed under my breath, too unsteady to sound truly amused. “I didn’t expect you to care for… something like embroidery.”

That earned me a furrowed brow. She tilted her head, the confusion on her face honest and unfeigned. “Why wouldn’t I?”

I shrugged, suddenly self-conscious. “Clothing. Decoration. It's hardly essential. I thought you were more… pragmatic, knowing your distaste for frivolous things.”

“I am, I don't indulge in non-essentials as you said, but it never stopped me from appreciating them. It's just not where my priorities are right now,” she said simply. “But I appreciate all art.”

My heart stammered like a caged bird slamming into my ribcage. The air felt thinner and warmer, and my ears started ringing.

She looked back at the embroidery, eyes softened with something I could almost mistake for reverence. 

I shook my head. “This is barely art. It’s just stitches.”

Her gaze snapped to mine, unwavering. “Who told you that? To you, maybe. But to me… It’s art. You took something plain and made it sing. You gave it grace. Gave it beauty. A story. If that's not art, I don't know what is.”

I didn’t know what to say.

So I remained silent.

---

Later that night, she returned to her reading and scribbling as I glared down at the city below through the cave mouth. Warlock’s Crypt crawled with movement—hulking troll shapes weaving through the skeletal cavalry, constructs clanking along the outer roads like living siege engines. Each step toward it felt like a thread being pulled tighter around my throat.

“You made it sound so simple,” I hissed, my hand twitching near Curse Eater’s hilt. “Trolls, constructs, gods know what else. And you want me to believe a little discretion and optimism will carry us through?”

She didn’t answer at first. Just stared out across the valley, her brow drawn tight with calculation.

“For now,” she said quietly, “we rest. Until we know more.”

“Great,” I snapped. “And how, exactly, do we know more? Pray a wight delivers us a tour map?”

I turned to her. “Give me your cloak.”

“What?”

" I need the Shadowveil. I’ll scout ahead. Only halfway to the city. I won’t go near the walls.” My voice dropped to something cold and certain. “With the non-detection still up, my stealth, and that cloak… I’ll be fine.”

Her eyes snapped to mine—stormy, startled. “Are you out of your mind?”

I smiled, teeth sharp and dry. “Frequently.”

“The cloak isn’t infallible, Astarion. Creatures with truesight—like, I don’t know, liches—can still see through it. Blindsight too. And you want to waltz down there with no magical backup? What happens if you’re spotted? Or worse, interrogated?”

“You said it yourself—it wouldn’t be that strange for a spawn to walk toward the city. If it comes to that, I go invisible. I teleport. Worst case, I use the gaseous form scroll.”

She threw up her hands. “Those can be dispelled!”

“And most things can't?” I shrugged. “Between being undead, my escape tricks, and the fact that I’m not an idiot—I think I can handle it. Outside the walls, at least.”

She stepped closer, voice lower now, urgent. “But what if you do meet something stronger? A caster—hells, even a wraith—that can cast above the fourth circle? You wouldn’t stand a chance of escaping if they decide to pursue you seriously.”

“Realistically,” I countered, “how many high-level undead do you think they’re sending outside the walls just to patrol the roads? Why would they waste that kind of power on night watch duty? Especially for a vampire spawn sniffing about.”

“We don’t know that.” Her voice was sharp now, fraying at the edges. “We don’t know anything about that place.”

“Exactly.” I stepped back, arms folded. “And that’s why I want to scout it.”

Silence.

She closed her eyes, jaw clenched. I could see it—the thousand calculations firing behind her eyes. Risk. Cost. Contingency.

Finally, she opened them. “We don’t need to be hasty,” she said, quieter now. “Not if you’re unsure. Not if you have any doubt. We can take our time and figure it out piece by piece. You don’t have to prove anything.”

I laughed, bitter and soft. “I’m not trying to prove anything.”

She looked at me. Really looked.

And I wasn’t sure she believed me.

She sees too much.

Less than an hour later, I was equipped and descending into rot and ruin—ready to dig through layers of death, undeath, and forgotten sins, all for the faint hope of loosening the chain still tight around my throat.

“If you’re not back an hour before dawn, I’m using the Sending scroll. And if you don’t answer,” Elenya said, eyes blazing, “I’m going in there to find you and kill you myself. Do you hear me?”

I chuckled. “Don’t threaten me with a good time.”

She didn’t laugh.

“I don’t like this,” she said, quieter. “I don’t like this at all. We could wait one more day. I could make you a familiar scroll, something you could summon and send in first—just to scout.”

She was rattled.

Cute.

“I suspect the city would have some sort of defence against magical summons,” I said, adjusting the hilt of Whisperfang. “It would be rather ridiculous, wouldn’t it? That this place remains a mystery if any bumbling hedge-wizard with a familiar and a sprig of incense could just peek in and come back with stories. No—whatever’s in there, it sees magic.”

“But—”

“Can’t you trust me on this one?”

“I do,” she said softly, her hand brushing her chin, eyes flickering with too many thoughts to speak. “I’m still worried.”

I offered her the smallest smile and placed a hand lightly on her shoulder. “I’ll be careful. I promise.”

Then I turned and stepped through the mouth of the cave.

As I jumped, the wind caught beneath me like an old, familiar lover—cold-lipped, indifferent, but more gentle than most. The Feather Fall potion still pulsed faintly in my blood, spreading through my limbs like silk unfurling. Lightness took hold. Gravity’s grasp fully absent as I let go.

Cloak drawn tight on the sides, I surrendered to the descent—not a fall, not truly. A glide. A drift. I moved through the air like smoke through cracks in stone, like shadow clouds pouring down the face of a moon. No noise. No life. Just a gentle motion.

For a heartbeat, I felt alive.

Truly free. 

Then I looked down.

Below, the blackened valley floor spread out like a rot-slick tongue, quiet and sprawling, the land bruised by age and scorched by magic long since spent. From above, I had a clear view of what waited.

In the far distance, massive winged shapes cut across the sky—giant bats, broad and silent, bearing undead riders in blackened mail. Their wings beat slowly, with practiced discipline, not the frantic rhythm of beasts. They circled the cliff edge like vultures with purpose. 

Sentinels.

They owned the air above this place.

Below them, the valley writhed.

Across the broken edge sprawled mega packs of ghouls and crawlers—dozens of them, of every size and shape imaginable, clustered like tumours across the expanse below me.

Some packs were tight-knit, moving in fluid waves as if controlled by a single will. Others were chaotic—biting, shrieking, scrabbling over one another. 

I hovered there, suspended in wind and dread, heart thudding against my ribs in a rhythm I could no longer call regular undead until my eyes found the roads to Warlock’s Crypt.

They sliced through the valley like old scars—straight, brutal, unhealed. Along them, two patrols marched with mechanical precision, formations so rigid and symmetrical they looked carved into the earth. Not movement—ritual. Not training—programming.

Clockwork horrors in full procession.

Every unit turned as one, pivoted as one. No signals. No orders. Just seamless, collective response. The sound of their march was dull and heavy, like boots against wet parchment. Unnatural. Wrong.

At the head of each one moved a Death Knight riding a nightmare.

Spotless, well-crafted silver plate gleamed like moonlight in oil—clean, sacred in a blasphemous way. The runes etched into the armor flickered dimly, restrained but awake. It walked with the slow, absolute confidence of something that had already died a thousand times and would never die again. It didn’t need to look around. It didn’t need to hurry. It wasn’t afraid of anything.

Its helm glowed from within, a cold blue light like starlight caught beneath winter glass—no flicker, just that steady, unblinking gleam.

Behind it came the trolls.

Lumbering, bone-thick things encased in patchwork armor—stitched together from scavenged hides, leathers, faces. I saw a tabard bearing the crest of an Amnian knight, folded across a thigh like an afterthought. A dwarven scalp braided into a gorget. A drow insignia turned into a belt. Trophies, or warnings, or both. They moved with the heavy-footed anticipation of beasts trained to the scent of fear.

Their nose twitched, tasting the air like hounds.

And they were not alone.

Flanking the larger horrors marched lesser undead—not shuffling or lurching, but gliding into formation with terrifying discipline. Skeletons in mail. Zombies bound in wrappings reinforced with leather. Wights with spears in perfect symmetry, their eyes dim but alert. Even the ghouls walked in rhythm, heads twitching in precise intervals, like they’d been taught how to listen for heartbeat patterns.

They were soldiers.

Trained. Positioned. Intact.

Maintained.

Gods bellow—

A Death Knight. An actual Death Knight. For routine perimeter patrol.

It was excessive. Opulent, even. A waste of power—unless you weren’t afraid of wasting it. Unless your coffers were bottomless. Unless your forces were infinite.

A DEATH KNIGHT.

Do these count as high-level spellcasters?

Yes. Yes, they bloody do.

Bound by dark oaths and vengeance so potent it reanimates their souls into a walking apocalypse. Or cursed by deities to live in undeath. I've heard the stories of Militades of Phlan many times. Of his might and power defending and restoring Phlan for a millennia until Tyr finally lifted his curse and delivered him from undeath. He also heard of lord Moonstar of Waterdeep, servant of the dark mistress responsible for slaying a third of the moonmaiden clergy and followers in Waterdeep two or three centuries ago. 

God’s above.

And now two such entities were pacing the road like some standard city guard.

Not guarding a vault.

Not commanding a war.

Just… patrolling.

I appeared to have severely—spectacularly—idiotically underestimated the city's arsenal.

If this were the outer wall...

If this was what they sent to chase down strays or curious travellers…

Then what, in all the Nine Hells, were they keeping inside?

I continued gliding—weightless, noiseless, a Shadow in borrowed wind and clinging to the broken seams where the magic of the place warped and bent, like heat shimmer on obsidian. The arcane fabric here sagged in places, as if reality itself had been overused and poorly repaired. Every ripple in the weave tugged at the edges of my cloak, and it pulled tighter in response—shadow sealing to me like instinct.

I pressed forward—toward the Necropolis.

With every foot drawn closer, my senses sharpened into knives. The stillness wasn’t still. The silence wasn’t empty. It was listening.

My fangs tingled, not with hunger, but warning. My fingers twitched toward the hilt at my side, craving the grounding weight of steel. The air had changed entirely—thick and leaden, saturated with ancient wards and death-magic residue so dense it clung to my skin like oil slicked with ash. Breathing it felt like inhaling the last breath of the dead—stale, bitter, full of unfinished oaths.

Twice, the wind shifted.

And I caught it.

Scorched marrow.

Cloying and sickly sweet and greasy—like sugar crusted over burnt bone, brittle and blackened. The scent hooked behind my teeth, and I gagged—not from weakness.

From memory.
When I was set on fire.
Not metaphorically. Not symbolically.
When his hands had held the torch.
When the chain and his command had kept me still.

I forced myself further, riding a coil of warm air rising from the cracks below.

The valley around the crypt was barren.

Not lifeless.

Just… waiting.

It whispered. Not in sound—but in silence. A kind of pressure that gathered in the hollows of your ribs, coiled at the base of your spine. The type of silence that remembered screams.

The mist grew lighter and heavier at the same time.

I landed light and crept between the rocks, skirting the ruined remains of old siege towers—now nothing but rust-gnawed scaffolds fused into the ground. The cloak wrapped tight around me, shadows pooling unnaturally wherever I moved.

I watched from behind a cracked monolith as a new caravan approached. Not the kind with oxen or wheels. This one was made of limbs and bone and bound-together corpses. Undead beasts—some stitched, some sculpted—hauled thick crates sealed with black wax, flanked by a retinue of pale-robed figures.

They didn’t speak. Didn’t gesture. They moved like thoughts through a dream. Fluid. Purposeful. Wrong.

I circled wide and decided to follow them s lipping into a copse of petrified trees. They crackled softly beneath my feet, brittle as bone shards. No birds. No insects. Only the sound of my heartbeat and the distant grind of something massive shifting within the walls.

Not everything here was undead. I caught glimpses—flashes of motion too fast, too irregular. Shades? Something else? I couldn’t tell. But one thing was clear: this wasn’t a graveyard.

And then, the city walls revealed themselves through the mist.

They didn’t rise so much as manifest—a sudden, silent emergence of black stone veined with dull red and writhing silver. Glyphs slithered beneath the surface like worms under skin—too slow to catch in motion, too faint to focus on without inviting madness. Towers jutted up regularly like black teeth—jagged, seamless, not built, but grown. Iron spikes lined every ledge, and crouched atop them were gargoyles—massive, hunched things with gaping mouths frozen in sculpted screams, as though they'd never stopped protesting what they'd become. I didn’t trust them to remain stone for long.

The walls crawled with death.

Roaming zombies, skeletons, ghouls, and trolls patrolled the lower grounds, while the upper ledges were manned by wraiths and skeletal archers posted at sharp angles, unmoving but alert. Among them, I caught sight of vampires—silent, robed figures gliding with uncanny grace. And one Death Knight, striding along the ramparts like a general inspecting his dominion.

The towers beyond the walls struck me at once: too clean. Not crumbling ruins, not relics of a forgotten age—but immaculate, meticulously maintained. Each line of black stone was seamless, and every angle was calibrated to disorient. There was no moss. No wear. They looked old, but untouched. It was a mockery of decay. A lie crafted by something that understood both architecture and fear. Each spire seemed deliberately off—just enough to unnerve, to trap the eye in its crooked symmetry.

Balconies of twisted iron curled outward like grasping fingers—or perhaps glyphs in a language older than bones. Even from this distance, I could feel the magical intensity radiating outward. The weave rippled underfoot. Glyphs crawled across every visible surface, shifting like scales in the dark. They didn’t rest. They didn’t repeat. They shimmered with a silent intelligence—alive, as though the stone itself breathed. Or waited. Or watched.

This wasn’t a ruin.

It was alive with purpose. Every motion is calculated—every stone in place. A city not abandoned—but thriving in death, having bent the laws of time and rot to its will.

Bridges webbed the towers—delicate in appearance, but wide enough for entire processions. Shapes moved across them with eerie precision: ranks of undead marching in formation, skeletal porters dragging carts heavy with things I couldn’t see, and wraiths drifting like torn shadows, flickering in and out of sight. The rhythmic clatter of bone on stone echoed faintly through the air—a constant hum that vibrated in my chest. They didn’t stagger. They didn’t hesitate. These weren’t remnants.

They were soldiers.

And they marched to a rhythm I could feel beneath my ribs—an ancient, unrelenting beat.

Higher still, bone gargoyles hunched on every ledge, unmoving yet oppressively aware. Their hollow sockets scanned the city below, not actively—but expectantly. Each one was carved with disturbing intricacy, their limbs jagged, their bodies sculpted as though pain had been used as a chisel. I knew better than to look back.

I felt them watching.

The twin roads I’d followed narrowed and merged into a broad entrance route—massive, clear of debris, and undeniably used. The stone bore fresh scuffs, drag marks, deep cart grooves—recent. Frequent. The road led directly to what I later learned was called the Gate of Waning.

A colossal arch of blackened bone and obsidian, easily twice the height of any noble manor I’d ever robbed. The keystone pulsed with a cluster of runes that throbbed like a dying heart, and every inch of the gate seemed sculpted for annihilation. The statues flanking it might once have been gargoyles, but had long since been twisted into barbed monstrosities—too many limbs, not enough mercy. They moved. They watched. Their spined arms curled in grotesque supplication, and their mouths—gaping, carved things rigged with mechanisms—looked poised to scream. Not sound. Magic.

The sight alone nearly stole the breath from my lungs.

The city stretched on—far larger than we had ever imagined. Layers sank deep into the earth, tier upon tier of catacombs and towers carved straight into the valley bedrock—Bone-lattice bridges suspended over voids. Obsidian walkways led into archways that shimmered with planar distortion. And at the center, rising like a blade plunged into a dying heart: a tower of black glass and tarnished silver, coiled in green fire.

No banners.

No lights.

Just presence.

Larloch’s tower.

I didn’t know how I knew.

But I knew.

When the caravan I’d followed reached the gate, it parted without sound.

No creaking hinges. No groaning stone. No shouted orders. The massive seam split down the center—silent, obedient—as though the gate remembered how to open for those expected.

I didn’t move.

Didn’t breathe.

The figures passed through. The gate sealed behind them.

There were sentries—wights in ceremonial armor, motionless on their plinths above the gate. They didn’t blink. I wasn’t sure they could. But I felt them watching. Waiting.

A brass plaque shimmered faintly below one with glyphs I couldn’t decipher. Not yet. But I’d seen Eleyna’s notes. I’d seen how she sketched similar wards in her spellbook—so I decided to draw a small approximation at the back of the smut book she gave me.

Whatever this place was, it obeyed laws. Laws written in blood and magic. Ancient ones. But laws still.

It was a machine.

Alive, in its own way. Processing. Sorting. Moving pieces.

And we were about to become part of it.

I crouched atop the broken heap of a collapsed stone culvert and went still. Perfectly, unnaturally still.

The cloak’s shadowveil wrapped around me like a second skin, and I let it consume me. Shadow clung to every inch of me until I became part of it—no longer a shape, but a suggestion, a shimmer at the edge of vision. I didn’t breathe deeply. Didn’t twitch. I let my pulse slow until even my undead senses dulled.

Less than half a mile from the Gate of Waning, I remained. Watching. Listening. Waiting.

Two patrols alternated on the road, shifting every hour. Each led by a Death Knight—silent, tireless, radiating authority that made the lesser undead snap to attention without a word. Behind them moved their troops—trolls, ghouls, skeletons, all with a shared cadence, as if the city itself breathed through them.

Caravans arrived at irregular intervals—some ragged, some gilded, none unguarded. The gates opened for each, seamless and silent. But I wasn’t watching the caravans. I watched the lights beyond the threshold.

They shifted and pulsed, casting long, rippling shadows across the black stone—light with no warmth, movement without sound. And within, no chaos. No market shouts, no cartwheel clatter, no laughter.

Not like Baldur’s Gate.

This was order.

Lethal, absolute order.

Enforced by things that didn’t sleep. Didn’t blink. Didn’t forgive.

I stayed longer. Long enough for the wind to shift. For the sky to haze. Long enough to learn the rhythm of it all.

No randomness. No deviation. Every action fed the machine. Every step was anticipated by something greater.

Nothing here happened by chance.

Giant bats—three, four, sometimes more—circled the walls in long, lazy arcs, never crossing inside. The undead that roamed the wall’s perimeter stayed out as well, as if warded from the interior by something older, more substantial. Perhaps loyalty. Perhaps command.

But the gate…

It didn’t open just for patrols and caravans.

Other groups came.

Cloaked figures, moving in ones and twos. No living among them—only the dead, and things that reeked of fiendish magic. Some were let in. Others were turned away. Two were executed on the spot—slaughtered by the Death Knight and the constructs flanking the archway. No warning. No hesitation.

Judgment here was swift.

I watched the wraiths stationed at the gate. They never stopped writing. Quills moved ceaselessly across ghostly parchment—cataloging, recording, perhaps scrying. Their work never paused, even when the executions occurred. Not a glance spared.

It was as if they’d already written it down.

Many of the roaming minions came uncomfortably close to my perch—so close I could hear the groan of old leather armor, the wet suck of half-rotted feet dragging through dirt. One troll paused less than ten paces away, its snout lifting toward the wind. It sniffed. Hacked and moved on.

None of them saw me.

None of them noticed me.

The cloak held, the shadows embraced.

But the silence in my head was deafening.

This is a suicide mission.

There was no hero’s gamble to be found here, no cunning plan or clever misdirection that would let us slip unnoticed past those gates. We wouldn’t infiltrate. We wouldn’t fight. We would be devoured—systematically, efficiently. This wasn’t a city. It was a weapon. A machine of undeath polished to brilliance and sharpened to cruelty.

I shifted, muscles stiff from stillness, and began to climb down from the broken culvert. Every motion was deliberate, noiseless, a ghost withdrawing from the mouth of a tomb.

I had seen enough.

We will not survive this.

My fingers found the familiar leather binding of my scrollbook. I flipped through it quickly, expertly, until I located the Fly scroll tucked behind an older scroll dimension door.

A whispered incantation, a flare of magic up my spine—and then I soared.

The wind caught me instantly, cool and sharp against my face. My cloak flared behind me like a shadow unspooled. I left the Necropolis behind, its towers dwindling as I climbed into the high, cold sky.

I glided through the silence, back toward the cliffs. Toward the ledge where we’d agreed to regroup.

Back toward her.

And gods, I needed to see her face.

When I landed, quiet as a thought, she didn’t notice me at first. She was pacing—agitated in that tightly-coiled way she rarely allowed herself to show. Her hands were clasped behind her back, knuckles white.

Not just pacing—circling the dome's edges like a trapped thing, lips moving in a soundless litany. 

Her head jerked up at the sound of my boots on the stone.

Just looked at me.

When she sensed me, she tried to look composed, but I saw the crack beneath the mask. Her magic dimmed slightly when she turned, breath catching before she spoke.

Relief flooded her face, and I heard her heartbeat settle—slowing from a tight gallop to something closer to steady. Still too fast. Still too strained. But steady.

I stepped through the veil, the cloak’s magic loosening around my shoulders as I unfastened it, boots soundless on the stone.

“No need to use the scroll or storm the lich citadel,” I said, voice low. “I’m in one piece.”

She opened her mouth—then closed it again. Her arms folded across her chest, fingers drumming her elbows. That was her tell. When her sharp wit failed her, when logic wasn’t enough to stitch her nerves shut, she folded in on herself. Quiet. Controlled. Terrified.

I dropped into a crouch by the edge of our bedrolls and began unlacing my gauntlet.

“The valley’s worse than I expected,” I said. “Better organized. Infinitely more powerful. Elenya, this is not going to work.”

Her gaze didn’t waver.

“Tell me everything.”

I nodded, just once.

“There are caravans. Not just necromantic constructs—though there are plenty of those. Some are hauling cargo. Huge, sealed crates marked with glyphs I didn’t recognize. Some wax-sealed. Heavy. They didn’t rattle.”

She knelt beside me, drawing her spellbook into her lap with an almost mechanical precision. Her quill was in hand before I’d finished the sentence. Already taking notes.

“And some,” I added, voice dropping, “are carrying the living.”

Her head snapped up.

“Covered cages. Sealed boxes. I heard heartbeats. Subdued. Not screaming. No panic. They weren’t resisting. Just… blank. Their pulses were stable, steady. Like they’d been charmed. Drugged. Or hollowed out from the inside.”

Her grip tightened on the quill until the feather bent.

“I followed one caravan to the gates. Groups were going in, too—cloaked figures. Undead. Fiends. No living. Two wights at the checkpoints for each lane. And a death knight watching everything, making the calls.”

Her brow furrowed. “Death knight? At the door? Are you sure it wasn’t—”

“I know what I saw,” I cut in. “I counted five total. One at the gate. One patrolling the wall with vampires. Two leading perimeter patrols. The last one seemed to be directing the outer hordes.”

She sat back, stunned.

“This is…”

“Elenya,” I said, “the only way in is through the gate. There is no sneaking past that many patrols, and the wards—they shimmer like spider silk strung across every stone. They’d see us the second we tried.”

Then I started recounting everything. Every angle, every movement. I showed her the sigil etched over the gate—it shimmered faintly, even from a half mile out—and she identified it as a wide-range Detect Life glyph.

“Half a mile?!” she snapped. “Are you out of your damned mind?! That close—”

“Stop fussing and listen. I stayed still. I stayed hidden. Every group that approached waited. Some were questioned—I couldn’t hear the words. But none of them were mortal. Every single one undead or fiendish.”

“No exceptions?”

“None,” I said. “And when one of the fiend groups tried to argue, they were cut down. No warnings. No chants. Just execution. Fast. Cold.”

She muttered a curse under her breath. Not the poetic kind. The kind that cracked through her accent like gravel.

“Did the rest get in?”

“Some. Others were turned away. No clear pattern, but it’s there. Something coded. Unseen.”

Her fingers hovered over a page of half-scribed sigils, not seeing them.

Her mind was racing, a storm of hypotheses and equations I couldn’t hope to follow. But I could feel the shift—the moment she realized the city wasn’t just mildly guarded. 

“The only options,” I said, “are to sneak in with a caravan, or talk our way in. And we’ll need something to say. Something good.”

She exhaled slowly, eyelids lowering as if to shield herself from what that truly meant.

“The city isn’t just alive,” I added. “It’s selective.”

Silence hung between us. Long. Heavy.

Then finally, in a voice that sounded more like a confession than a thought:

“We can’t teleport in once the doors open?”

“No,” I confirmed. “And even if we could… the perimeter swarms with undead. We’d be spotted before we landed.”

She swallowed.

“But there are vampires inside,” she said slowly. “The ones who got in… they might be key. Maybe if we learned what they said...”

I met her gaze. “ELENYA! Something’s happening in there. Something bigger than a necropolis. It's not worth it."

“What if Larloch’s preparing to march?” she whispered. “We’re less than two weeks from Baldur’s Gate and Waterdeep—he wouldn’t need a siege engine. He already has one. How did things get so bad? Where did he find five death knights to be able to use them just for the city defence? This is seriously dangerous.”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?” I muttered. “How the hell did he build this? When? You said that the last report was dated 70 years ago. Clearly, the city upped their force like nothing I have ever seen during that time.”

“We can’t go in under these conditions,” she said, more to herself than to me.

“We can’t go in there under any conditions, period!” I insisted. “This is not a joke. We are way above both our pay grades. And then some.”

She let her spellbook slump closed beside her, spine flush to the stone. Then she reached for her armor again—the spider silk threads now stitched with runes that shimmered like wet silver. Her hands were steadier. Her jaw wasn’t.

“You were gone four hours,” she said softly.

“I know,” I replied. “You counted every minute.”

She didn’t deny it.

Instead, after a long pause, she said, “Thank you. For coming back.”

I let the words settle. Let their weight soak in.

Then I sat down across from her.

“You still want to go in, don’t you?”

“I think,” she said, “we’ll need a better story than ‘trade’ or ‘pilgrimage.’ We’ll need a sponsor. Someone who has already been accepted by that place. Or at least Someone who won’t be seen as prey.”

She paused. Her voice, when it came next, was razor-thin and steel-sharp.

Resolve.

"We need to raid one of the caravans first.”

“Gods below women, do you have a death wish?“  

“You said the patrols don’t go beyond the cliff face so that we could ambush one of the smallest caravans. And get their cargo to figure out what the city needs or wants and who it’s trading with.”

“Why not just let it go? Have you missed the part where I told you there are death knights at the fucking gates? This is clearly beyond us.”

“ I am not talking about fighting them, Astarion, but a caravan is manageable. That’s worth a shot. Let’s think about it a bit more. We are both tired."

---

She didn’t rest.

Even after everything, after the reports, pacing, and my return, she dug into her pack with single-minded fury and pulled out two tomes, flipping them open like they might start screaming answers. Her lips moved silently as her fingers traced lines of ancient script, her eyes darting like prey in the dark. She barely noticed when I began unstrapping my leathers or sat down beside the gear pile.

I didn’t speak. Didn’t want to disturb her… whatever she was doing.

Exhaustion and anxiety still gawked at me until the hunger stirred—creeping up my throat like smoke, curling around the edges of my ribs, slow, dull, and patient. I ignored it for a while.

Time slipped. My eyes found the cityscape again—through the mouth of the cave, across the valley floor, up those towering black spires veined in cold blue light. Beautiful. Terrible. Unforgiving.

Pulling me in.

I do not like this.

She said I needed to hold on and reinforce my sense of self.

I am Astarion.

again

Astarion what?

I do not like this at all.  

My thoughts wouldn’t leave me alone.

Sense of self.

I tried again to remember my name. Not Astarion. That one stuck. That one had roots, even if they were rotted through. But the rest—the name I was born to, the family I came from, whatever might have come before—was lost. Gone. A jagged void in my memory.

Even my earliest days as a spawn were veiled in black fog.

I am Astarion,
I was an elf, good at embroidery. 

I was …

I glanced at the enchanted crossbow she had given me. It still sat untouched beside my pack. Sleek. Lethal. Beautiful craftsmanship, but...

I’d never used one and never been allowed one. So how did I know—instinctively—how it worked? How to reload it.

The thought clung to me like blood on skin.

I am Astarion, and I am an elf.
I am a High elf.

What kind of high elf?
Was I from Baldur’s Gate, or was I just living there when turned?

I focused on the memories that fled through my mind when I heard her song of rest. 

A red clay house, a courtyard. 

Long dark blue hair.

A practice target. 

Laughter.

I rummaged through her endless bag until I found the pair of shortbows we’d looted days ago and a bundle of arrows we’d meant to trade or barter.

The moment I touched the bow, I knew.

It fit my hand like it had grown there. Good tension. Solid draw. Just enough give in the wood, but not too much. Perfect for skirmishing in tight quarters. Something you could fire from a tree or a crypt hallway.

How do I know that?

I set up a mark on the crumbling desk at the back of the cave—drew a crude bullseye with a bit of charcoal and stepped back. Nocked an arrow.

Thwip.

Bullseye.

Again. And again. Almost every time.

She had said it was racist to assume I could use a bow.

Maybe so.

But my body remembered what my mind couldn’t.

Seems I am one of those bow-handling elves.

Stern Lilac colored eyes looking at me.

I must have been trained. Someone must have taught me. I must have mattered to someone—once.

So why can't I remember?

I am Astarion, a high elf noble from Baldur’s Gate. I was working as a magistrate.

Was I from the Gate originally?

Long expansive farmlands, A carriage. The Basilisk gate.

Dark-haired young elven girl running through an upper city estate.

Moon elf.

I WAS A MOON ELF.

I felt the spiral start again. That awful, clawing emptiness pulling at the edges of my ribs like a tide rising too fast.
Who am I?

Her voice broke the current.

“Are you hungry?”

I blinked. She’d stood up, watching me with eyes still lit faintly silver from lingering magic. “You should’ve said something earlier,” she added softly. “Wait a second.”

I tried to wave her off. “Not really. I mean… I could always eat. But it’s manageable.”

She gave me that look. The don’t insult my intelligence one.

“Stop lying. Your pull started to tug quite strongly. I don't know why you insist on not eating recently. Is my blood that bad?!”

Ah.

So she’d felt it. The bond between us—it always ran quiet, but it did run.

I was in pain. Or… no. I was in mourning. Mourning the man I once was, the one I couldn’t even name—the one whose hands fired arrows like breath and who vanished into shadows like second nature.

And she thought I didn’t want her blood.

Oh, the irony!

If only she knew.

I smiled—sharp, but soft. “Well, if you’re insisting… who am I to say no?”

I drank.

Bit into her with practiced reverence, a gesture as intimate as it was instinctive. And just like that, the world snapped back into color.

Her scent. Her breath. Her heartbeat was steady and warm beneath her skin, pale from long hours awake. Familiar. Anchoring. Mine.

I took only what I needed. Just enough to ease the gnawing in my bones and still the crawl of memory’s absence in my veins. No indulgence. No hunger-drunk reverie. Just sustenance. A ritual as old as the world, and one of the few that ever felt… safe.

When I pulled back, I didn’t retreat. I simply rested my cheek against the crook of her neck, drawing in the scent of her skin, listening to the cadence of her breath. The rhythm of her life—the only thing in this gods-damned world that didn’t feel stolen or false.

I don’t want to lose her or myself in there.

And that was when she said it.

“It’ll be fine,” Eleyna murmured, her voice thin, the wind snatching half the sound before it reached me.

I cast her a glance sharp enough to cleave stone. The biting wind outside seemed to mock her words as it whipped through the rest of the cliff face, carrying with it the bitter scent of rot and ancient magic that emanated from the crypt below. The smell alone made my gut twist, but her dismissal of the danger we were about to walk into stirred something darker within me.

"Fine? You think this is fine?" I hissed, my voice low and laced with disbelief. The chill creeping into my bones from the sheer audacity of her calm. " You want to walk straight into a necropolis so secret that no living soul truly knows what happens inside, guarded by every single nightmare one could think of. A city ruled by an archlich so old and powerful, he keeps other archliches as pets. That's without talking about the other liches, vampire lords — even demons — at his service. And apparently, death knights as doormen.” I spread my hands, trying to encompass the enormity of what was before us. "No, this is not fine. This is everything but fine. Are you not the least concerned we’re strolling into an abattoir with a census policy?"

Eleyna didn’t flinch. Her gaze remained unwavering on the sprawling cave ceiling, as if the abyss beneath us were simply a mundane curiosity. I hated how unshaken she seemed—hated how calm she could be in the face of certain death.

“It's dangerous for sure, Astarion. That's what makes it worth it. No pursuer will follow us here,” Eleyna said, the words almost weightless against the howling wind. She wasn’t even looking at me anymore. “No Cazador's minions. No hunter of your kind. Not even Cazador himself would dare risk stepping into this place. He would be charmed and dominated by Larloch or one of his minions immediately. If he sent anyone, they’d lose our trail at the gates and assume us dead — or worse.”

I felt bile rise in my throat, the word dead ringing hollow in my chest.

Worse.

That was the truth beneath it.

Not just dead. Worse.

The thought clung to my ribs like a shadow, curling through the marrow.

I swallowed the panic and dragged my focus back to her voice—to her certainty, to how she spoke of strategy when all I wanted was a reason not to flee.

“It’s a gambit for sure,” she said, calm, deliberate, maddeningly composed. “But we don’t need to give up yet. Your scouting already gave us valuable information. Imagine what a caravan could give us. How much more could we see?”

Her eyes flicked to me, sharp and unflinching.

“This gambit is one I’m willing to make.”

I blinked. “You’re serious.”

“Of course I’m serious. I’m also running low on some spell components,” she added, brushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear with all the nonchalance of someone discussing crop rotations. “Things I can’t find easily. Gemstones, treated incense. Minerals rare enough to make even Daggerford a gamble. And don’t get me started on the House of Mercy. I was hoping to restock more at the Gate. The temple is...”

She sighed, tilting her head to the side like she could already hear me protesting.

“Not exactly a bustling metropolis,” she continued. “If we go back now, I’ll have to leave you behind to go to Candlekeep and restock. During the day. Alone. Surrounded by divine casters I can’t predict, much less control. You’d be exposed, Astarion. Vulnerable. I won’t have that.”

There was something in her voice then—barely restrained. Not anger. Not fear.

Conviction.

“No one would dare touch you in the temple if I’m beside you,” she said, tone sharpening. “But some of Ilmater’s flock forget. Forget that he left the Triad. Forget that hasty justice always comes at the cost of true mercy.”

She looked at me now—not as a task, a victim, or even a w—but as something fragile. Something precious she refused to entrust to anyone else.

“I don’t want to take that risk. I’d rather defend you from monsters,” she said, quieter now. “Than lose you to some well-meaning fool with a holy symbol and a sermon.”

I froze.

It wasn’t the words. It was how she said them—like a vow she wasn’t aware she’d spoken aloud.

This wretch is dangerous, I thought.

Too dangerous.

But the thought had no weight. Not really.

It wasn’t just her magic that made her terrifying; it was how calmly she could gamble everything for someone else.

“I would bet my pack,” she added, turning back to look at the ceiling as if she hadn’t just said something that made my chest feel like it might break open, “that the Warlock’s Crypt will allow us to stock up if we can get in. The city is filled with mages after all.”

Her voice was measured, almost light. Casual. The way one might speak of market stalls or spring rainfall.

“It presents too many opportunities, Astarion,” she said. “To ignore. Or give up. Not yet.”

And I just stood there, heart thudding, lips parted, caught somewhere between admiration and dread.

Because Elenya wasn’t foolish, she didn’t underestimate the city.

But she had already decided that it wouldn’t break her.

My face was still nuzzled in the crook of her neck, her skin warm against mine, her scent a balm and a snare. I murmured the words more than said them, letting the sarcasm curl around the edge of my breath like a blade half-drawn.

“So you’re telling me this has nothing to do with your morbid curiosity about monstrous places?”

I felt her chest rise with a steady breath—controlled, thoughtful.

“Of course I want to see it. Gods, I’d be lying if I said otherwise.” Her voice was quiet, firm, brushing past my ear while her fingers ran absent-mindedly through my hair. “But that’s not why I’m pushing. We can’t keep scraping by on dried bramble, looted pouches, and wishful thinking. Since we left Baldur’s Gate, we’ve always been on the back foot. Running and hiding and being hunted. We chose this path together, Astarion. I'm just trying to ensure we get something out of it.”

She shifted slightly, her temple resting lightly against mine.

“If we’re truly serious about severing you from Cazador’s hold, then this place—this awful, cursed, nightmarish place—is our best shot at something real. Not hymns. Not half-truths from temple scrolls. Truth. What makes vampires? What breaks them? You won’t find that in most libraries. But here? Maybe.”

She took a slow breath in.

“And you’re okay with going in blind?” I asked, disbelief sharp in my tone.

She leaned back, just enough to look me in the eye. “I never said that. I’m reckless, not stupid. That’s why I want to intercept a caravan. That I can calculate. Especially if I have this—” she gestured toward the Gloaming Cloak beside her pack. “ It increases my survivability and yours by always allowing me to hide and sling both offensive and healing spells. The content of the caravan could help us see through the fog. Understand the city’s import needs and who they are trading with; information like that will help us craft a believable story, avoid detection, and say the right things. Maybe even buy us protection.”

She hesitated, then added, “And if I’m being honest… the lack of information? That’s not just the danger. It’s the draw.”

“What?!”

Her mouth twitched, not quite a smile—more a ghost of defiance.

“We’re not guaranteed safety, spell components, or even knowledge that helps you directly. It could be a waste. But it’s the only known undead city in the western Heartlands. And a functional one. Do you know what a field report alone would be worth?”

She turned, fully now, the urgency in her words catching light like a flint to tinder.

“You would be set for life. Candlekeep would fund half our future needs for just a city layout. The real learned circles, Astarion—the ones with the power to help us—aren’t impressed by vague sob stories. But a working map of a necropolis ruled by Larloch, the shadow king? That’s power. That opens doors.”

Her words wrapped around me like smoke, tightening, twisting, threading through every weak point I’d tried to hide. This wasn’t about the crypt. It never had been.

This was about her.

Her brilliance. Her danger. She had a hunger for something more than survival.

And me.

My gnawing hunger. My obsession with control. My desperate refusal to lose her—to lose this.

And somewhere beneath that—quiet, aching, half-formed—was something I still couldn’t name.

“What’s the value of gold or favour,” I muttered, voice rough, “if you die trying to get it?”

I looked away.

“And aren’t Ilmateri supposed to not care about riches?”

Her glare came swift and clean—cutting straight through my defences like a scalpel.

“It’s not about gold, and you bloody well know it.” Her voice cracked with restrained fire. “Whatever solution we find to your Cazador problem—wherever we find it—it’s going to cost more than blood. More funds that I can mobilize. We’ll need protections I can’t cast, casters I can’t afford, knowledge buried in arcane vaults.”

She glared at me.

“Also, this place could help us with all three. The wards here are some of the strongest in all Faerûn. Larloch may be a lich, but he’s also one of the plane's most powerful, most secretive minds. If this were just about lore…” she paused, her gaze steady, “...I would’ve come here years ago. Alone.”

I felt her hand brush against my chest, just over my slow beating heart.

“You are the main reason I’m even considering this. You grumpy prick.”

She needs to stop doing this to me.

Saying things like that.

Like it means nothing.

Like she didn’t just reach into my ribcage and press her palm against something I’ve kept buried for my whole undeath.

It’s infuriating. Maddening. Terrifying.

Last time someone reached there i ended up burried. 

Because when she looks at me with that fire, that fucking resolve, I forget that I am—

a killer, a liar, a prostitute, a slave in fine leathers and ruined smules.

I forget what I’ve done to survive.

What I may do to her.

And yet… she says it.

Like it’s just a fact.

Like it’s something true.

I can’t handle this softness. Not from her. Not when it comes wrapped in bloody pragmatism and near-suicidal plans. Not when it might cost her everything.

I remembered the city below, the shapes of trolls and constructs moving like shadows, the skeletal cavalry patrolling the outer roads. “You make it sound so easy,” I hissed. “Sorry if that hardly seems the ideal academic retreat.”

Eleyna was silent for a moment, her gaze never straying from mine. Then, softly, she said:

“I want you to feel comfortable with this.  If you really don’t want to, we can just leave. But it’s worth it to at least try and observe from a safe distance and check one of the caravans."

Fuck!

“I’m serious,” she says again, quieter now. “It’s not the city. It’s not the knowledge. It’s certainly not the gold that's worth it.”

She leans forward and presses her brow against mine.

“It’s you, Astarion.”

And I almost tell her not to say that.

Because if she means it, if she really means it—

Then I can’t lose her.

And if I can’t lose her,

“It’s worth it, Astarion, because you are worth it.”

Then I’ll do anything to keep her.

Even walk willingly into a lich’s jaws.

Even kill again.

Even let her see how deep the rot goes.

“Fine,” I whisper.

But I don’t pull away.

I can’t.

Fuck 

I really don’t like this.

---

The plan had been simple.
Strike fast. Strike clean. A caravan too far from the Crypt’s patrol range to raise alarm, too close to pass unguarded.

We chose a narrow bend in the old road, flanked by stone pillars scorched by forgotten spellfire. Eleyna’s charms masked our scent. I laid the traps myself. The moment dusk fell, the waiting began.

And then came the caravan.

Six skeletal oxen dragged ironbound carts—one packed with crates, the other with barrels. Guarded by a weight, a deathlock, and above it all, a circling bonebat, its wings clicking in the stale air.

“We take out the bat first,” Eleyna murmured, her fingers curled with gathering light. “Then isolate the caster.”

I nodded—and vanished into mist.

The first strike was clean.

A radiant bolt burst from her hands, shattering the bonebat mid-air in a scatter of burning wings. I reappeared behind a wight, Curse Eater humming as it sank through decayed armour, devouring the animating curse with a violent pulse. It dissolved in my arms like ash on the wind.

Then came the screaming.

The deathlock shrieked something guttural—arcane syllables tearing the air as blades drew and flesh unknotted. We split through the first wave like razors through silk. Eleyna’s Cutting Words slipped between curses, unravelling enemy spells with poetry edged in venom.

And then—then—reality caught up.

A second caravan emerged behind us. Larger. Armored. Pulled by skeletal beasts plated. More guards. More death. No symbols. No flag. Just necrotic sigils burning in their skulls and a tethered boneclaw sorcerer riding behind an orb-mounted cart.

The air turned to iron.

The boneclaw screamed—and the dead answered.

Two more bonebats descended in jagged arcs. A headless rider, swamped in necrotic fungus and failed enchantments, dragged itself from the tree line and roared, scattering even the mist.

We were drowning in them.

Steel clanged. Sigils burned. Arrows hissed from the shadows. My ribs shattered under the rider’s exploding projectiles. The protection from evil and good i was concentating on almost slipped, as my breath knocked loose in a spray of blood. Undead surged. I struck, parried, twisted—Curse Eater humming, whisperfang slick and ichor—but the wave didn’t break.

“They’re shielded!” Eleyna shouted, somewhere through the screaming. “The sorcerer’s sustaining them—he’s bound through that orb! It’s a curse, I think.”

I drove a blade into a knight’s knee. “Then we sever the bond!”

And then the fog came.

Not mist. Her.

It rolled out of her like liquid moonlight—glimmering silver, searing cold. It slid along the ground, wrapped around my limbs, and burned through the shielding of the undead like acid.

I cut. They fell. Still, they came.

I stumbled—limping, vision bleeding. Curse Eater pulsed in my palm, devouring enchantments one after the other, but I was cornered. A blow landed. Another. My breath hitched. My knees buckled.

We were in a stalemate due only to the protection from undead we cast previously to the attack, and the combined effectiveness of her radiant fog and Curse Eater ability to absorb some enchantments. 

This is not going to cut it. 

We were taking too much damage.

And I felt it—the vial at my neck—Malar’s blood.
It called. Cold. Hungry.

But I didn’t reach for it.
Not yet.
Not like this.
Too many bodies. Too much frenzy. I wouldn’t come back from that edge. Not in time.

She rose, draped in the shadowveil, eyes silver with wrath

Her form blurred—blasts of crimson erupted from the fog, while whispers spilled from her tongue. Old words. Myth. Lore weaponized. They struck like memory—guiding me, strengthening me. My arms burned with newfound precision. Each strike landed harder, and each dodge was more instinctive.

I felt her voice before I heard it.
“Those who desecrate the dead will always be desecrated by the dead.”

It wasn’t just inspiration. It was possession. Spirit-lore surged into my limbs—a hunter long-dead lending me his hands.

Her melody came again—an eerie, lonesome thing I remembered from the tomb. The first song she sang for me.
Not to lull.
To heal. My ribs knit. My breath returned.

Together, we cut them down.

She countered one spell with raw will, and another with a scroll mid-incantation. Her fingers bled. She didn’t care.

She kept healing and inspiring me from her fog. While she slung spells and blasts, she sometimes distracted the enemies with her cutting words. Calling forth vengeful spirits to hurdle them.

Until...

Elenya screamed.

A Blight spell slammed into her chest. Her body jolted, thrown back by the force.

I saw red, and before realizing, I misty stepped right behind the sorcerer. 

She rose, draped in the shadowveil, eyes silver with wrath.

And then—I saw it. The orb. The nexus.

Curse Eater shuddered in my grip. It wanted.

I gave it what it wanted.

The blade came down—not a strike, but a judgment. The orb shattered. A pulse of necrotic backlash blasted through the valley—and half the undead dropped in an instant, their strings severed.

The sorcerer turned to flee—his flesh glowing with the light of her guiding bolt.

He didn’t get far.

Whisperfang found his jaw.
Curse Eater tore through his chest.
Silence fell.

The road was a graveyard now—a battlefield alight with fog and fading echoes.

And her. Still standing.
Still burning.

I lowered my weapons. My hands trembled.
And I smiled.
Gods help me—I smiled.

We worked in silence at first. She scouted the perimeter, still watchful. I started with the crates.

The wood was slick with blood—some of it mine, most of it not. I opened the first lid and was hit with a scent that turned my stomach: formaldehyde, ozone, rot. Inside, jars—a dozen or more—each sealed with wax and marked with glyphs I didn’t recognize.

“What is this?” I asked, wiping blood from my brow.

Eleyna appeared at my side in silence, cloak whispering against the stone. She didn’t speak—just crouched low, eyes scanning the contents of the opened crate with growing stillness. One hand hovered near her dagger, the other bracing against the rim.

She exhaled once. Not sharply. Not startled.

Just… tired.

Inside, the stench of brine and something sweet—wrongly sweet—rose like a curse. The jars were packed in shock-foam and ash padding, each sealed with alchemical wax. One held a severed tongue, curled like a slug. Another—worse—a cluster of floating eyes. Different sizes. Different colors. Different species. Pupils dilated, spinning slightly, as if still dreaming.

Another jar turned slowly in place, revealing a thing that might have once been a fetus. Or several. Eleyna leaned in, her face unreadable.

“Two-thirds of these are from Underdark stock,” she murmured. “Maybe deep beastfolk. Maybe... aberrants.” She tapped the glass with the butt of her quill. “The limbs are too thin. Fingers too long. Eyes unopened. But it’s psionic. That coil you feel? Residual. I think they tried to infect embryos with illithid tadpoles. Birth interrupted.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. Something inside me recoiled.

Then—

A silver rack. Ten vials. Black glass. Each cradled in a velvet-lined mold like jewels in a crown.

Mindflayer tadpoles. Perfect. Preserved. Each floating in a shimmer of soft amber, like unborn thoughts suspended in a dream.

Stored with extreme care.

Beside them are rows of smaller jars tagged undercommon and Thayan. “Experiment Batch 56.”

Inside: vampiric embryos. Drow—almost certainly dhampirs. One had fangs already. Another had tentacules. One twitched when Eleyna passed her hand too close to the glass.

“They were breeding us,” I said before I could stop myself. My voice didn’t sound like mine.

“No,” she corrected softly, “they were building something new. You don’t breed this many experiments unless you search for a pattern.”

Another crate. Heavier.

Soulforged iron ingots—black as void, warm to the touch. One glowed faintly when I passed my hand over it.

“Smelted with soul energy,” Eleyna muttered, knuckles white. “These poor souls.

A neat bundle of scroll tubes. Dozens. Copper-sealed, some leaking red wax.

She flicked one open, then hissed and dropped it. Not from pain—from language. Abyssal syllables scrawled in blood-forged ink curled off the page like smoke.

“Lich-sustaining rites,” she said, checking the second. “Corpse preservation. Soul-binding. And— Illithides anatomy,” she held up a tube, shaking it slightly. “One teleport sigil. Unmarked destination.”

She shoved everything into her pack with finality.

And then—

The back of the cart.

Black jars. Smaller. More delicate. One held a still-beating heart. Another—two eyes, blinking at different speeds. A brain floated in the third, no skull, just nerves trailing like roots.

And nestled in their center: a velvet-lined box of shard-phylacteries. Crystal fragments, humming faintly with undeath. Runes etched into each, blood-slick and pulsing. I didn’t dare touch them.

But someone had.

Someone was collecting them.

And then we found the book.

It breathed when Eleyna opened it. Bound in humanoid skin, the pages were alive—whispering, whining, gurgling with every turn.

Its title inked itself across the cover as we stared:

The Hymns of the Hollow God.

It reeked of betrayal and despair. And it watched us. Not literally. But with the kind of attention a predator gives when it’s still deciding if you’re food or friend.

Eleyna snapped it shut with a shiver and bound it in three layers of cloth and wax thread.

“Cursed?” I asked.

“Violently,” she confirmed.

We didn’t speak again for a while.

Not until the wind howled over the crates and made the tongue in the jar curl against the glass like it heard something calling back.

“Gods,” I muttered. “What were they doing with these?”

She didn’t blink. “Spell components. Rare ones. Aberrant experiments, and isoteric research maybe necrotic in nature.”

“No documents?”

She shook her head. “No ledgers. No seals. Just… collection. For trade or ritual.”

We moved to the second cart.

No jars this time—just crates of raw ingredients. Bundles of preserved myconid flesh. Scales from some kind of chimeric drake. A glass box of dried tongues—thirty-three, I counted, all clearly humanoid. None labelled and just categorized by size and shape.

I checked the sorcerer’s body.

The robe had enchantments—minor ones—mostly defensive. Useless now. His satchel held more curiosities: crushed pearls, powdered garnet, and a small pouch of grave dust tied with a hair plait. A bone wand, too. Carved with a name I couldn’t read.

Eleyna took it all.

Not hoarding. Not greed. Just necessity. Knowledge. Leverage. 

We burned everything left before returning to our base.

The cave welcomed us with silence.

Not peace. Not warmth. Just silence. The kind that crept into your bones and curled in the pit of your stomach.

We'd stashed what we could. Crates emptied. Cages smashed—the preserved horrors left to rot. What mattered was what we brought back in our hands—and what we left behind in our veins.

I dropped the satchel near the old desk and collapsed against the wall, letting my head fall back until the stone bit into my scalp.

---

“We should use the Boneyard.”

I blinked. “What?”

She turned toward me, voice calm. Measured. But unreadable in that particular way she used when saying something she knew I wouldn’t like. “Your pedigree. For our cover. You’ll claim you’re a spawn of Hamezaar.”

I pulled back slightly, eyebrows rising. “Hamezaar?”

“A dwarf vampire warlord,” she said with surgical precision, her tone bordering on academic. “He overthrew a lich, took control of an entire mausoleum city in earthroot, and turned it into a militarized undead stronghold. The Boneyard—technically called Pholzubbalt—is far enough from here that most won’t expect to know your face, but close enough in reputation to carry weight. Especially with necromancers. He’s a renowned archlich killer.”

She said it the way she might read off a grocery list. Calm. Matter-of-fact. As if she hadn’t just suggested I pretend to be the direct spawn of one of the most terrifying beings in Faerûn.

I barked out a laugh—loud, incredulous. “You want me to walk into Warlock’s Crypt—a city ruled by liches—claiming to be the beloved pet of their most notorious predator? That sounds less like a cover story and more like a divine suicide note.”

She didn’t flinch. “That’s precisely why it’ll work.”

“Oh, of course,” I said, voice dry as old bone. “Because every undead horror in that place is just going to politely back off the moment I flash the name of a vampire lord who isn’t even here.”

“No,” she replied. “Because they won’t want to risk the possibility that he is.”

I gave her a long, skeptical look. “Darling, I may be a good actor, but you can’t expect me to pass for a dwarf. I’m a vampire spawn, not a legend. And I’m fairly certain I can’t convincingly pass for him.”

“It’s not about impersonation,” she said. “It’s about implication. Reputation. Hamezaar is known to guard his bloodline with obsessive loyalty and possessiveness. According to a tome I found in Baldur’s Gate—on vampire lineages and infamous bloodlords—he once laid siege to Undrek’Thoz because one of his spawns was taken captive. He didn’t negotiate. Didn’t even send a warning. He just started poisoning their water supply and sent waves of skeletons until they gave the poor bastard back.”

My smirk faltered.

“He’s that dangerous?”

“Yes. And more importantly, he’s that possessive. Which is exactly the kind of name you want hanging over your head when dealing with creatures that prefer to break their toys before asking if they were already owned.”

I stared at her.

Then said slowly, “That’s what you were reading?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“It’s been… what, two hours?”

“I started yesterday, when you left to scout.”

My mouth parted, a response forming, but it died on my tongue. Instead, I just looked at her—really looked.

Her brow still furrowed from effort. Her eyes still rimmed with fatigue, silver-flecked with the lingering residue of too many divinations. Her lips pressed into a line that was trying not to tremble. There was no triumph in her tone. No smugness. Just… worry. Cold and clenched at the edges. Worry, she was barely holding at bay with facts.

I reached up and brushed her cheek with the back of my fingers.

“You’re terrifying,” I whispered.

Her eyes met mine, unflinching. “Good,” she murmured. “So are you.”

And I smiled again—this time with something gentler. Warmer.

Because in that moment, with the taste of her still on my tongue and the deathless city pulsing in the distance like a wound dreaming of teeth, I knew one thing for certain:

Whatever happened in that crypt…

I wouldn’t be facing it alone.

“And what exactly am I supposed to be, then?” I asked, arms folded, the heat behind my words sharper than I’d meant. “One of his lost experiments? A diplomatic errand boy?”

“A spawn,” she said without pause, already shaping the plan like clay in her mind. “Entrusted with minor negotiations and sent to Warlock’s Crypt to discuss necromantic trade or evaluate potential alliances. The Boneyard used to be a necromancer cabal—it fits. Just don’t appear desperate.”

She crouched then, fingers dragging an outline into the dusty floor of our shelter. A crude map formed—necropolises and tunnels etched in Old Mulhorandi glyphs, the names so ancient and weather-worn I could barely read them. I doubted she could either. But that wasn’t the point. She was conjuring history, myth, and menace all at once.

“If anyone questions you,” she continued, “your master’s silence will do half the lying for us. Pholzubbalt is infamous for its internal secrecy. No emissaries. No treaties. No politics. Just fear. That kind of aura is its own shield. It says: ‘I’m not worth questioning. Because I might bring something worse.’”

I laughed—bitter and low. “You want me to pretend I’m the pet of a secretive psychotic dwarven vampiric necro-warlord to access the city of a secretive psychotic ancient archlich shadow king.”

“Yes,” she said simply. “Pholzubbalt’s been sealed for decades. No one knows his current lieutenants. We invent names, titles, factions—‘House Boneward of the Lower Ossuary,’ ‘Knight-Bastard of the Circle of Nine Tombs,’ whatever sounds obscure and self-important. If it sounds ridiculous enough, no one will question it. They’ll assume it’s real and be too afraid to ask.”

She stood and began gathering the necessary components, speaking as she worked. “You’ll drink the potion of mind shielding. Wear the spider-silk armor. We can finish embellishing it, aside from some finer clothing I must have in the pack. It’s old drow make, but it looks expensive enough to carry weight. Add non-detection, and you’ll smell of magic, money, and menace.”

I raised a brow. “And if they press me?”

“Feign disdain,” she said without missing a beat. “You’re a spawn from another necropolis—aloof, arrogant, offended that some rotted hedge-born corpse thinks it has the right to interrogate you about your lineage. According to The Book of Night, one of Hamezaar’s spawn once said their master sends them on sabbaticals—open-ended missions to prove themselves. Find a relic, fulfill a task, return home with either results or regrets. It’s seen as a rite of passage. Say you were sent to ‘retrieve an elusive necro-artifact’ or ‘evaluate the lichdom here.’ Keep it vague.”

“And if that doesn’t work?” I asked, voice dropping as I tried not to let the unease show. “Since when do I do the talking anyway? You’re the one with the big brain and the bigger mouth.”

She gave a small smile—too calm. Too practiced. “If it fails, we bow out. Look appropriately insulted, act above it, and retreat. They might deny us entry, but they won’t attack unless we give them reason. And if they do—” she shrugged—“I drop a bomb and we teleport out using Dimension Door.”

“Marvellous. A flawless plan,” I said, deadpan. “And what will you be, then? My trembling mortal consort?”

She didn’t answer. Not right away.

Instead, she reached into her satchel.

For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.

She pulled out a small glass vial—half-frosted from the cold it exhaled, pale blue liquid shifting sluggishly inside. My stomach turned before she even spoke.

“I can’t risk endangering our entry by attempting to go in as a living mortal. At least not at the gate. I’ll be with you,” she said, “but… diminished.”

“Diminished?” My voice was sharp now.

“I’ll pass as undead. I can mimic the features. With non-detection, they won’t sense my life force. But I can’t stop my heart. I can’t lower my temperature. I can’t be undead. Not without this.”

She tipped the vial in her hand. The chill of it clung to the air like smoke. I took a step closer, voice low and urgent.

“What is that?”

“A modified feign death potion,” she replied. “It slows the pulse, drops the body temperature, and dulls breathing. Enough to pass a glance. Maybe not close scrutiny, but… hopefully, no one will be looking too closely at me if you play the entitled brat well enough. I trust your performance wholeheartedly.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Hahaha, very funny. What are the potion’s ingredients?”

She listed them calmly, as though reciting a recipe. “Belladonna. Foxglove. Nightshade. Whiteshade. Stimulants, Necrotic and cold resistants to balance it out.”

My stomach dropped. I stared at her like she’d grown a second head. “Foxglove is a poison.”

She gave a delicate shrug, expression unreadable. “Everything’s poison, if you don’t know what you’re doing.”

“And you do?”

“I do,” she said—softly, but with a cold certainty that made my skin crawl. “I brewed it carefully. I tested it. It works. I can still move. Speak. Think. I’ll be slower, more fragile, but it’ll sell the part.”

“That’s not an illusion, Eleyna. That’s suicide with extra steps.”

“Do you have a better way?” she asked quietly. “A scroll? A ritual? An artifact that can make me undead for a day without killing me?”

I didn’t answer because there wasn’t one.

And that silence, the cold clarity of it, hit harder than any of her spells.

" I already tested it, Astarion. It’s a bit dangerous, but it should be fine as long as I detoxify it later."

That casual certainty twisted something ugly inside me. But she pressed three small vials into my hand before I could respond — clear and viscous.

My gut twisted as I recognized them for what they were: antidote. Antitoxin. She had expected to take this risk, and I was the one who’d be left holding the fallout.

“Give me these,” she murmured, her smile brittle, her eyes locking onto mine. “In case I overreach.”

"So the plan is..."

I looked down at the glittering corpse of the city below through the cave mouth.

“Pretend to be the property of a long-dead warlord,” I muttered. “And walk willingly into a city ruled by something worse than him. While you are poisoned”

Eleyna’s eyes gleamed, and her smile was almost kind for once.

“Exactly.”

I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. The words caught in my throat as I slipped the vials into my belt pouch, my breath ragged as I tried to steady the tremor in my chest. This wasn’t going to be simple. We both knew that.

I saw the weight in her eyes.

She wasn’t being reckless. She wasn’t trying to prove anything. She was scared. But she was doing it anyway. Because she thought it was the only way.

Because she thought I was worth protecting.

“I don’t like this,” I whispered.

“I know,” she replied.

---

The next three days passed in a blur of needles, scrolls, and the slow, methodical forging of a lie too convincing to doubt.

It started with a cloak.

She held it up between us, the fabric fine but worn from travel—creased at the folds, singed near the hem. She spread it over a rock like a relic and ran her hands above the surface, murmuring a mending charm. The thread twisted and realigned beneath her touch. Burned edges rewove themselves. Dust lifted away like ash blown from an altar.

“Everything you wear,” she said, “must be pristine. Travel-worn enough to be plausible, but unmistakably expensive. Enchanted. Claimed.”

“Let me guess,” I said dryly. “That way, I look like something too valuable to mess with?”

“Exactly,” she murmured. “And with nondetection layered on top, no one will be able to tell what the enchantments actually do. Just that you’re—” she gestured at the cloak as it shimmered, flawless now “—heavily armed. Or guarded. Or cursed. Let them fill in the blanks.”

I let out a slow breath. “So you want me to look like a walking magical heirloom.”

“Yes,” she said, with no hint of irony. “With impeccable tailoring.”

---

The tailoring was mine.

It surprised me how easily my hands remembered the motions—drawing thread. Tightening seams. Reconstructing delicate patterns across gloves, cuffs, and lapels. I hadn’t sewn for almost a century, since before Cazador beat it out of me. But the memory of beauty, care, and control was still there, stitched into me like a hidden lining.

I embroidered ancient sigils into the cuffs of a spider-silk coat. Reinforced boots with a faux ceremonial heel. Added ceremonial silver etchings to the bracers—subtle enough to look inherited, but too intentional to be dismissed.

She watched me work. Quiet at first.

Then, softly: “It’s beautiful.”

I didn’t look up.

“You said that before,” I muttered.

“And I meant it before. I still do.”

My throat tightened. I tried not to let it show.

She didn’t push further, didn’t try to gild it. Just left the compliment there, like a glint of silver in the cloth—another thread I didn’t know what to do with.

Once the enchanted clothes were selected, mended, cleaned, and reinforced with more minor enchantments, she moved to the real torment: education.

Gods.

I hadn’t known there were that many maps in the world, let alone ones of the Earthroot’s crumbling corpse-cities and the ancient tunnel systems underneath them. She summoned illusions in the air. Sketched glyphs on stone. Recreated court hierarchies, power webs, bloodlines.

“The Boneyard wasn’t just a necropolis,” she snapped on day two, when I failed to remember which lesser lich held the Third Tombhold. “It was a functioning society. Learn it like one.”

“It’s also fiction,” I snarled back. “We’re lying, remember?”

“No. We’re performing. You don’t get to improvise when we’re surrounded by beings who can read your soul.”

Her logic was flawless.

Her bedside manner, nonexistent.

She made me recite everything twice. Then again, in reverse. I confused tomb-houses with ossuary sects. I forgot whether Baron Skullblight ruled before or after the Treaty of Wormsong. By the end of the second night, I was ready to scream.

She didn’t let me.

“You’ll be brilliant,” she muttered when I finally got it right. “But only if you suffer first.”

Somewhere between the fifteenth noble house and the third siege of Undrek’Thoz, I passed out mid-recitation. When I jolted awake, drooling against an open book, she was already brushing my hair back from my forehead and whispering, “Start again.”

But there were quiet moments when the ruthlessness gave way to something else.

When she gently adjusted my cravat. When she steadied my hand on a sigil I was about to miswrite. When her fingers lingered too long on my wrist while tightening a cuff, her eyes met mine with that same unspoken promise:

You are not going alone.

By the evening of the fourth day, I looked like royalty fallen from some mythic, brutal throne.

Layers of dark silk and deep-stitched leather. A cloak that shimmered slightly even in shadow. Jewelry that caught the light like a threat. And beneath it all—magic.

Too much, too subtle to trace. Exactly as she’d planned.

Then came the rest: a dark shirt of fine weave beneath the armor, dyed in that unfathomable gray-black of mage-fortresses. Thick travel trousers tucked into enchanted boots — matte black with faint sigils stitched into the soles. Spidersilk gloves that left the fingers feeling bare but bristled faintly with spellthread.

“Remind me never to offend your tailoring standards,” I muttered, slipping it on. It clung like a second skin. Sinister. Perfect.

A crossbow hung at my hip beside a newly repurposed finer sheath for Curse Eater, its edge faintly glinting with arcane light. At my belt were two daggers: One was a Lolthite ritual blade she found in her pack that she advised me never to use, and the other was Whisterfang. And then she brought out the cloak — dark as void, heavy as regret. She draped it over my shoulders with something approaching reverence, the fabric swallowing the light as if it hated being seen. When she stepped back and looked at me, I caught her smirk before she wiped it away.

“You look adequate,” she said, tying the last piece into place at my throat.

“You made me a lie,” I murmured, without bitterness.

Her smile was tired. But proud.

“Then wear it well.”

“Oh, I will,” I said, brushing ash from the edge of the hood. “I almost believe the lie myself.”

She snorted — an inelegant, very real sound — and turned away to dress.

Her shift was subtler, but no less unsettling.

She didn’t break. Didn’t tear or splinter like a werebeast as she usually did. Her body simply... changed. Cheekbones sharpened, lips curled back to reveal new, elongated fangs. Her eyes darkened into rusted garnet, wide and impossible. The long silver hair she wore down now framed her face like spun moonlight, and the lines of her body shifted toward an uncanny elegance. Not exaggerated. Just... off enough.

A human vampire. Or close enough that even the dead might pause.

She fastened the shadow-woven robes around herself — dark, embroidered with thread that shimmered like the sheen of oil on water. Not regal. Not ostentatious. Practical. The perfect little assistant. A retainer. A familiar. She added a belt with a short blade strapped against her thigh and a shadowmancer’s spellbook clipped to the side — all of it worn like weight, not decoration.

She prestidigitated herself clean, her hands weaving silent sparks that wiped away blood and dust. Then, with a grimace, she applied a paste from a sealed tin — thick, gray, and reeking of something I could only describe as formaldehyde and damp grave moss.

I wrinkled my nose. “By the hells, what is this stench?” But as she applied it, mingling with her scent, almost entirely covering it with the stench of undeth ”You are masking your scent.”

“That’s the point,  I made it with the ghoul ichor,” she said evenly. “The scent of death is what sells the illusion. Shall we go ? ”

So we travelled toward the Necropolis.

We stayed low, clinging to the broken seams where magic sight bent around the angles. My senses sharpened with every step, fangs tingling, fingers itching for a blade. The air here was denser — full of ancient sigils and the residue of death magic so saturated it clung to the skin like a film. I more than once caught the scent of scorched marrow — cloying, almost sweet, like roasted sugar crusted over a charnel pit.

We halted in the shadow of a crumbling cairn just beyond the final ward line. The final illusions ended here — from now on, it was truth, no more hiding. We were entering a crucible, even with the layered spells wrapping us like cloaks.

Eleyna didn’t speak. She reached into the folds of her robes and withdrew the first vial.

It looked like frost caught in glass — pale, swirling, full of something that shimmered faintly with colors that had no name. Her hand trembled, just slightly, as she uncorked it. She didn’t hesitate.

She drank it in a single, practiced motion.

Ten heartbeats passed.

Her breath caught.

Her heart slowed.

Her pupils dilated.

Then she swayed — and I caught her by the wrist, pressing my thumb against the pulse point.

Cold.

So cold it burned.

At first, I felt nothing. My own dead panic rushed in to fill the void where life should have been. Then — faintly, barely — a flutter. A whisper of a beat, so slow, so irregular, I thought I might be imagining it.

“Damn it,” I hissed, voice low. “You’re sure this was the right—?”

Her other hand grabbed mine, ironclad. Her eyes — not hers anymore, now rusted blood and too wide — locked on mine.

“I’m fine,” she said. Her voice was barely audible. It sounded wrong. Wrong and hollow, like words spoken from beneath ice.

I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream. But we didn’t have time.

And so I let her go.

She pulled up her hood. Straightened her spine. Rolled her shoulders like a performer stepping onto a stage where death would applaud. And when she looked at me next, the girl I had known was gone.

What remained was an exquisite corpse.

My breath hitched.

For the first time, I believed the lie.

She looked like death.

And now, so did we both.

We kept walking until the Gate loomed before us. We passed under the arch — beneath the hollow gaze of iron horrors, into the ribcage of the beast.

One of the statues exhaled as we moved beneath it, a gust of fetid air reeking of scorched marrow and blood-inked vellum. Its head turned with the grinding ache of rusted bone, empty sockets following us with a predator’s patience. My skin prickled, every instinct screaming that the thing could move, would move — if we hesitated, if we faltered, if it so much as smelled uncertainty.

But no alarms sounded. No lightning screamed down from runes. The Gate of Waning accepted us.

The gates opened sideways.

Beyond, the city unfolded like the anatomy of a corpse long preserved in black ice — veins of wide, geometric avenues that gleamed under the pale phosphorescence of necrotic light. The air was still. Cold. Not the chill of nature, but the sterile, preserved cold of something embalmed. Order reigned in every motion, every step.

Skeletons in tattered servant livery swept the stone in tight, perfect arcs, their brooms leaving no trail of dust. Zombies hauled crates of dried goods and scroll bundles, moving without the hesitation of hunger, guided by wights in long, grave-gray coats who walked with the bored precision of overworked scribes. Their long polearms gleamed — not for battle, but for enforcement. For correction.

On an upper walkway, giant bats landed one by one in choreographed stillness, their harnesses jangling with bone clasps. From their carts, they disgorged cages of living prisoners — sobbing, wide-eyed, some broken already, others biting back screams. They were met by vampire knights in gleaming dusk-plate who took their names with detached professionalism, escorting them toward what I could only assume were holding pens or research blocks.

Above all this, ghostly scribes drifted through the air like medusae in ink-dark water, scrolls unspooling behind them as they wrote in real-time — spells and observations glowing briefly in silver-blue light before fading into the air. Names. Numbers. Assignments. Every living breath seemed measured. Every soul accounted for.

It was a necropolis, yes.

But more than that — it was a ledger that lived.

I stole a glance at Eleyna.

Her eyes were vast, rust swallowed entirely by black. Her pupils dilated, her breathing shallow — too shallow — her skin pale and clammy. Even for this act, even for her.

Gods, I thought. She’s brilliant. Suicidally brilliant. To wear death like silk and walk unnoticed through the slaughterhouse. But dread gnawed at my ribs. Beneath the heavy disguise, I could feel the tension wound tight through her limbs. Her body was playing corpse — but if that potion pushed just a little too far...

I prayed. Not to any one god. Just... any of them.  Any tattered, forgotten power that might still pity monsters.

The stone flared beneath our boots as we stepped beneath the final arch. But again, Eleyna had layered us in protections too deeply for that. Her wards held. The spells slid off like oil on glass.

The pressure receded.

Only silence.

And then—footsteps.

A death knight emerged from a nearby alcove, silent but for the hiss of frost cracking along the seams of its plate. Its armor was ancient — dull silver etched with bone glyphs, now blackened by time and smoke. The helm was wreathed in soft mist, and within, its gaze burned cold and blue — unblinking, inhuman, insatiable.

Beside it hovered a wight scribe, thin and hunched like a reed in the wind. Its fingers twitched with hunger and memory, gripping a parchment-wrapped staff. Scrolls trailed from its shoulders like a bureaucrat’s funeral shroud, each line of runes writhing faintly under my gaze, as if still struggling to flee the ink.

“State your blood allegiance, Spawn,” rasped the death knight, its voice like breath through bone dust.

I stepped forward.

Tall. Arrogant. The unruly child of high blood. I folded my hands behind my back in that lazy, entitled posture I’d seen Cazador perform—the stance of someone who had never considered being refused.

“We serve under Master Hamezaar,” I said smoothly, folding my hands behind my back in the gesture of bored diplomacy. “Ruler of Pholzubbalt in the Earthroot. Dispatched by our maker and his Lieutenant of Necromancers. We come to propose trade — artifacts, aberrant specimens, knowledge, and lesser commodities. A prospective visit.”

The wight’s head twitched — once, twice — like a marionette jolted mid-slumber. The bones creaked. Its neck cracked with an audible pop. Then, in a single motion, it dipped a hooked quill into a black-glass inkwell chained to its hip.

Its voice rasped out like dry parchment tearing.
“What’s the meaning of this? According to our record, the Boneyard has refused all attempts to establish contact.”

Shit.
Shit.
Shit.

My heart stuttered.
Calm down.
This is good. This is good.

If they haven’t had contact — then, no one from Pholzubbalt is here.
No contradictory witnesses. No real oversight.

Just me and the lie.

“Dear Father does not take well to strangers visiting Pholzubbalt unannounced and uninvited, especially if they persist in calling the city with that gaudy name,” I replied smoothly, flicking invisible dust from my sleeve. “I’m sure you understand. But some of Larloch’s Crypt’s recent activities have been... fascinating. Especially your new interest in our aberrant neighbours.”

A pause. Let them hang on the word our. Territorial. Implying ownership.

“According to certain necromancer acquaintances,” I continued, letting my tone grow conspiratorial, “your labs have taken a particular interest in our fauna. Father believes there may be a fruitful opportunity for alignment — mutual benefit. And so we were sent. A formal feeler. And perhaps...” I offered a gracious nod, “...an apology for his previous silence. Dear Father, you see, can be a touch impulsive when liches are involved.”

The wight did not blink. Could not. But I saw the subtle movement of skeletal hands tightening around its scroll.

“Name the necromancer associate.”

I tilted my head, as if indulging a child’s curiosity.

“Vicar Morveris. Minor scion in Neverwinter. Trades primarily in bound souls and frequently uses the Mausoleum Necrotopia for his research. Prefers to avoid speaking of that fact outside your... esteemed precincts.”

A gamble.
But one worth placing.

The name was obscure enough to go unchecked but true enough to ring plausible. I've heard of more than a few greasy little mages hawking chained souls like sausages in the alleys between candlelit summoning circles. The economy of suffering was vast — and not always logged in the right ledger.

The wight hissed. Not at me — but at the vellum.

Its quill didn’t write — it burned, script searing into the parchment with a crackling sizzle. The lines pulsed with heat, symbols glowing, then dimming. Rearranging.

They were rewriting the city's memory and making room for us.

Then — more danger.

“We have no records of dealings with that mage. How was he made aware of our interests?”

Oh.
Shit.
Too close.

I let out a low, breathy chuckle.

“Oh. Was that supposed to be a secret?” I asked lightly. “Terribly sorry. But I must be the bearer of bad news — people are talking.” I leaned in, lowering my voice. “If even someone as isolated as our Maker caught wind of it, then I assure you: the whispers are everywhere. We had multiple reports from Thay to the Underdark.”

A pause.

“Where dear Vicar heard it, I can’t say. But your... booming new economy? Let’s just say it’s become the subject of eager speculation.”

The wight leaned closer.

“Names.”

No.
Too far.
This is getting dangerous.

I straightened. Let my irritation bleed through.

“With all due respect,” I snapped, eyes narrowing, “do I look like a bloody information guild? Wight! ”

A heartbeat. Maybe two.

“We came because you solicited us. If the Crypt is no longer interested in establishing contact — that’s entirely your prerogative. Dearest, and I here will happily let you to your business and head back while enjoying a long, quiet sabbatical far away from the boredom of court, indulging in everything the surface has to offer. But I will not stand here being interrogated about your own leaks by the city guard—”

I turned toward the death knight. Dread clenched in my chest like a vice. Still, I schooled my nerves and sized him up before adding.

“—as mighty as such guards may be. ” I finally added, looking directly at him, "So, sir, I would like to know if we are welcome here; if not, I would like to catch the nearest sinkhole before sunrise. I loathe camping under the best of circumstances. I suspect the scorching surface sun will not improve my distaste."

The knight did not speak.

But his head turned.

Toward Elenya.

No.
No, no, no — don’t look at her.

I felt the shift like cold steel dragged down my spine.

She did not flinch.
She didn’t need to.

She stood there, a vision of vampiric elegance — all corpse-beauty and candlelit poise, moon-pale and otherworldly. Her chest rose just enough to mimic breath. Her eyes stared into the middle distance. Neither defiant nor submissive. Merely...

Waiting.

If they questioned her...
If they saw through even a thread...

But they didn’t.

The scribe’s finger moved — jabbing a sigil into the scroll. Heat shimmered in the air.

The knight inclined his head.

“Proceed. You will find guest registration assigned under House Vhol, two streets in. You have ten hours to register. Registration of local acquisitions is required within three days, unless a permanent pass is granted. Failure to comply will result in confiscation.”

I let out a soft breath — part relief, part exhaustion — and masked it with a genteel smile.

“Of course,” I purred, letting a sliver of disdain creep into my tone. The kind that said I considered bureaucracy beneath me.

The knight gestured with a gauntlet rimed in frost.

“A ten-day pass is granted. If you wish to remain beyond that span, you must apply for an extension; otherwise, the rune stone will mark you and flag you for disposal. If the stone is lost, report to the nearest ledger,” he gestured toward the scribe, “and proceed immediately to House Vhol’s Foreign Office. If you are caught unmarked...”

A pause.

“You will be terminated. On sight.”

Lovely.

The wight extended a black, vein-threaded crystal set with a pulsing rune that glowed like something stolen from a funeral pyre. Cold as bone. I took it.

A second followed for Elenya. She bowed just enough to imply courtesy — no more.

“House Noctelith,” the knight continued, “will be most interested in your trade proposals — if your offerings concern aberrations. Seek their representative in the Mid-Ring Barterum. You may also barter for sustenance there. Or in the feeding salons — if your offerings prove sufficient.”

Audience... with what, exactly?

“The Vein Market is closed to outsiders. Stay clear. Locations that do not allow black runestones are marked at the entrance. The mage,” he added, nodding toward Elenya without quite looking, “may find the Scarlet Enclave more amenable for lesser exchanges. But all formal trade passes through the Trading Four.”

I forced a nod.

“And lodging?”

“No lodging is granted without patronage,” came the reply. “You will be housed — and observed — by whomever you deal with. This is not an inn. Should you fail to secure dealings before rest is required, register at House Vhol. They will assign shelter.”

Then — a flicker.

Not a smile. But the echo of one. Dry as old bones.

“But rest assured. No daylight reaches the streets.”

And just like that, his helm turned away.

“NEXT.”

I did not exhale.
Not yet.

Not until the stone door closed behind us.
Not until I knew we’d survived our first lie.

The streets of the perimeter and the outer ring passed beneath our boots in ritual procession. We walked on — or rather, drifted, every step calculated, every movement drawn from that delicate theatre of the undead: elegance without urgency, presence without tension. We didn’t belong here, but the trick was to act as if we did — and as if the idea of being questioned was beneath insult.

The outer district of Warlock’s Crypt unfolded like a diagram etched in obsidian: precise, blighted, mercilessly beautiful. Wide avenues of slate unfurled before us in impossible angles — paths calculated for patrol patterns, soul-count logistics, and architectural dread. The stones were smooth, unnaturally clean, gleaming faintly from the efforts of skeletal labourers who swept in symmetrical patterns. I saw one pause to collect a fallen molar from the gutter and tuck it into a pouch of polished bone, presumably for reclassification.

Low complexes rose like tumours between the roads — blocks of black stone and ribbed iron. They bore no signage, only the faint shimmer of glyphs that curled and faded like breath on glass. Some, I knew, were administrative vaults where wights tallied breath and blood. Others were pens — stock dormitories where mortals were caged, rationed, and watched.

The sound of it all was wrong.

There were no footsteps. No idle chatter. Just the low hum of undead motion: the rustle of parchment wings, the hiss of wards, the quiet click of bone on bone.

Gargoyles perched on every lintel. Some were carved, mouths choked with roses the color of old wounds, petals crusted in rust-red resin. Others were animate — not moving, not snarling, but watching. Eyes like pinholes into some deeper night, the light inside them steady and knowing. I kept my gaze down.

Carts rumbled past, iron-banded wheels screeching against the stone. Each rattled with cages — row after row of mortals, packed in like livestock. Some sobbed. Some stared blankly. A girl whispered prayers into the folds of her mother’s dress. None of them mattered here. Not to this place. Not to the death knights and vampires who walked the streets like scholars on their morning stroll.

Lesser undead crawled over the carts like locusts — tightening chains, gagging the loud, striking the disobedient with practiced indifference. They didn’t kill. Not here. Not unless ordered.

Floating scribes and “ledgers” dipped and spun through the air, long banners of parchment spooling behind them every few blocks. Their quills never stopped moving — inscribing midair in radiant blue-green sigils that flickered before embedding themselves in the walls, the stones, even into the very carts. I realized with a cold twist in my stomach: they weren’t just taking notes.

They were updating the city’s memory.

The scent here was unlike the gate — no scorched ozone, no magical flash. Just... precision. The sterile tang of cold iron, the loaminess of crushed moss under stone, and that faint sweetness of old, decaying magic — how a once-powerful scroll might smell when its last word fades.

Somewhere ahead, a chorus of screams rose.

Dozens, maybe more. Terrified.

Then silence.

Not cut off violently. It just stopped like someone closing a latch.

Eleyna didn’t flinch beside me. Her posture was impeccable, her expression that practiced hollowness of the dead. But I saw her hand twitch once. Just once. A flicker at her side like the faltering of a heartbeat.

She drank another dose.

We kept walking — deeper into the city, deeper into the nightmare.

After two hours, we traversed most of the outer ring and had a better feel of the inner city. It was built like a trap — beautiful in its symmetry, lethal in its stillness. Towers curled above us like petrified spires of bone, ghostlights flickering within their windows like the eyes of watching gods.

Beside me, Eleyna’s breath had grown fainter still. I could hear it only because I knew her and memorized its rhythm — the shallow pull of it, wrong and slow and faltering. Her eyes were vast now, pupils devouring the rust completely, swallowing the towers’ flickering lights like pools of oil. Her skin, too, was turning pale in a way that wasn’t natural.

She reached for her belt, fingers trembling, and pulled a fourth vial free. Downed it with the cold decisiveness of someone long past fear. Her throat convulsed once. Then again. She staggered, reached for the nearest wall, and pressed her palm to it — leaving behind a faint crescent of sweat and grease that shimmered oddly against the warded stone.

This can’t be good.

When she stood again, she moved with grace that wasn’t hers — too fluid, too effortless. The languid, arrogant elegance of vampires grown idle with unlife. It was disturbingly convincing.

But I could see it. The tremor at her jaw. The subtle twitch in one eye. The unfocused glassiness beneath her mask.

“How long can you keep this up?” I hissed, pitching my voice so low it barely existed.

She gave a smile — faint, more exhale than expression — but it tried to be reassuring.

“Long enough,” she whispered. “But we need shelter. Fast. I can’t... can’t maintain it indefinitely.”

“Then we go to House Noctelith,” I said quickly. “As instructed. Present the offer—”

“No.” Her hand shot out, catching my sleeve with frightening strength. Her knuckles blanched through the illusion, and I saw her mask slip for the first time. Not the magic — her. Her fear.

“No,” she repeated, teeth gritted. “We can’t bluff trade courts. Not like this. Not with time-pressure, not when I’m fading. One mistake, Astarion. One pause. They’ll flay me for novelty and collar you like a prized dog.”

Her voice had started to slip — slurring faintly, syllables blurring together. She was losing coherence.

“We don’t even know if the living are allowed here yet,” she added, breath shallow. “If I bleed wrong in front of the wrong person... we won’t get to scream.”

I scanned the avenue ahead. Open. Wide. Too many patrols. Too many eyes.

“Then what?” I snapped, trying to keep my voice steady. “What do you propose?”

Her pupils caught the light and devoured it whole.

“Anywhere else,” she murmured. “Somewhere small. The Barterum. Maybe they have a private feeding room in the salons, the knight said, something. Just an hour. That’s all I need. Or whatever the Scarlet Enclave is. We barter a secret, buy a sliver of time. But not a negotiation room. Not the thrones. Not like this.”

She was speaking too fast now, the words soft and wet on her tongue, slurring together in a half-drunk cadence.

I didn’t answer. I grabbed her.

Drew her into a narrow side street — an alley more like a scar, flanked by high walls etched with ancient sigils. The stone here pulsed, softly, like coals buried deep beneath ash. Faint heat. Faint warning.

She stumbled as I moved her, one leg dragging. Her hand slammed against the wall to catch herself. For a second, she swayed — then collapsed into me.

And I felt it.

A heartbeat.

Not the soft, carefully muted echo of her slowed pulse, but a broken, frightened flutter. Off-rhythm. Weak. Too slow. Too slow.

My hands clenched on her arms.

“What did you do?” I snapped, louder than I meant. “Eleyna — what exactly did you do to yourself?”

She looked up at me, eyes swimming, lips pale. Something cracked in her face. Not the form — something more profound. Something real.

“What I had to,” she said softly. “To protect you.”

The words stole my breath.

“If you die—”

“I won’t.” Her whole body jerked in a sharp spasm. She winced. Her knees buckled.

“Not yet,” she whispered. “Don’t count me out.”

She was trying to smile. It broke halfway through.

“I can still maintain it,” she added, her voice thinner now and more breath than sound. “I just need to... heal every so often. I just have to not detoxify.”

“Detoxify?” I hissed. “You're walking a poison line so thin it’s eating your organs.”

“It’s fine,” she whispered. “It’s all... calculated.”

Then her hand slid from my sleeve.

And I realized: she was going to collapse. Not now. Not in this minute. But soon. And if we didn’t get her to safety — to shade, cover, or anything- we wouldn’t die as heroes, monsters, or fools.

We’d die as footnotes.

We moved again, though now it felt less like walking and more like drifting — caught in the slow, inevitable undertow of a nightmare with rules no living thing was meant to learn.

The middle ring was not like the outer districts. It wasn’t about order.

It was about appetite.

The streets changed.

The avenues widened into grand concourses paved in obsidian slabs, mirror-smooth and slick with reflected light. They caught the ghost-glow of necrotic gardens and twisted it into oily ripples that followed every step, as if the city were watching from beneath.

The sterility gave way to decadence — not the kind born of comfort, but cruelty long institutionalized.

Blood orchids, cultivated into patterns of spiralled despair, bloomed in manicured plots alongside fungus trees whose caps pulsed softly with dreamlight. Crawling claws — disembodied, jewel-adorned — trimmed dead petals with surgical care, pausing now and then as if to admire their artistry.

Above, the towers were taller. Thicker. Gorged on magic.

Their balconies were dressed in shadowed silks, dyed in hues that didn’t exist under any natural sun. Stained-glass windows glinted with stories no historian would ever write — scenes of feasts, flayings, and rituals too intimate and too old to be imagined.

On one terrace, I saw them.

A knot of vampires reclined on a crescent of marble couches, draped in gauze and gold, laughter like wine gone sour. They passed a chained mortal between them — suspended over a basin, bleeding slowly. Each dipped their goblet in the drip as if sampling a vintage. Their smiles were indulgent. Their eyes... bored.

The scent drifted to us like a lover’s perfume: incense thick with iron, the breath of cold stone, and a faint floral note that felt cruel for being lovely. Every few hundred paces, archways yawned to reveal inner courts, private salons, secret markets. Some bustled with motion — lesser undead and spawns darting on errands. Others were silent, watched only by statues that seemed too aware, too awake.

I tried not to look too long. I could feel their gaze ready to blink.

Beside me, Eleyna's head lowered slightly, her breath short and uneven. Her form still held, but barely — like silk over flame. She was swaying. Her arm, still looped through mine, was no longer theatre — it was scaffolding. Her grip was a silent plea I dared not answer aloud. Her head dipped, only slightly, and I caught her elbow with the pretense of affection.

I leaned close, lips brushing her ear like a lover’s whisper.

“Hold on,” I breathed. “Just a little longer. The barterum is supposedly close.”

Her reply was nearly nothing — an exhale shaped into words.

“Just… don’t let them take me. If it fails.”

I turned toward her. Eyes too wide. Pupils are swallowing everything. Her skin had gone translucent under the form, veins rising like bruises in moonlight. But she was still there.

“I won’t,” I said. “Not ever.”

It didn’t sound like me—something making a promise that would not be broken.

But the hourglass was nearly empty.

And then — ahead — the faint arches of the Barterum of Secrets came into view.

It glowed not with light, but with memory — lines of necrotic sigils pulsing faintly along its stone ribs, reacting to our proximity like a body sensing blood. Beyond the threshold, silhouettes flickered: vampires in hushed negotiations, lich apprentices muttering incantations into their palms while wraith scribes hovered near; Thayan agents in crimson robes, inspecting glass cases that held horrors no larger than a child’s fist — living traps, sentient curses, bottled time.

Eleyna’s steps turned uneven. Twice she staggered, bracing against the wall, leaving behind red-streaked smears that glistened in the ghostlight like melted garnet. Her breathing had taken on a fragile wheeze, the sound of paper cracking in winter wind.

“Steady,” I murmured, jaw tight. “We’re almost to the Barterum.”

“Do you see the dying butterflies?” she whispered.

I froze.

Her voice was soft, childlike — laced with awe, as if she were describing something gentle and beautiful. Her eyes were far away, lit with ghostlights and delusions.

A chill settled in my ribs. Not the city’s this time.

“There are no butterflies, darling,” I said. “Only bones. And things that would love to feed on you.”

She didn’t answer. Or didn’t hear. Or... didn’t want to.

A few steps later, I asked, barely audible,

“How are you feeling?”

She blinked slowly. Her smile came crooked — eerie.

“The fog’s still working,” she said brightly. “The spider’s never getting me. I won’t let it. Shhh.”

It was how she said it — conspiratorial, like sharing a secret with someone who couldn't hurt her — that made something twist violently in my gut.

Ahead, the avenue curved around a low plaza filled with cages.

Mortals.

Huddled inside. Dozens. Maybe hundreds. Eyes huge, glassy. Some rocked themselves silently. Others sat perfectly still, pupils dilated beyond reason. Wights moved among the cages like keepers in a zoo, affixing black vellum tags to the bars — inventory, maybe. Classifications.

Eleyna’s breath hitched.

Her fingers clawed into my arm, and she stumbled, barely catching herself.

“Why are they… why are they here?” she whispered. “I thought we were done with Menzoberranzan, Astarion…”

“This isn’t Menzoberranzan,” I said, sharper than I meant to. “It’s Warlock’s Crypt. You’re hallucinating.”

“I hear them praying.” Her voice broke. “Like when … chained. And the overseers would—”

She didn’t finish. Her hand clapped over her mouth as she stared across the square at something I couldn’t see.

She broke away suddenly, staggering toward a narrow colonnade off the main road.

I caught her before she vanished into the dark. “Eleyna—”

“There.” She pointed, trembling. “There — do you see him?”

I looked.

A flicker — hooded, robed in grey and red threads that writhed like veins. A slender face, broken, covered in open wounds, crooked, misaligned. Bloody. Sorrowful. Staring straight at her.

“That must be my friend,” she breathed. “My only friend.”

“Ilmater?” some distant part of me asked —incredulous. Absurd. “Watching you?” I whispered, teeth clenched.

“Watching us,” she replied. Her voice shook. “His expression— I can’t read it. But he’s here.”

I looked back and …

The figure was gone. Nothing but shadow and stone remained.

She turned to me, eyes wet.

“We have to go there,” she said. “He always helps.”

I didn’t believe in miracles.

But I believed in her.

So I nodded.

And together, we turned from the arch of the Barterum — the last place of safety we’d hoped to reach — and stepped into the narrow, sigil-carved street, where no one waited but gods and ghosts.

In my chest, something unfamiliar moved.

And I prayed.

To that idiot god.

Make sure she lives.

Or I will kill every follower of yours.

We kept walking down that side alley until the world narrowed.

The city thinned behind us, noise falling away like breath held too long. The air grew heavier — still thick with rot and ozone, but now quieter, more intimate. The kind of quiet that comes before someone screams.

And then I heard them.

Two sharp, terrified cries. Small. Humanoid. They cut through the cold, ordered murmur of the undead city like blades through silk.

I followed by instinct. Not thought — instinct. The same instinct that once made me a predator. The same one that now screamed Protect her.

We turned a corner and found the edge of the Scarlet Enclave.

And I finally understood the name.

Red banners draped every door and balcony — stitched with sigils that pulsed like fresh wounds. Crimson light bled from behind shuttered windows, staining the stone like dried blood. The architecture was modest but steeped in authority: clean walls, precise angles, and thick air that buzzed faintly with held-back power.

We followed the cries to a sturdy stone residence, its windows sealed with red iron, its threshold marked with the rune of a Thayan house. Outside, a Red Wizard barely dressed in interior robes was shouting orders while skeletal porters unloaded crates. Some bore fragile sigils. Others carried trembling cages, faint whispers leaking out from whatever lived within.

He kept yelling — about being careful, about rare spell components, fragile constructs, not damaging the nerve fungus — the kind of fury that came from exhaustion, not only cruelty. But the crackle of defensive magic rolled off the building in waves. I could taste it. The air hissed with the residue of wards.

He was powerful.
A wizard from Thay with a house in Warlock’s Crypt, what were the chances of him being a necromancer?

He looked high-level enough to me.

This is a bad idea.

But then I looked at Eleyna.

Her knees buckled. Sweat glistened along her hairline. Her lips parted in short, gasping breaths. Her form still clung to her like tattered silk, but I could see the truth bleeding through.

If I waited, she would die.

She told me to avoid this type.

I studied the wizard again. No spellbook. No focus. No staff.

No shoes.

Still, permanent thralldom …

She told me to leave her to avoid necromancers and casters.

I turned to Eleyna — intending to ask if she could impersonate a red wizard, invent a sigil, something — but her eyes had rolled back.

Her body convulsed once, hard. As I noticed, the fifth vial was empty next to him. She slid down the wall, twitching like a puppet cut from its strings.

That snapped the last thread of hesitation.

She is going to die.

I shoved two antidote vials past her lips and forced her to swallow. She choked, retched — and then drew a breath. Shallow. Fragile. But real.

I eased her down into the shadows, laying her in a darkened alcove where the ghostlight couldn’t reach. Her form became invisible in the shadows as soon as I did this.

The cloak was working.

“Stay,” I whispered. My voice broke on it. “Don’t die. Don’t you dare. Or I will kill every single ilmatari on the realm.”

And then I moved.

I slipped toward the house, staying low, testing the wards—one foot on a loose cobblestone. One hand brushes the shadow along the frame. No flare. No alarm.

Good.

I knocked.

The wizard’s voice called out, muffled and irritated.

“I told you to bring the rest tomorrow morning! I’m tired, I just got back, and I need time to—”

The door creaked open. He stepped into view — bald, sweat-slicked scalp catching the necrotic glow. He squinted at me, clearly expecting a servant.

My fingers twitched.

Malar’s blood started calling.

Do it.

But I hesitated.

Because for one half-second, the face that flashed before my eyes wasn’t his.

It was Eleyna’s — pale, straining, lips blue at the edges, eyes unfocused and shining like glass.

If I missed…

If this man were protected…

If this house were warded…

If I struck and failed—

She dies.

The inside of my skull was screaming. Every instinct I had — honed from a century of bloody work — was shouting.
Kill him now. Kill him before he breathes your name.

And still, I hesitated.

Because I could feel the future branching around me like snapped ribs for one stupid, aching second. A dozen possibilities. All of them were filled with blood. All of them are full of risk.

What if he had a ward that triggered on blood loss?

What if someone saw?

What if Eleyna never woke up — even with his death?

What if this didn’t save her?

I was sweating. I never sweat.

“Yes?”

I bowed; hands folded behind me in the posture of a low-ranked servant.

“My lord wishes me to deliver an urgent missive upon your return,” I purred. “House Noctelith sends regards and—”

He rolled his eyes.

“Bloody hell, couldn’t this snob wait one single day? How did he even know I was back? Fine, fine, come in. Tell me what he wants quickly and we’ll see if and when I have time—”

Then he turned his back fully — stepped forward to wave away an invisible irritation in the air — and in that moment, the fear vanished. He muttered to himself, not waiting for an answer.

If I miss this, she dies.

She can’t die.

I cannot miss

That was all I needed.

My skin prickled.

Now. Now.

I saw red.

I reached for the vial at my neck.

Malar’s blood.

She had begged me not to use it casually. I hadn’t planned to.

But she was dying. She was down. And the wizard must die.

I called in the blessing.

It hit like wildfire in my being. My vision sharpened until I could see the heartbeat of the caged mortals—feel their fear, like warmth in my chest. My muscles burned, then snapped into something new, more primal. My thoughts dimmed.

There was only prey.

The world snapped into unnatural clarity.

My skin felt too tight. My breath is too shallow. My muscles burned, surged. Every heartbeat within a mile radius beat in my ears. The injured bard, forty feet away, was already dead—it just didn’t know it yet. I could smell its rotting marrow. I could feel its fear.

The world narrowed to the soft spot just below the skull.

Only the prey remained.

Only the hunt,
I moved.

Faster than I ever had.

My hand clamped over his mouth as Whisperfang plunged upward — angled to pierce behind the jaw, sliding past molars, through the soft curve of the tongue and into the throat. He spasmed. Eyes bulged. His hands twitched, fingers forming a spell sigil in reflex—No casting with no tongue.

I slammed him down, hard, into the stone floor.

Curse Eater howled as I struck—the magic within it flaring red and black.  The blade punched through his chest — once, twice — under the ribs. I felt it grind against bone. His heart shuddered. I twisted. Again. One slash, then another—then fangs, not for sustenance.

For dominance.

Blood boiled out of him.

Hot. Slick. Heavy with an iron scent. It hit my arms and throat and soaked into the lining of my cloak.

He tried to scream.

I didn’t let him.

The blade didn’t slice—it tore, fueled by the frenzy in my blood.

They all felt it.

Even the prey in the cages began screaming, feral panic blooming as the presence of a predator consumed the air. I could taste their fear—sweet, sharp, alive.

The claws came out, sharp and cruel.

I tore through his throat — muscle, then the windpipe itself. His mouth opened wide in shock. The breath that left him bubbled.

But I didn’t stop.

The blood was in me.

I was the apex. The predator. The old hunger that walked before fire.

He never screamed.

He never could.

He jerked once more — then went still.

His body slumped sideways, blood pooling fast, seeping between the tiles like something returning to the stone it came from.

And I just stood there.

Shaking.

Shaking harder than I had in decades.

Because that wasn’t a clean kill.

That was desperation.

One more kill. Just one.

No.

I don’t know how long I was lost.

But eventually… I noticed.

There were no more enemies.

Only stillness. Blood on stone. One Corpse scattered like broken dolls.

And Eleyna—gone.

No—hidden.

My breath was fire.

I didn’t know how long it took.

But eventually the blood haze lifted. I wiped the blade. Mechanically. Without thought.

I needed to be calm.

To be sharp.

Because outside, in a shadowed alleyway, the only person who had ever made me want to live was dying by inches.

“Eleyna—” My voice was raw. I had to turn this house into a sanctuary before she joined this bastard in the dirt.

My senses returned all at once — like a trap slamming shut.

And with them, the screams.

Behind me, the two mortals in the cage shrieked — high, thin sounds that sliced through the thick silence of the house. One clawed at the iron bars, fingers bloodied, eyes wild. The other had pissed themselves and simply rocked, back and forth, mouth open in a soundless wail.

I stood there, chest heaving. Slick with blood. Arms burning with the memory of the kill.

My blade hung heavy. My palms dripped.

I turned slowly to face them.

The two mortals, not mortals, children froze, their screams faltering into choked whimpers.

I raised one hand — red to the wrist — and pressed a single bloodied finger to my lips.

“Shhh,” I said, voice low, cold as the grave they nearly joined. “Or I’ll decide you’re next.”

They cringed.

One curled into a ball, sobbing. The other shook so violently the cage rattled. Neither made another sound.

Good.

I stepped over the wizard’s body and closed the door.

Time to bring her in.

Notes:

And for all the dice-goblins out there—I did run the math.
Yes, every fight you’ve seen so far is technically winnable. The odds are terrible. The tactics are brutal. But the numbers check out. Just don’t ask how many potions and scrolls it took.

Chapter 28: Other me and Pretty-Pain-things

The Twin's POV

---

Everything rattles.

Bones drag the cage. Rattle. Jerk. Slam.

Metal hurts.

Bars cold. Floor colder.

 

Cold metal bars bruise my side.

Other Me screams. Loud, broken.

Always screams when the skelly-things move us.

I want to bite the bones.

I want to break them.

I hit the cage bars until my fists hurt.

Until she sends quiet through the link.

“Stop hitting it, they’ll hurt you more.”

Other me's feeling flickers inside me,

quiet as always.

I don’t care.

Let them try.

Let me bleed.

Let it all burn.

She folds in.

Hides.

She always hides.

''Stop hurting you."

I don’t stop.

I slam my fists again.

I want to break something.

I want to make something bleed.

I don’t scream.

I never scream.

Not out loud.

Yeah, I noticed.

''Screaming makes it worse."

"So does not screaming."

The sky is gone. Only stone. The air stinks—blood and chalk and burnt wire.

Magic and rot. Spell-hunger.

A Bald magic man lives here. Red robe. Shouting. Always shouting.

He’s not scary.

I want to rip out his tongue.

He points at us. We are tools. Toys.

He’ll hurt us again.

They always do.

The others did.

Every time.

They bend us

I’ll kill him first.

Even if I die.

 

The other me scares me.

I don't want him to be hurt.

I am scared

Sacared for other me.

It bites the back of my teeth.

Makes my belly curl.

other me forgot to be scared too long ago. 

Other Me trembles.

always with rage.

I hold his hand through the bars.

Other me's hand doesn’t help.

But I hold.

She holds it anyway.

Her hand is small.

Useless.

But I let her.

Other me is everything

I scream.

Always scream.

Loud keeps the bones away.

Sometimes from me.

But always from other me.

The cage drops with a clang.

My ear rings.

My side hits the bars hard.

I kick.

I whine.

I fight air.

Other me scream.

He is trying to hide me

She folds into herself.

We shake.

We brace

I try to rip the cage apart.

Try to bite it

The sky is gone. Stone now.

The house smells like pain. Blood. Burned magic. Bad spells. 

“Pain always comes after smells like that.”

Yeah.

I want it to come.

Let it try.

Let it bleed.

I want to make something bleed

We are not safe.

We know this place.

Not this house, but this kind.
Red mark on the door.

A place where air is hungry and walls remember screams.

Where things bend.

where they break 

Where we were.

The air hums.

We know this place.

We are not safe.

 

Then—

Knock.

We both freeze.

Everything stills.

 

“That’s not the bones.”

"No"

It’s him.

I watch.

He comes in.

Beautiful. Pale. Dangerous.

Red eyes.

Smile like a blade.

Power.

I feel it.

He’s darker than the bald red magic man.

sharper than the bones.

He could kill everything.

He should.

I want to kill everything.

“He's a Pretty-pain-thing”

Yeah. That too,

But he’s not looking at us.

He’s looking at the Bald Red magic man.

Bald Red magic man sneers, yells, loud, always loud. 

Shows his back

Stupid

to show back to Pretty-pain-thing.

He doesn’t matter. 

Pretty-pain-thing smiles.

And then—

Meat sounds. Flesh sounds. Wet. Real. Honest. Fury. Blood

YES.

FearFearFear

BLEED

DEATH, PANIC

Not screams. Just… red.

The Bald magic man doesn’t even get to scream.

Dies too fast,

dies before sound can reach his mouth.

Ripped open like meat. Torn like paper.

Perfect.

Deadly

I watch.

I hide

I love the sound it makes.

It makes my blood sing.

PanicPanicPanic
HideHideHide
CRY
Shaking 

"Stop!"

I block it.

Too soft.

WE BLEED NEXT !

"STOP! Fear calls pretty pain things. Breath"

Other me shakes beside me,

curled like a breath trying to disappear.

She sends panic again.

Fearfearfear.

We scream.

Other Me wails into my chest,

I echo the shape of it.

I send back fire.

Fear. Panic. Echoes.

“He will kill us too.”

"Maybe. But he didn’t.

Hide"

This is what we need.

What we should’ve been.

Red- eyed pretty-pain-thing turns.

Looks at us.

The Other me cries.

Other me scared

Other me pee.

Other me will annoy Red- eyed pretty-pain-thing. 

Other me will be hurt next

Other me will bleed

I look back.

I scream

I cry

Look at me

Don't look at her,

DON'T look at other me 

"No!

No!

Don't do it 

Don't hide me from pretty-pain-thing 

Hide with me 

Please!

OTHER ME,  STOP

I will be GOOD

Don't make pretty-pain-thing bleed you."

Eyes glowing.

Blood dripping from claws.

He doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t blink.

He lifts a red-streaked finger.

Blood on lips

"Shhh."

We both go still.

Because we understand: ‘Next.’

As long as other me is safe

I’m not scared.

I respect it.

Because that power?

I want it.

Then he’s gone.

Door shuts.

Blood pools.

We wait.

I press against the bars on the back.

 I don’t.

Waiting. Not breathing.
Not moving.

I watch the blood drying.

The bald magic meat bag is leaking.

Pretty

"Your heart is too loud".

“Yours isn't loud enough.”

 

Then he comes back.

With her.

White hair. Blue lips. Almost dead.

"Another pretty-pain-thing?"

“She smells like the edge of dying.”

He lays her down gently.

Gentle.

Why?

She’s weak. She’s nothing.

But he…

He bends for her.

He kneels for her

He wraps her in his cloak.

Feeds her little bottles.

His hands shake.

Wipes her sweat.

Wipes her face.

He whispers.

He begs.

He shakes.

Not like rage.

She twitches.

He panics.

He speaks soft—not like a killer.

Like someone afraid.

Real fear.

For her.

Pretty-pain-things don’t do this. They bite.

They bend. They smile before they hurt you.

But he isn’t hurting.

He’s scared. Like me. Like Other Me.

“I don’t understand.”

"I do. She’s pack."

I hate it.

Why

She is broken

He protects her like pack.

"That’s what she is."

"No, it's not that."

I press my hand to the bars. Watch him hold her hand.

Watch her smile.

Watch him smile back.

Still alive.

Still scared.

Me too.

But this time the fear is shaped differently.

Not sharp.

Just... new.

 

She touches his face.

He doesn’t bite her.

He leans into it.

She laughs. Dying, and she laughs.

His smile breaks open

They are broken.

But they are together.

Oh!

"She is his other me."

"The one you go soft with,"

I hate it.

I want it.

Not her.

Him.

Not the softness.

But the shield.

The teeth.

The monster on your side.

I can't kill for my other me.

I want to, but...

I am weak

Not good at hurting yet

He could tear through the world.

I want other me to stand behind that.

“She matters to him.”

"So we make ourselves matter to him, too."

“…What?”

"You felt it too."

"The way he looked at her?' 

"If she is his other me—

Then we stay near.

We make her ours."

“She might not want us.”

"Then we make her!"

“Other me, it never works. No one wants us without bending us.”

"It will work.

She can bend me,

It's okay,

S he broken,

Can't hurt too much."

Something in me breaks.

"NO! Bend you also bend me. 

YOU ARE OTHER ME!"

"Better bend me than bending us both

It's okay

We stay close.

We stay useful.

We stay safe.

He won’t leave her.

So if I am good to her, he won’t leave us."

“That’s not how it works.”

"Yes, it is.

That’s how packs work."

"He’s fangs."

"SO? We become pets for Fang's other me.

Or I become a toy"

“I just want… you safe.”

"Same.

But I want fire too.

I want safety with teeth.

We’re not bent right now.”

"No.

Right now—"

We’re being ignored.

We are being kept

"Until broken."

 "Maybe not bad-breaking."

"What other kind is there?"

"Like when a chain snaps and you realize how heavy it was."

"Breaking is breaking."

I look at my other me.

She’s quiet.

Sad.

I sent trough the link:

"We make her ours."

She doesn’t answer.

But I know she hears.

She’ll follow. She always does.

"We’ll be good.

We’ll stay close."

Other me curls beside me in the cage.

"And when the pretty-pain-thing bares his fangs—
He’ll do it for us, too."

So I can protect my other me too

I rest my head on other me's shoulder.

We don’t cry.

---

They don’t cry.

But their feelings echo between them—fire and fog, sharp and soft, wound and salve.

Two broken minds in a cage that didn’t break them enough.

Not yet.

And now?

Now there’s blood on the floor, a dead wizard in the dark, and something like hope curling in the shape of red eyes and a Soft thing

---

 

Chapter 29: Why You Left

The Body’s POV

---

I feel it first in my fingertips.
The splintering.
Like glass warming too fast under flame—veins of heat, cracks of light, lightless.
My limbs are filled with wrong.

A light pulses at the end of a tunnel.
Soft, gold, and distant.
Ilmater’s.

But it’s not for me.

That light is for souls.
And I—

I am empty.
A shell carved hollow and worn thin by use.
A tool without a wielder.
A body left behind.

I will join the empty.

My soul left the realm too long ago—
shaped and folded and dissolved into mist.

My chest aches.

Not pain.
Worse.
Recollection.

---

I blink, and the world folds inward.

One moment: stone beneath me.
The next: silk. Or water. Or ash.
Everything stretches, slurs, glows at the edges like an overexposed dream.
Sounds blur and bend. Footsteps become heartbeats. Names become echoes.

Mine bounces against the walls of nowhere.

I think—I think I’m dying.
Not dramatically. Not gloriously. Just… ceasing.

I should have endured more.
Should have been useful longer.

But this—
This isn’t so bad.

Let it end like this.
Soft-edged. Unwitnessed.
Let me dissolve in the empty.
Let me slip between the silence of two breaths and vanish.

---

A shadow moves.

I don’t lift my head.
Why would I?

But it crouches in front of me—
and I know her.

She’s wearing my face.

Not the one I wear now. Not the changeling’s mask or the bard’s charm.

The real one.

Mine.

The Fogself.

The one who walked without sound.
Who could quiet her heartbeat with a breath.
Who vanished before the blood even had time to fall.
She was precision. She was silence. She was escape.

Now she looks heavier.
Dim.
Like smoke clinging to bone, like memory made flesh and left too long in the rain.

I cannot see her face.
Neither can she.
We were never meant to be looked at.

---

My soul.

She kneels beside me, head tilted—curious, almost amused.

“You look terrible,” she says, like a joke passed between ghosts.

I laugh.
It wheezes out of me like a punctured bellows.

“A bit late for a wellness check, don’t you think?”
My throat is dry stone. “You left. You left me.”

She shrugs. “You didn’t need me. You agreed.”

I try to shake my head, but I’m not sure it moves.

“I always needed you,” I whisper. “You left me no choice.”

She doesn’t argue.
Just says, with unbearable gentleness,
“No. You needed the friend more.”

---

And there it is.

Memory, bleeding through me like ink in water.

The crypt.
His voice when it cracked.
The stitchwork.
A name—mine—spoken like it meant something.
A hand on mine, not for violence, but for comfort.

My hands don’t remember how to hold.
Only how to kill.

I don’t know how to comfort.
Only how to complete the mission.

Was that why she left?

I wasn’t soft enough.
I wasn’t sharp enough.
Not enough of anything.
Just a body.
A vessel.

A discarded sheath.

"At least you came back to see him,” I mutter.

She smiles, almost shyly.

"You don’t feel me, I know," she says, "but I am always watching you."
Her voice trembles at the edges.
"I really loved you. You deserved better than me."

I snarl.
"I deserved not being empty."

---

She sits cross-legged now, like a child at a long-forgotten fire.

Her eyes are mine.
But colder.
Older.
Burned through a hundred lifetimes of silence.

"If this is the end," I murmur, "at least I got him away. From the monster."

And for the first time, she smiles like she means it.

"You did,” she says. “Even if he doesn’t stay. Even if you never speak again. You got him out.
If you die… I’ll be stuck in the fog. But I gave him some of it too.
A whisper, a thread.
Enough to hide him, if I can’t hide you anymore.”

I want to cry.
But my body forgot how.

---

"Why are you here?" I ask.

"You’re dying."

"...I know."

"I didn’t want you to go alone," she says.
"Not like this. Not apart.
I know you hate me. But I love you."

"I don’t—" my voice catches.
"I don’t hate you."

I don’t know what I feel.
Grief? Regret? Resentment?
Longing?

The air ripples.

Butterflies appear.
Tattered, dying.
Their wings bruised, their flight drunken.
And they begin to land on her shoulders, her chest, her throat.

They’re not Lolth’s.

"I thought it was her," I murmur.

"No,” she says quietly.
“It’s older than that.”

I look at the butterflies—poison laced in beauty.
"Who’s hurting you?"

“I don’t know. But it doesn’t hurt most of the time.”
She tilts her head, expression blank.
"It just keeps me from seeing."

"...I’m sorry."

“So am I.”

---

The poison hums louder now.
My skin becomes a drum beneath it.

"I thought you left because I was useless," I whisper.

She blinks, slow and patient.

“You think too much.”

And then she leans forward—
forehead to mine, like we used to do before mirrors and masks.
When we weren’t yet separate.
When we were whole.

"You weren’t useless," she breathes.
"I was."

---

The fog rises around her.
Heavy. Quiet. Home.

A voice—his voice—pierces the dark.
Calling. Desperate. Maybe for me.

She stands.

"Will I see you again?"

She smiles, walking backward into the mist, unraveling with each step.

“I wish.”

---

The world fractures—
Stone. Light. Embroidery. Blood.
A name I no longer know how to carry.

But he’s calling it.

And it matters again.

I am Elenya’s body.
I remember the missions.
The deaths. The silence. The fog.

But now I remember something else:

He got out.

And for the first time in my life—

That is enough.

Chapter 30: The Hollow and the Hunt

Summary:

Astarion saves Elenya from the brink of death—but something in him doesn’t come back with her.
The kill leaves no satisfaction. The bloodlust doesn’t fade.
And when the hunger returns, it isn’t just his.
He spirals through bureaucracy, memory, and the unbearable temptation. In a city of predators, he must decide if what remains of him is still Astarion…
…or just the thing wearing his face.

Notes:

This chapter is intense. It contains graphic depictions of hunger, dissociation, vampiric craving, trauma responses, and the emotional/psychological toll of predation. There are no actual non-consensual acts, but the themes of internal violence, temptation, and invasive instinct are intense.

Astarion's POV

---

I ran into the alley.

I ran to her.

She was slumped against the wall, lips blue, eyes half-lidded, breath catching in ragged, irregular jolts. Her limbs twitched faintly—the last sparks of some frayed nerve trying to keep her upright.

“Elenya—” I dropped to my knees, gathering her into my arms. Her body was too cold. Too light. Her skin felt like paper soaked in ice. And her heartbeat—gods, her heartbeat—wasn’t a rhythm. It was a stagger. A drunk stumbling through winding alleyways in the dark.

Her head lolled forward, eyes fluttering open just enough to see me. She inhaled, almost like she was sniffing me. She smiled—weak, crooked, and somehow still full of mischief.

“I told you…” she whispered, voice thinned to a thread, “…spider wouldn’t… catch me.”

Her lips barely moved. The words slipped out like breath on glass. Like death pretending to be clever.

“No,” I said, holding her tighter. “No, it won’t.”

Not today.

I lifted her. She didn’t resist. Her body sagged against mine like a broken marionette, arms limp, breath catching on the jagged edge of each inhale.

She weighed nothing.

That terrified me most.

Not the blood still wet on my hands. Not the corpses cooling behind me. Not the stink of rot or magic or the dead wizard’s empty stare.

Her body. How light it felt in my arms. Like she’d already begun to leave it behind.

“Come on, darling,” I murmured, though my voice cracked. “Don’t make me carry you just to lose you at the door.”

She didn’t answer.

I kicked the door open with too much force. The hinges shrieked, wood splintering. It didn’t matter. Let the whole Crypt hear us. Let them all come. I had fangs and fury and a house full of blood.

Let them try.

Inside, the chamber reeked of ozone and death. Tables cluttered with vials and half-used spell components. Shelves of cursed trinkets and bottled horrors. A wizard’s nest.

Good. It would do.

I shut the door and laid her on the narrow slab past the hearth—a stone shelf masquerading as furniture. It was cold. She was colder.

Her breath rasped in shallow, failing gasps. Lips entirely blue now. Skin slick with cold sweat. Fingers twitching with the memory of a grip, but unable to hold.

I peeled her hood off first. My fingers shook. I didn’t know when that had started. I couldn’t stop it.

“Come on, love,” I whispered, brushing damp strands of hair from her brow.

Her breathing was fragile. Papery. A stuttering rhythm like torn silk.

“Stay with me.”

Her head lolled to the side, eyes unfocused—caught between realities.

“No, I can’t. I promised Astarion I’d help him. I need to go. He’s not safe. I helped, but not enough. He still needs me.”

My heart hammered.

I reached into my cloak and found the last potion she hadn’t drained—amber glass warm from my chest. I uncorked it, cradled her head, and tilted the vial to her lips. Her throat convulsed as the bitter liquid slid down. Then I added an antitoxin from my own bandolier—slowly, carefully. She choked once, but it went down.

Still no change.

Her heartbeat was a failing metronome. But still present.

I dug again, fumbling through the pouch until I found a healing potion. I poured it past her cracked lips.

“Come on, Elenya,” I murmured. “You’ve survived worse than this. Haven’t you?”

Her lips moved. Barely a breath: “Is that why she left me? Because I was useless? Because I am no one?”

Who was this she? She’d never spoken of anyone like that.

Not now.

I poured the potion more slowly.

“Drink, my dear. If only so I don’t have to burn this damn place down alone.”

She coughed. Weak. But she swallowed.

Twice.

Colour returned—barely. A wash of warmth under her skin, like the last rays of a ruined sun.

She blinked.

My knees went weak, and I realized I’d been holding my breath for minutes.

“He got out of the grave; at least he’s not buried. We helped… That’s enough.”

“No. It isn’t,” I said.

The next half hour passed in pieces. Slow. Wrong. It stretched like sinew, twisting between beats of her stuttering heart.

I stripped her gloves. Rubbed warmth into her hands. Wiped the sweat from her face. Peeled her wet clothes off. Smoothed her robe. Kept her warm. I didn’t move far. I didn’t dare. She moaned once—soft and confused—and I thought I’d dreamt it.

I gave her another healing potion.

She swallowed on reflex. Her throat moved, and I wanted to scream.

Instead, I sat there. Watching.

Waiting.

Every part of me wired to her pulse. Her breath. Her smallest twitch.

And finally… finally… her chest rose with a full, ragged inhale. Not clean. Not strong. But enough. And then—

“Cold,” she whispered.

I was already wrapping her in my cloak before I realized I’d moved.

“Better?” I asked, my voice barely mine.

She hummed.

That was it.

No smile. No words. Just breath.

Her fingers twitched in mine.

Once.

Then again.

A flicker of life—stubborn, tenacious. I held my breath.

Her eyes opened. A crack of rust in a face pale as ash. Lantern light caught in them—amber over blood. Her lips parted. No words. Just the shape of them.

I leaned close enough to feel the ghost of her breath. And I—before I could stop myself—said it.

“You said you wouldn’t worry me anymore.”

The words tumbled out raw.

She blinked, dazed.

“I didn’t mean to,” she rasped. “Wasn’t… planning to…”

Her fingers curled around mine. Weak. Still hers.

“I didn’t think it would take so long… to find lodging. I thought we had time.”

I exhaled hard, pressing my palm over my face. Blood smeared across my cheek.

“Don’t ever do that again,” I said without looking.

A beat. Then: “Or what?”

I glanced down.

She was smiling. Barely—but it was hers. Crooked. Sharp.

“Or I’ll drain you myself,” I murmured. “Only I get to kill you.”

She giggled. A soft, breathless thing—like a windchime strung with bones.

Then softer: “I’m sorry, Astarion… I didn’t want to hurt you. I could feel the pull. You were in pain.”

She was right.

I hadn’t noticed until she said it.

I had been in pain.

Not just panic. Not adrenaline. Not survival instinct.

But dread.

Real dread.

A frantic, jagged emptiness clawing me open. A desperate, broken thing howling inside since the moment I saw her collapse.

And now she was here.

Breathing. Cold. Alive.

If she had died—if I’d been too late—if that had been the last thing she ever said—

I pressed my forehead against the back of her hand.

Let her pulse anchor me.

I didn’t move. Didn’t look at the cages in the corner. Didn’t want to see what else was alive.

I breathed and kept waiting while she drifted in and out of consciousness. Slowly, her skin warmed and her lips lost their corpse hue. She still looked half-dead, but this time it was only the vampiric form she shifted into.

I stayed until she stirred again.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I muttered. “You’ve taken to dramatic collapses, darling, haven’t you? I’d prefer you focus on more enjoyable ways to get my attention.”

She tried to smile. Failed. Still perfect.

“Didn’t you complain about my being dull? I’m just keeping up with your dramatic flair.”

Her words were slurred, but coherent. Relief should have come.

Instead, I just nodded.

“I do appreciate the effort,” I murmured. “But that’s not what I had in mind when I asked for bad decision-making. Next time, just get drunk, stab someone, or set something on fire. Much more enjoyable.”

She gave the ghost of a laugh.

Then closed her eyes again.

Just resting, I told myself. Not fading. Not dying. Just letting the pain ebb. Just breathing.

I watched her chest rise and fall.

And then… quiet.

Eventually, the panic dulled. Too slowly, the world came back into focus.

The shaking stopped.

She slept—fitfully, but alive. Pale, trembling, but alive.

I kissed her knuckles, light and quick.

And with nothing left to do, I finally stood.

The wizard’s body hadn’t moved.

The blood had started to dry.

The cages in the corner were quiet now, save for occasional whimpers—softer, rhythmic. Hopeful. The little ones huddled together like forgotten dolls. Watching. Waiting.

I met their eyes for a heartbeat. Said nothing. Just stared. They flinched.

Human. Young. Scarred—a boy and a girl, both bruised. Thayan experiments, likely. Important enough not to be in the pens. Not dangerous enough to be gagged. But both wore strange collars.

They didn’t beg. Not aloud. But their eyes said everything. Don’t hurt us. Help us. Please.

I turned back to her.

Wrapped her tighter in the cloak.

Brushed a strand of sweat-slicked hair from her forehead. My fingers lingered.

Then dropped.

Because the panic was gone now.

The breathless desperation that had propelled me—that made me tear a man apart just to buy her another hour—was gone.

---

I moved to the far end of the room. Stared down at the Red Wizard’s body.

It was pulp now.

I had torn him open like meat. Ruined him. Left no dignity. No throat. Just red and ruin and the stench of panic turned to death.

I’d killed before. Gods, had I killed before.

But this was different.

There had been nothing clean in it.

I leaned against the wall and tried to breathe.

Something was wrong.

The panic was gone.

And what remained…

Nothing.

No fear. No rage. Not triumph. Not disgust. Not even relief.

Just cold.

The kind of cold that settles in your marrow when the storm’s passed and all that’s left is wreckage.

I looked at my hands. Still stained. Blood dried in the cuticles. Crusted under the nails.

I should have felt something.

Revulsion. Guilt. Vindication. Happiness. Anything.

Instead, the room was too quiet.

Even my thoughts had gone still.

The kind of silence that comes after the scream. After the kill. After the part of you that cared has stopped knocking.

I was hollow.

I blinked.

I looked at her again.

Still breathing.

Still here.

But I wasn’t.

And that realization didn’t frighten me the way it should have.

I simply shrugged and got to work.

I stripped the wizard’s corpse with practiced efficiency.

Robes first—threadbare linen stained with red. Trousers next, clinging wet and pathetic. Undershirt half-torn, gummed to his ribs with cooling blood. No jewelry. No rings. No focus stones. No amulet. Just skin and meat and stab wounds.

How many times did I stab him?

It didn’t matter.

He had nothing else on him. Likely caught while changing. No shoes even. His feet were filthy, crusted with grime and sweat. Toenails curled over with neglect.

So even necromancers forget basic hygiene. I sneered, then pulled him by the ankles, dragging him off the entrance tiles last, letting his skull knock the stone one final time. Satisfying. Hollow. Loud.

There was a rug by the threshold—gaudy, stiff with age, already soaked through with blood. I rolled him into it. The cloth swallowed his corpse with a wet sound like meat dropped into canvas.

He was lighter than expected. Maybe I was still strong from the frenzy. Or maybe I didn’t care enough to feel the weight.

I dragged the bundle across the floor. It bumped over stone, leaving streaks of red like a brush dipped in blood. The house was silent, save for that sound.

Stone. Blood. Silence.

I found a storage room off the kitchen—some poorly ventilated afterthought meant for junk. The smell hit first. A thick, wet stench of decay and ozone. Blood. Sweat. Fecal matter. The cloying tang of piss-soaked stone. Like… the kennels.

Inside, cages. Rusted. Humanoid-sized. Familiar.

The stink clung to me. To my thoughts. It would cling for days.

Still I felt nothing.

I dropped the rug. He thudded into the corner like discarded luggage. Flesh and failure wrapped in tacky wool.

Good.

I shut the door behind me with quiet finality.

Let him rot.

I moved to the kitchen. Found what I needed.

Cleaning supplies. Rags. A scouring brush. A bucket. Even a conjuration ring built into the basin. I activated it. Cold water hissed into being, crystalline and endless, unaware of the blood it was summoned to erase.

Back to the entrance.

Too much red. Smears on the threshold. A splash on the doorframe. A drying pool at the center.

I crouched.

And scrubbed.

The first rinse turned pink.

The second red again.

The third, brown with grit.

I washed floor and door, over and over, until my knuckles stung raw, until the dried gore loosened from every surface.

The scent of blood still clung to my tongue. Copper. Metallic. Alive.

I wiped the blade. Rinsed. Scrubbed again.

Some stains remained—on two other rugs nearly as ugly as the one rotting in the back. The colour was deep. Permanent.

That could wait.

The memory lingered.

The twist of the knife. The crunch of cartilage. The warmth of blood. The ragged inhale that never got to finish. I’d been fast. Brutal. Precise.

The power. The rush. The blood.

For a moment, I’d touched something ancient in myself. Something feral. Something divine.

Now there was only the aftermath.

The quiet.

I rinsed again. One more time. Watched the water spiral down the drain—pink to clear.

Still nothing.

I straightened slowly, stiffness settling into my joints. Blood clung to the folds of my sleeves, the collar of my shirt, the creases behind my knees where it had soaked through.

My clothes were filthy. Clinging damp to my skin like a second, lesser corpse.

I stripped them without ceremony.

Shirt, vest, gloves. Trousers. Undergarments.

The fabric peeled away in wet, sticky sounds. Some patches clung where the blood had dried. The air against my skin felt colder than it should have, despite the hearth’s heat.

I dropped the ruined clothes in a heap.

She’d clean them later.

I took out soap and conjured more water into the basin. Warm this time. Let it run until steam began to rise.

Found a cloth. Coarse, but clean.

Dipped it.

Scrubbed.

My skin seared under the heat, but I felt none of it. Not the sting. Not the relief. Just motion.

Arms first. The blood didn’t come away easily. It had dried into my knuckles, congealed beneath my claws. I scrubbed harder. Watched the red swirl, dilute, vanish.

My claws were longer than ever. Cazador would have flailed me for letting them grow so conspicuous.

I found I cared very little.

I cleaned my neck. The hollow of my throat. My chest.

The basin turned pink again.

I rinsed the cloth. Soap. Water. Skin.

Over and over.

Mechanical.

When I reached my face, the cloth paused.

Just for a second.

I saw the lack of reflection in the basin water—warped, rippling, a cloth hovering in the air.

It should have been funny. Or sad. But it was neither. Just nothing.

I washed my face. My mouth. My eyes.

I washed the gore. The guilt. Or what should have been guilt. Scraped it off my skin. Rinsed again.

I washed until the water was cold and the cloth stiff.

Then I found a fresh tunic in the pack—too large, plainly dyed, but serviceable. It smelled faintly of cedar and cavewater. It smelled of her. I pulled it on with numb fingers. Let it hang loose.

My hair was still damp. My skin smelled of soap and steel.

Clean again.

Still hollow.

She was resting.

That was what mattered.

And I…

Still felt nothing.

---

 

When I returned, Elenya had pushed herself upright—barely. She was curled on the slab, wrapped in both our cloaks, a canteen trembling faintly in her hand. I crouched low beside her, checking pupils, lips, pulse. She still looked dead. But it was only her vampiric mimicry.

“How do you feel?” I asked.

She blinked slowly. “Like someone scraped out my insides with a dull spoon.”

“Poetic,” I murmured.

My hand brushed her cheek. She didn’t flinch. Another miracle.

Yet I felt little.

I sat beside her, letting the silence stretch. Only the distant murmur of undead patrols outside the warded walls reminded us we were still in the Crypt. That—and the soft, terrified breathing of the children in the cages.

I didn’t look at them.

Elenya spoke first.

“Where are we, Astarion? This is clearly not a feeding salon.”

She didn’t know. She hadn’t seen. She didn’t know what I’d done—what I’d become to make this place safe. She’d hate it. Hate me. She would see the monster.

The one I fed with Malar’s blessing.

The hollow thing.

“Shh. Time for that later. For now, rest,” I said, my hand finding her cheek again.

She saw the deflection, but allowed it. Her gaze drifted past me toward the cage.

“Can I help them too?”

I sighed. “Eventually.”

It was the answer she didn’t need to hear. I knew she’d press. The questions were already bubbling in her chest. The need to help, to save, to undo wrongs. But this wasn’t our battle yet.

She nodded quietly. Her gaze flickered back to the children, but she didn’t linger.

Thirty minutes later, I was staring at her again—this time with a different kind of admiration.

She was recovering. Not fully. Not truly. But enough to move. Enough to be herself again. The distance between us had narrowed. Though I still felt death clinging to her, she was already wearing the mask again.

When she stood, her movements were steady, if slow. She didn’t lean on me.

I didn’t reach to steady her.

Every instinct screamed to—but I didn’t.

This was the price she’d paid for her life. To move again.

She gave me a knowing glance, and I couldn’t help but feel I’d lost something. Some sliver of intimacy in the silence between us. Something I hadn’t earned, maybe—but had tasted anyway.

“I’ll need my things. There’s work to do,” she said, voice too steady.

“No.”

She blinked. “What?”

“There is no way you or I are doing anything right now. Do you hear me? You will rest, here, and—”

“Astarion, I’m fine. The antitoxin works, I just need—”

“I said no. End of discussion.”

I didn’t yell. I didn’t need to.

I went to her pack, retrieving bedrolls.

“Astarion,” she tried again, “it’s not necessary—”

“I cannot believe the opinion of someone who just overdosed on her own damn potion.”

She sighed—long, quiet, infuriating.

“Let me at least set the dome. For safety.”

“Knock yourself out. But those two stay out of it.”

Ten minutes later, the dome shimmered into place. A faint magical veil, womb-like in its silence.

I set my weapons by the pillow. Ritual. Familiarity.

Then turned to her.

I stripped her potion belts. Removed the scrollbook. Loosened her armour. And ushered her down.

As soon as she hit the bedroll, I caught her. Pulled her tight into my arms.

Something was wrong.

I didn’t feel anything.

I inhaled—and a sickly, undead stench hit my nose. Copper rot mingled with sweat and chemicals.

“Magic it away.”

“What?”

“The scent. Clear it. Use the cleaning cantrip.”

“Astarion, if I do that, someone could smell me.”

“There are already two mortals in the house. What’s one more? Take it off. I need to smell you.”

She did.

And finally, I breathed her in.

Cedar. Juniper. Cavewater. Myrrh. Night orchids.

Mine.

But it felt strange.

Wrong.

I felt restless.

My arms were full of her—her weight, scent, rhythm. They should’ve undone me. Loosened something in my chest. Brought a trembling breath. Softened the blade inside my ribs.

Feeling nothing over the kill was one thing.

But here?

Here I wasn’t hollow.

And yet—no bloom of relief. No pulse of comfort. No heat. No grief. No guilt.

Just stillness.

I buried my face in her hair, inhaled again.

Nothing.

No safety. No want. Just static.

Her heartbeat thrummed—slow, steady, repaired. The rhythm I had fought like a madman to preserve.

Still… nothing.

Not even anger.

Only the dull pulse of a void where something vital used to live.

I closed my eyes. Focused. Her breath. The curve of her spine. The slope of her hip. The cracked softness of her mouth.

Nothing.

It wasn’t numbness.

It was something else.

It left me reeling.

Until I felt it.

Something.

My skin itched beneath the bones.

A craving.

But not for her.

For her blood.

It started slow.

A tremble at the edge of my senses. A thrum in the root of my teeth.

Like music through a wall—distant, muffled, persistent.

The craving.

A formula.

She was warm. I was cold.

She was full. I was empty.

She had blood. I had none.

And her neck—

Gods, her neck.

So soft, so pale, pulsing steady now. The vein fluttered like a moth behind silk. I could feel it through fabric. Hear it through layers. Calling.

Mine.

Mine.

Mine.

My fangs didn’t slide out in excitement. They pushed forward like teeth from a corpse. Slow. Reluctant. Mechanical.

I should feed.

Just a little.

To stabilize.

To think.

To feel.

She wouldn’t mind. She’d let me. She always did.

Didn’t she?

I could tell her after. She’d understand.

Wouldn’t she?

Would she mind if I took it all?

I could take her now.

She wouldn’t stop me.

Wouldn’t even wake.

The idea settled like a lover. Comforting. Familiar. The script already written.

My fangs ached.

Not aroused. Not enraged.

Designed for this.

Why keep denying it?

It was her fault.

She knew what I was.

She chose this.

She allowed it.

The thought slid in like a blade. Smooth. Inevitable.

Images followed—pinning her, biting her, bleeding her dry. Drawing it out. Making it hurt.

I flinched.

The thought didn’t feel like mine.

It was foreign. Hot. Filthy. A reflex with no conscience. A command without a speaker.

Not hunger. Not mine. Not the ache I’d learned to endure.

This was older.

Cruel.

It wanted her to scream. Not just in terror—in agony. It wanted despair. To drink it. Wear it like perfume. Not sustenance. Desecration.

And the part of me that cared—whispering, no, not her—was barely audible.

I turned slightly. Aligned my mouth with her throat. Felt her pulse brush my lips.

She didn’t stir.

Did she trust me this much?

Or was she simply collapsed too deeply to resist?

My hand slid from her hip to her sternum.

If I pressed, just so, I could tilt her toward me—expose her neck—let her fill my mouth, my lungs, my everything.

Her heat radiated.

I hovered. Fangs bared. Breath still. Frozen between two needs.

I pulled back slightly, breath catching.

She stirred, murmuring my name in that soft, slurred way sleep tangled her tongue.

Her fingers curled around mine.

And I felt nothing.

Not joy. Not relief. Not love.

Only cold.

My stomach twisted—not with guilt. That too had fled.

But with hunger. A gnawing pulse at the base of my throat. A thrum beneath my tongue. A want that knew her veins better than I did. That had already chosen the spot.

I leaned closer.

“Don’t,” she whispered, eyes still closed.

Not fear. Not a plea. Just a word passed through sleep.

Don’t.

I froze.

I looked down.

She wasn’t awake. Not truly. Not fully. But something in her had sensed it. The tilt. The shift.

Something was wrong with me.

Yet she slept on. Peaceful. Trusting. Open. Vulnerable.

I shouldn’t want to.

But the hunger sharpened.

What is this?

Then it hit me.

It wasn’t mine.

“This isn’t me,” I told myself. The thought was weak, like a prisoner shouting from the bottom of a well. But it echoed. Over and over. This is not Astarion.

Not me. Not mine.

It was his.

Malar’s.

His blood still pulsed in me. Still thrummed like a second, darker instinct. I had invited him in once. Welcomed his blessing.

And now the Hunt remained.

This wasn’t starvation.

It was infection.

The blessing wasn’t fading—it was taking root.

Feeding on me. Off the kill. Off her.

I closed my eyes. Tried to breathe through it.

Her scent. Not blood. Not want. Just her.

But the hunger rose again.

A boiling crescendo. A voice in my marrow. Not words. Just more.

I bit my lip, forcing my mind into trance.

I could resist.

I knew hunger.

I had spent most of my unlife suffering it.

I could resist.

I just needed to want to.

I felt nothing but hunger.

But I knew one thing.

This prey is mine.

Mine to chase. Mine to kill. Mine to play with.

Not Malar’s.

I focused. Her breath—steady, slow—matched mine. Or perhaps I matched hers. It didn’t matter. I clung to it like a lifeline in the hollow.

Until trance took me.

---

Trancing had been a grave mistake.

What awaited me was not the gentle drift of starlight, nor the memories etched into moonstone—no quiet temple of the self, no elven sanctuary of past and pain.

No.

This was the tide.

It surged.

Red.

Not roses.
Not lips.
Not love.

Blood.

It poured down my arms in hot, syrupy ribbons—thick as honey, copper-slick, steaming where it met skin. I was running. Sprinting through a forest I did not know. My claws tore through brambles. Branches cracked like bones beneath my feet.

Ahead—laughter.

No. Not laughter. A sob. A child’s voice, broken by terror.

Familiar.

Elenya?

No.

Too small. Too young.
Too afraid.
She tripped.
She fell.

I leapt.

Black hair.
The world spun. Smoke curled in ribbons. The stars blinked out.

The moon began to bleed.

Who was she ?

Teeth.
Silence.
Pressure.

I sank my fangs into her throat.
Warmth. Pulse. Despair.
She fought. Kicked. Sobbed into the dirt.

And gods help me—
It felt good.

Elven ears.

The sweetness. The surrender. The light fading beneath me.
My body surged. My senses bloomed.
I drank her like she was made to die for me.

The moon kept bleeding.
I was drowning in blood.

And then—
A hand.
Large. Clawed. Bestial.
It clamped my shoulder. A father’s touch. A creator’s claim.

I turned.

The Master of the Hunt.

Towering. Cloaked in matted black fur slick with gore. Head crowned with massive antlers adorned in sinew.
Red eyes—no pupils, only hunger.
And beneath them: no mouth. No nose.
Only a vast, quivering pit of muscle and rot.
A sniffing hole. A whuffling wound, wrapped in flayed skin.
The scent of my kill made his neck shudder with approval.

He nodded. Once.

And the forest tore away.

Cazador.
Bent beneath me.
Not regal. Not poised.
No silks. No smile.
Just a ruin of flesh and robes.
His throat was a mangled canyon where my fangs had carved through cartilage.

His limbs spasmed like a marionette underwater.
His lips gurgled my name, not in command—
—but in terror.

And it wasn’t enough.

The Huntmaster whispered:
“Again.”
So I did.

The world twisted.

An arena.

Stone walls slick with blood.
A moonless sky.
Wolves howled from the shadows—feral shapes with eyes like coals.
My body was no longer mine.
Elongated arms. White fur matted in gore. Claws soaked red. My spine arched. My jaw split.
I was a beast.

No—

I was the beast.
I was Silverblood.
Fangs shattered bone.
Sinew stretched like thread between my teeth.
Every breath was blood.
Every sound, the scream of prey being unmade.

A blur.
A form.
Elenya.
Standing across the pit.
No armour. No sarcasm. No fury.

Just her.
Barefoot. Bleeding.
Not afraid.
Disappointed.
Her eyes didn’t flinch. Her voice didn’t rise. She didn’t run.

She only said, softly: “Don’t.”

And I did. 
I didn’t hesitate.
I ripped out her throat.
Her blood sprayed in arcs.
She clutched the wound, stumbled, fell.

Her hands found my arms.
Her lips tried to speak.
Her eyes tried to stay.
I watched the light leave them.

And I smiled.

I gasped and jerked upright.

Sweat soaked my back.

The hunger roared.

Not in my stomach.

In my teeth.

In my soul.

I looked at her across the dome.

Still asleep. One hand curled around her dagger. Still trusting.

Foolish, beautiful trust.

Except this time it wasn’t whispering.

It was howling.

My mouth ached. My jaw ached.

I touched my lips—felt the fangs, still distended, as if I’d been biting.

Her?

I tasted copper.

Not memory.

Not illusion.

Blood.

I stumbled to the corner, bracing on cold stone.

Opened my mouth. Spat.

Red.

Not enough for a feeding.

Enough for a sin.

Gods.

Did I—?

No. She was whole. Breathing. I hadn’t.

The children!

No. No scent of blood. I would have smelled it. I hadn’t bitten anyone.

The dream hadn’t just been a vision.

It was a pull.

A rehearsal.

Malar’s call echoing through the hollow in me where feeling used to live.

A plan drafted in blood and teeth.

I was being rewritten.

And she was still sleeping.

She didn’t know.

Not really.

She thought I was still me.

Still the man who kissed her neck after each bite. Who licked her wounds closed. Who made jokes to hide the cracks.

Still Astarion.

But Malar had touched me.

And something in me had touched back.

And she was still warm. Still here.

And all I could think was how easy it would be.

How effortless.

How quiet.

I wanted to want her safe.

But I didn’t feel that.

All I felt was the echo of a voice that wasn’t mine, whispering:

Take.

I stood a long time, staring down at her.

Trying to remember why I wanted her to live.

Trying to remember what that even felt like.

But the truth settled in like rot behind the teeth:

I didn’t remember.

I only remembered pretending.

The shape of care. The rhythm of concern. The gentle hand on the cheek.

I remembered doing those things. Not feeling them.

I backed away, step by silent step, until my spine hit cold stone.

The far wall. Opposite her. Opposite everything I once clung to.

I slid down against it.

I didn’t rest.

Couldn’t.

Every time I closed my eyes—blood flooded me.

Not metaphor.

Not memory.

Blood.

Hot. Sticky in my mouth. Coating every thought in crimson hunger.

Elenya’s blood.

But not just hers.

Children. Strangers. My own.

A flood of old kills, new temptations, and Malar’s voice stitched between every heartbeat, whispering from the hollow beneath my ribs:

Hunt.
Cull.
It’s what you are.
Stop pretending.
They’re all just meat with names.

I jerked awake. Again.

Scratched my arms until they bled.

Bit the inside of my cheek to taste my own blood. To remind myself I still could.

It wasn’t working.

I stood. Paced. Counted.

Ten steps to the door.
Fourteen to the cage.
Seven back to the dome.
Three to her bedroll.
One to ruin it all.

I didn’t wake them.

Didn’t touch them.

But I hovered—again and again—over that edge.

Each time daring myself not to fall. Not to be controlled.

Not because I still believed.

Not even out of hope.

But out of ownership.

Because if nothing else, she was mine.

My prey.

Mine to chase.

Mine to kill.

Mine to spare.

Astarion’s.

Not the Huntmaster’s.

I whispered it like a mantra. Over and over.

Mine. Not his.

Astarion’s.

Not Malar’s.

Not Silverblood’s.

I didn’t know where that name came from.

But the moment I thought it, I knew it was true.

A monster’s title.

A hunter’s blessing.

A curse.

A choice.

And I—I still had a sliver of one left.

Even if all it meant was not yet.

---

We both kept drifting, not resting—caught in shallow breath's uneasy rhythm. It was less than two hours later when I finally opened my eyes. Still not rested. Still starving, the dome shimmered faintly overhead, pulsing like a breath.

She was already sitting up on the bedroll.

Her gaze had fixed on the cage again. The children. The silence.

They hadn’t made a sound in hours. Just shallow, haunted breathing.

Elenya rose, slow and quiet, bare feet against the stone and walking toward them. The boy flinched when she approached—growled once, low and uncertain, while the girl scurried back and started shaking.

She stopped.

She tilted her head, studying them.

I could see the thoughts turning behind her eyes—quick and quiet, like always. But there was something else now. Not quite grief. Not pity either.

Resignation, maybe.

She turned without a word, went to her pack, and retrieved some food. Nothing fresh—some dry bread, dried apricots, and a wrapped cheese wedge. She knelt and placed them carefully near the cage, not close enough to provoke panic. Not nearly enough to feed them fully. 

The children didn’t touch it.

She didn’t press them.

Instead, she looked over her shoulder at me. “Where are we?”

I met her eyes and sat up slowly.

“Warlock’s Crypt,” I answered, voice rough with disuse. “Mid-ring, in the Scarlet Enclave. Which… turns out to be a full Thayan district. Possibly diplomatic. Possibly something worse.”

I gestured loosely to the quiet ruin around us—the dusty tapestries, the cruel furniture, the stench of power long soaked into the walls.

“This is the residence of a now-deceased Red Wizard who, regrettably for him, happened to have a rather comfortable setup for my purposes.”

She didn’t move. Didn’t blink.

Just stared.

Not at me—at the rug under her feet. Then the bloodstain. Then the door I’d dragged the corpse behind.

Her voice was quiet—too quiet. The kind of quiet that comes before the blade strikes.

“You engaged with a necromancer.”

A pause. Her breath caught.

“Astarion. You could have been enthralled.”

A statement. Not a question. Not even anger, at first. Just a fact. Weighted. Heavy.

I smirked, half out of habit, half out of defence. I’d been waiting for this. Bracing for the sermon, the disappointment, the self-righteous scorn.

“Is that the part that bothers you? Really?” I asked, my tone razor-thin with irony. “Not the murder? Not that I slaughtered an unarmed man in his own home just because I needed a place to crash?”

I shrugged. “Please, darling, spare me the charade. Stop pretending to be—”

Her head snapped toward me, expression a mix of hurt and offence. The stormy blue of her eyes lifted immediately, revealing that deep blue peppered with lightning cracks. Her voice cut like cold steel—clean, final, impossible to ignore.

“Astarion, is that really what you think?” she said, stepping closer. “That I’d stand here and choose to moralize to you when you—when you could’ve been enthralled? Turned into some grotesque imitation of yourself? A puppet? Forever?”

She wasn’t shouting. Not yet. But her voice trembled at the edges—too furious, too afraid. I have never seen her react this way.

“I would’ve never known,” she said, quieter now. “Never seen it happen. You would’ve looked the same. Smiled the same. And I wouldn’t have known it wasn’t you. I would have died thinking I broke your chain while in reality I would have delivered you to another master.”

I blinked.

That… wasn’t the answer I’d prepared for.

Delivered to another master. 

Oh, if only you knew, little dove.

“No righteous fury, then?” I asked. “No lecture? No invocation of your god and his bleeding chains? You swore, remember? You said you’d never let me hurt anyone again.”

She looked up sharply—eyes like a lightening storm in on top of a blue ocean, raw and unforgiving.

And then she snapped.

“What the fuck are you talking about?"

“You said that to the Gur,” I spat. “Back in the woods, remember? When they had me surrounded.”

She looked at me incredulously.

"You mean the people who were hunting us and aiming crossbows at us? The people I slaughtered to save you? Flash news,” she spat, her voice suddenly too loud and too alive. “I FUCKING LIED. How could you think I would ever take your choice away? Astarion ... What the actual fuck ?”

The words landed like a slap. 

I hurt her, I really did hurt her. She has never lost her calm like this before.

“Is that really how you see me? Some preening, self-aggrandizing hypocrite? Marching around with moral high ground stitched to my back like a fucking flag? Taking away your agency?” Her laugh was hollow, bitter. “I hate hypocrisy.”

I said nothing.

She kept going—too fast now, like a dam breaking.

“I may not like the idea of unnecessary pain, or suffering, or any of the thousand ugly things you and I and every cursed soul in Toril have had to do to stay alive. But what you did,” Her voice dropped again, steady now, sharp as glass. “You did it because I left you no fucking choice.”

She stepped past me and started pacing now—tight, focused circles like a caged predator.

“I passed out in your arms. In enemy territory. No knowledge. No allies. Surrounded by threats we didn’t even understand. In a place filled with monsters that could enslave you. Left you with no magical backup. And why?” She jabbed a finger at her own chest. “Because I miscalculated. I got cocky. I didn’t bother wondering if the city even allowed lodging for visitors.”

Her hand dropped to her side, trembling.

“I made you my caretaker, all I fucking gave you was a blade. The knife I trusted to strike. So how in the hells do you expect me to stand here and wag a finger at you for doing exactly what I made inevitable? For fucking saving me. How is your killing whoever you killed any different from what I did to the Gur ?”

Her voice broke, not in pitch—but in weight. In the ache beneath every syllable.

“Also, how could you think I would ever judge you by some arbitrary moral standard I decided to uphold for myself? You have been killing all along. The troll, the half-elf Zenth, the boneclaw and other undead. I tried to avoid violence. But I never forced you to do so. I may have asked or begged, but I uphold those standards for myself. The keyword is myself you idiot. I never held your choices against you and would never. Even if you turn into something I cannot stomach, I will simply fucking leave.”

I didn’t look at her. Not yet. I didn’t think I could.

I didn't know how to deal with her like this. Especially not when every fibre of my being wanted me to bite her and drain her. 

But she wasn’t done.

“Even worse—how could you think I’d rather waste time condemning you for killing someone that kept FUCKING CHILDREN in a cage, rather than be terrified that you could’ve been enslaved by him for eternity?”

Silence followed.

I didn’t know what to say. I stared at her a moment longer, the weight of her words hanging in the still air. 

And every word she said had buried itself somewhere I didn’t know how to reach right now.

She turned to glance at the children again—small, silent, watching from behind the bars.

“They don’t look like they were about to be rescued by the good Red Wizard of Warlock’s Crypt. You fucking saved them as well.”

The corner of her mouth twitched—something between scorn and sorrow.

Silence.

It stretched between us like a drawn bowstring—tight, trembling, seconds from snapping.

She stood there, breathing hard, fury cooling into something quieter. Regret. Sadness.

And I—

I wasn’t thinking anymore.

I was scenting.

Her pulse had quickened.

Her throat was flushed.

A single bead of sweat traced her jaw's curve—salt, heat, and blood just beneath the skin.

My tongue pressed to the roof of my mouth.

No.

I clenched my jaw, nails digging into my palms until the skin broke.

She didn’t notice.

She approached toward the cage—toward the children—and that’s when the growl started. Not hers. Not mine.

The boy was growling.

Low. Warning.

But not at her.

At me.

I blinked. My eyes had narrowed, unbidden. My teeth were half-bared. One step forward and I hadn’t realized I’d taken it.

The boy's growl stopped.

The girl had gone still. Watching. Frozen prey.

And I…

Gods, I could taste them.

Not just their blood—their fear. It curled in the air like perfume, ripe and desperate. It tasted like hunger's answer. Like a promise whispered against the teeth.

The part of me that still wore my name screamed.

But the other part—

The Silverblood.

The beast.

It was demanding.

Then her gaze drifted back to me.

“What’s wrong with you, Astarion? It's like you reverted to...”

I paused.

No. 

Not now.

She saw too much.

She stepped closer, frowning faintly. “You’ve been… distant since the poison. I know you are mad at me, but... I don't know what to do. Can you help me understand what is going on? Why are you in pain?”

Her voice was soft. Familiar.

Wrong.

Too trusting.

She stepped toward me.

And that was when I saw it again— really saw it.

Her neck, bared slightly where her cloak had shifted.

The faint blue vein pulsing just beneath the surface.

So small.

So delicate.

So mine.

My prey.

My lips parted.

“I’m not mad,” I said quickly. “I’m not. I am not in pain either. Everything is fine.”

I could feel the fangs pressing against the edge of my gums.

Bite. Drain. Feed. Take her to the floor. Hold her still. Drink until nothing is left but silence—

She smiled—soft, sad before simply saying, “You are lying.”. It was the same smile that used to unravel me. The one that used to press warmth into the cold spaces of my chest.

Now?

Nothing.

I turned away, hand over my mouth, eyes squeezed shut. My breath came ragged. Shallow.

The taste of her heartbeat was still on my tongue.

She spoke again, gentler this time. “Astarion. What’s wrong? Did something happen? Did he do something to you?”

I couldn’t answer.

Because if I opened my mouth, I didn’t trust what would come out.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “For putting that on you. For being a liability—”

“Don’t say that,” I muttered. “You’re not.”

“But I was. And I know it.”

She didn’t say more.

I didn’t answer.

Blood.

Fangs.

A scream.

And I wanted it.

Gods, I wanted it.

I wanted to rip the children from their cage like rabbits in a snare. I wanted to feel their pulses break beneath my jaw. I wanted to drink her. Not gently. Not lovingly. I wanted to devour.

Because the beast was rising.

And it remembered the taste of power.

"Astraion? Talk to me, please! I am only trying to help. Why are you pulling away? Did I do something wrong?"

I looked past her at the bloodstained rug, the darkening dome overhead, and the children huddled in the cage like breathless relics.

“Enough,” I said. Not to her. To myself.

“I told you that everything is fine. Now, would you stop pestering me? We’ve already wasted six hours and only got four left to register before someone starts asking questions. That’s what matters now.”

I didn’t look at her. I couldn’t.

Sadness filled her face before the fogginess of her gaze reappeared and intensified. She blinked once. Whatever fire and life had sparked behind her eyes vanished. Her expression flattened—calcified, like grief turned to stone. 

She nodded and took a deep breath. 

“You’re right. Sorry for pushing and being a nuisance. ” She adjusted her cloak with the mechanical precision of someone folding away her voice.

“We’ve already wasted enough time—because of me. Let’s get to it.”

For the first time since I used the beastlord's blessing. I felt something other than hunger.

A profound, silent shattering behind my ribs. 

I wonder what that was.

---

The Red Wizard’s body lay where I’d left it—in the back room, stiff beneath a gaudy rug, reduced to a bundle of discarded flesh. Whatever legacy he’d hoped to build, whatever dominion he once clutched, now reeked of piss and preservation magic, curled like spoiled meat.

I didn’t look twice.

Just stepped over him and moved on.

Drawers scraped beneath my hands—some jammed with broken quills and inkpots long dried, others obsessively catalogued in that way spellcasters always favoured. His study was a ruin of ambition. Books toppled in uneven towers. Crates sealed with waxen sigils. Papers stacked like bones.

I cracked one crate.

The parchment inside groaned with age. Scrolls curled like corpses’ toes—yellowed, brittle, wards long faded.

Another crate. Then another.

That’s when I saw the pattern.

This wasn’t hoarding. It was a purpose. Obsession.

Netherese relics. Grimoires inked in iron and voidroot. Diagrams not of theory but of application. Runes to twist, to bind, to trap. And deeper still—pages that made even my stomach clench.

Soul-binding rituals.

Elaborate. Anatomically precise. Step-by-step instructions to sever a soul from its tether and stitch it elsewhere.

Not necromancy.

Desecration. Preservation by mutilation.

Magic whispered in blood cults and erased from civilized tongues.

If this was real, Elenya’s gamble had just paid off in dividends.

I turned slightly, holding out the scroll without meeting her eyes.

“You’ll want this,” I murmured. “Filth your patrons collect like fine wine.”

No answer.

When she finally spoke, her voice was cold. Controlled. Weapon-sharp.

“They’ll want these. We trade them in… and they’ll owe us.”

Her eyes flicked to the scrolls, but not to me.

No glance.
No brush of fingers.
No whispered joke.

Nothing.

Just silence. Calculated. Methodical.

Good.

Because I wasn’t sure I could bear it if she did. Not when her scent still clung to my throat like a challenge. Not when the taste of her heartbeat still danced behind my teeth.

I turned back to the crates before I made a mistake. Before I reminded her—and myself—that I wasn’t safe to be close to.

Not yet. Maybe not ever.

She was already rummaging through his other effects, retrieving the red runestone—a credential she could twist into a Thayan diplomat’s identity, complete with sigils and titles to keep suspicion away.

It would work.

The last chest I opened revealed a Thayan sigil, dark and intricate—alongside correspondence marked with House Noctelith.

And the pieces fell into place.

He’d been bartering with Noctelith for soul-binding rites. Dangerous.

Elenya approached as I surveyed the pile, moving with her usual quiet precision.

“Did you find more documents?” Her tone was sharp. Focused.

I nodded.

“I need to study this,” she said, brushing the correspondence with something close to reverence. “With his ring, and the right attunement, I can transfer his residency. We’d be golden.”

Her breath caught as her gaze darted between diagrams.

“This man was powerful, Astarion,” she said, finally meeting my eyes. “I’m surprised you killed him so quickly. Even caught off guard. That’s… impressive.”

No warmth in her voice. Just calculation. She was studying me now like one of the scrolls.

She always saw too much.

“I need to see if he was expected anywhere,” she added. “If we’re going to use this place, we need to know who might come knocking.”

Then, without pause:

“Do you mind going to the Foreign Affairs office? Register the Scarlet Enclave as your residence. Use the runestone. Map the district. Divide and conquer?”

She phrased it like an option. It wasn’t.

I nodded slowly, even as something in me tightened. A part of me didn’t want to leave her—not while the hunger still coiled under my skin like a parasite—but I needed space.

I needed air.

I needed to not bury my fangs in her throat and drink until everything soft in me turned to ash.

As she bent over wards and sigils, I adjusted my cloak and left.

---

Very little exploring was done.

I stalked through the mid-ring in silence, retracing our steps. Corpses lined the alleys like forgotten prayers. Some fresh. Others ancient. All of them prey.

Already dead.

Already claimed.

The air was thick with that particular silence of a city ruled by hunger and hierarchy.

Eventually, I reached the perimeter—where the paved thoroughfares thinned into the bureaucratic belly of the Crypt. There, a ledger waited.

When asked about the office, it didn't speak. Just nodded and motioned for me to follow.

I could kill it.
I should kill it.

I was so tired.

When I asked about our destination. The flat and mechanical voice of my escort whispered from the side: “All immigration, defence, and registration proceedings fall under the authority of House Vhol.”

We arrived at a monolithic cube of blackened stone—impersonal, imposing, thrumming with magic. No banners. No guards. Just a carved obsidian door that opened as we approached.

Inside, it was worse.

Rows of undead scribes hunched over granite desks. Necrotic lanterns floated in precise formation above them, casting no warmth. Vampire spawns moved like shadows between the desks—filing, speaking, commanding.

So many spawns.

These were Vhol’s. That much became obvious.

So— this was how the machine ran.

Spawns directing the lesser undead. Collars beneath collars. An elegant system of control. It would seem that House Vhol would have at least one vampire lord with it to have so many spawns working together.

The hunger started to hum beneath my skin again—like a fever. Like rage. 

When my turn came, I stepped forward, placing the black runestone on the slab of carved obsidian.

“I am Almirth Heshneer,” I said, voice even. “Spawn of Hamezaar, Master of Pholzubbalt. Visiting to assess potential trade. I am currently residing in the Scarlet Enclave, hosted by a Thayan acquaintance.”

The zombie behind the desk recorded every word with an inkless quill on parchment. No ink. No other tools. Just transcription magic and stillness.

Questions followed.

Arrival time. Purpose. Prior contacts. I kept as close to the truth as I dared.
The slab beneath my hands flared once—quietly—and I felt the Zone of Truth hum through my bones.
It pressed. Whispered.

Tell me everything.

But Eleyna’s wards held. And the Potion of Mindshielding did the rest.

They asked about the second spawn on record. 
I kept my voice flat.

“My sister departed after arrival. Escort duty only. She may return tomorrow if summoned.”

The zombie’s head twitched once, unnaturally fast.

“Teleportation exemptions are granted to permanent residents only," he then looked more closely at the the red runestone of the wizard and started casting something on it before finally adding," However, provided your host allows her to bypass their personal wards, she may appear directly within the residence as they already have one in place.”

I nodded again. 
Noted.

“Here is the list of controlled goods. Would you like to declare any acquisitions obtained within city limits?” the zombie asked. “All magical artifacts, knowledge, and living cattle must be registered after three days to avoid confiscation.”

I blinked.

Living cattle.

The words were casual. Expected. Routine.

“May I bring in cattle from outside?” I asked.

“Yes, however, cattle trade and other activities are highly regulated and will require a decent, proper registration and procedures. If the cattle are for private consumption, the process is simpler,” the clerk replied. “Unmarked cattle roaming without a registered stone holder is fair game. No claims may be filed for injury or death. You will be responsible for its behaviour.”

“And if I travel with it?” I pressed.

“Cattle in transit must wear regulation collars. Clearly showcasing intended use.”

A cold, familiar image flickered behind my eyes—

The children.
Their collars.
The scent of blood in the rug.
The silence when they looked at me.

“And if I don’t intend to sell it?” I asked, quieter now. “Only feed.”

The zombie’s eyes flicked over me, unreadable.

“As said previously, no prohibition applies if you do not wish to register it as marketable property. You would only need a personal-use collar in this situation. It does not require proof of lineage nor examination and is not concerned by import regulations or customs duties. However, it must always remain within private quarters or be supervised by you. No movement outside the residence alone or without its collar. ” 

I bit my tongue before I said she is not cattle.

Because in this place?

She was.
And so was I.
She was prey
I was predator.

"So the only ones living in the city are all property? Strange, I thought my host was very much still alive." 

"The city allow few living citizens and visitors. The Enclave probably have the highest living population amongst any faction. This is due to their special status. They also have their own process," he said, looking at the runestone with barely masked disdain. 

Interesting.

"The other living citizens and visitors are very rare. All of them are managed by his lordship's team directly. If you wish to invite a living associate, they would need special permission beforehand from House Vhol." The sneer on his face deepened.

" Oh really?! The city even accepts living visitors." 

"Technically yes but, these authorizations are pretty rare and almost impossible to obtain. Most attempt to come here disguised as cattle." He looked directly into my eyes, "Declaring an unvetted associate as a cattle to grant them acess is strictly prohibited and punishable by immediate termination of the visitor and confiscation of the cattle."

I nodded. Filed it away.

"Far from me the idea, I barely get along with my siblings, let alone with my lessers. I was just worried that my manners were lacking toward my host because I thought him mortal, while he may have been just disguising himself so well that it tricked even my scent. Fret not, I am not in the habit of fraternizing with my food."

Now he nodded, seemingly vindicated. 

Very interesting.

"I take it you did not know your host before arrival. How were you able to secure a partnership? Was there any exchange of regulated properties?"

"Not at all, nothing more than good old nepotism and favour calling."

" What favour did you offer?" 

"Oh, please, you wound me. I haven't offered that bloodbag a single thing. It just happened that my hometown has a long history with Thay, even if not always peaceful. Nonetheless, Many Thayan vampires and mages used to visit the mauselums necrotopia's when its doors were still open. Some still do even now, due to their, how should I call it, lingering friendship with dear father. When we discovered no visitors' lodgings were available in the city, we simply sent a message home and were given his name. My host was similarly instructed to host us by one of his superiors. To my displeasure, we learned his nature only upon meeting him. Had I known what he was, I would have protested, but alas, father's instruction. Why is there an issue with such dealings? Please do tell me there is one. A big one would be better, so I can request a different arrangement." 

A slight smile appeared on his rotting features. " None whatsoever, as long as no undocumented exchange of controlled goods or knowledge occurred. It is an acceptable means of acquiring hosting. If your dealings lead you to be sponsored by a different faction or individual later on, you must give your runestone to a ledger and signal the change."

"Hopefully, soon enough. What are these runestones?" I said, faking disappointment.

"Proof of status and authorized stays." The zombie continued, unprompted, as if ticking through some internal checklist. “Due to your current status, certain restrictions apply. You are registered under a black runestone : temporary visitor. Limited access. No teleportation rights. One time, only temporary passage right. No access to many areas. No undeclared trade activity beyond personal sustenance. ”

It pointed a bony digit toward the stone in the crate behind him.

I glanced at it, noting now the faint shimmer of runes inlaid around its base—colour-coded.

“Black is for transients,” the zombie said. “ Grey is for permanent-access holders. Colored runestones denote full residency under a recognized house or enclave.”

I gestured lightly. “And how does one acquire grey? Or... colored?”

“Application,” it answered. “And sponsorship. You must either apply through the central registrar at House Vhol for the grey one or be vouched for by a recognized faction representative for the colored one.”

I arched a brow. “What of the Scarlet Enclave?”

“Thayans can apply on their own to the enclave representative, which will be later verified by House Vhol. They have limited stones that they are authorized to give only to their citizens. Here they remain aliens, tolerated guests, with citizen status, but no sponsoring privileges to outsiders,” the zombie said flatly.

Of course. The Thayans were parasites in their own fashion—perched delicately in a city that hated them, yet powerful enough to remain tolerated. Useful, but not trusted.

"Okay, so if I understand correctly, once I secure enough dealings, I can directly apply to this central registrar for permanent access?" 

"Exactly." 

"Well, thank you, that was most informative.  Before I leave, may I request two of those collars? only the personal feeding ones or whatever they are called.” I asked, letting my voice drip with casual politeness. “Now that I know it's possible, I'd rather have my sister return with more familiar bloodbags. No disrespect to the city stocks, which I am sure are fine, but we tend to be quite particular about feeding.”

The zombie paused just long enough to make the silence uncomfortable, then scribbled something down with his bony fingers before sliding me a slip of parchment with a seal at the bottom across the desk.

“Present this at the customs desk, at the front entrance,” it droned. “They will issue your collars. Remember— for personal consumption only. Should you wish to sell or trade cattle, you must apply for a mercantile exchange permit through House Vhol or the customs desk, depending on the value of the cattle.”

I thanked the clerk, stepped aside, and tried not to think about the slip of parchment burning a hole in my pocket.

Two collars. TYPE CR45

For private use and personal consumption.

If the entry hall had been quiet—deathlike in its stillness, this place thrummed with grim activity.

Chains clinked.

Quills scratched.

Incantations droned in monotone from the far wall, where a bent-backed scribe whispered through an endless stack of parchment.

Crates lined the walls, stacked high in cold symmetry.

Identical to those we’d seen on the caravans.

Mortals filled the chamber.

Some were collared, shackled, and trembling.

Others dazed—compliant—trailing handlers in crimson and bone-threaded robes like livestock too tired to resist.

Some in cages. 

Gods, the cages.

So many.

And so many mortals inside.

Not prisoners.

Not criminals.

Inventory.

And suddenly—I couldn’t breathe.

The smell hit me first.

Sweat. Magic. Blood not yet spilled. That… taste in the air. The one you never forget.

The smell of waiting to be used.

The cages were the same. The collars. The indifference.

This wasn’t just cruelty.

Not really.

Cruelty, at least, requires intention. You can only be cruel to a person. This… this was something worse. This was logistics.

People being processed like cargo. Like things. Just like Cazador and Godey used us. If only on a grander scale. A whole system built to make you forget you were someone before the shackles.

I’d lived this. I was this.

However, the disgust that rose in me wasn’t just mine.

It pulsed from that deeper place—Malar’s influence—gnawing at my ribs, pricking my gums.

It was pure revulsion.

This was no hunt.

No sacred culling.

This was slaughter —sanitized and systemic.

Ordered. Organized. Civilized.

There was no chase. No skills. No fear. No struggle. No rush or chance of escape.

It wasn’t sport. It wasn’t even survival.

These were no prey. 

Only cattle. 

It was… commerce.

This was indecent.

Unnatural.

I moved through the space with feigned indifference. As I struggled to keep my hunger not for the mortal but for their farmer. The Huntmaster's mark will and desire aligned with mine as it wanted to tear down this monstrosity. As I advanced, I barely attracted any notice. A glance from a boneclaw. A nod from a skeleton. No one stopped me. It helped that I looked like I belonged here.

Yet the utter disgust kept thrashing at my ribs. 

Kill, destroy, burn, purify.

Hunt!

I reached the ledger post—an older elf zombie with half a jaw, and a voice that sounded grumbly like rust peeling off iron. “Purpose ?” the elf rasped without looking up.

I handed over the slip. Managing to contain my blood lust by a thread.

After a moment, he stamped it with a circular sigil and pointed with a gnarled quill. “Room six. Red for personal use. Give this to the handler.”

I could not answer, nor speak. Not pretend normalcy. I felt the beast's desire to destroy and devour everything here. So I simply took the paper and nodded.

Finding the blasted open room with a low ceiling took me longer than reasonable. It was lined with shelves and racks. Collars of every material and hue hung like a low-end jeweller's display: iron runed in silver, barbed leather. Each bore a tag with a sigil, a function, and a status. It was green for breeding. Grey for experiment. Blue for mage-thralls. Black for phylactory fuel. White for Feeding"

And red for personal use.

I handed the stamped parchment to the assistant at the counter. A female presenting wight. She glanced at it, then pulled two red collars from the hanging line. “Dual signature and further documentation are required if you intend to register them and sell later. Otherwise, off-record personal use only.”

I accepted the collars. They pulsed faintly in my hands—warm, or maybe it was my blood that was boiling. I kept seeing my claw dig into her jaws and rip down that husk.

I turned without comment, the red bands tucked under my cloak. 

I wanted to hunt everything here.

---

When I returned, she was still cataloguing.

Scrolls, runes, dusty folios—her hands moved with a careful rhythm across the desk, as if the world hadn’t shifted. As if I hadn’t just walked through hell on a leash of self-control.

She barely looked up. Just opened the door, nodded once, and returned to her work.

Good.

Because I was hanging by a thread.

The hunger wasn’t gnawing anymore.

It was singing.

Screaming.

Loud and steady. A thrum beneath my skin. A second heartbeat—unnatural and urgent. It hadn’t even been six hours since I called on Malar’s blessing, but it already felt like weeks of starvation.

How long was I expected to survive like this?

Vampiric hunger was bad enough—cold, methodical. It had rules. Patterns. This?

This was chaos.

Heat. Fury.

The need to maim. To ruin. To tear joyfully.

She moved to the study, glancing at the children asleep in the corner.

I couldn’t hear them breathe.

But I could smell them.

My head pounded.

Hunt. Prey. Kill. Feed. Cull. Blood. Kill.

I was unravelling.

And then—

My knees buckled.

No elegance. No grace. I collapsed like a drunk, hitting the wall with a graceless thud. My body spasmed once. One hand clawed at the doorframe. The other curled into a fist so tight it trembled.

She came to me.

She didn’t hesitate.

Something shattered behind her—a jar, maybe—but she ran.

“Astarion?” Her voice was sharp with fear. But not fear of me. Fear for me.

Gods help me—that made it worse.

Her scent hit me like fire.

Warm. Flood. Mine. Prey. Feed.

“I’m fine,” I croaked.

A lie. So thin it tore on my tongue.

She didn’t argue. Just eased me down into the nearest chair, hands gentle but firm. Like she thought she could ground me. Hold me here.

But the blood was still on me. Everywhere. Hers. Mine. Malar’s. It seeped through my memory like it had soaked my skin.

She reached for my face.

“Don’t,” I rasped.

“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” she said simply.

No offence. No hurt. Just truth.

That’s all I wanted to say. You. This. Something kind in the dark.

But I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t breathe.

“I won’t say anything,” she added softly, kneeling beside me. “But I’m not walking away, either.”

I pressed both palms to my eyes.

Trying to blind myself. To her. To everything.

“Leave me alone,” I muttered.

I wanted to drain her. Tear through the walls. Hunt everything in sight. I was choking on it.

“Astarion,” she said gently, “you’re in so much pain—”

“You promised,” I hissed, dragging every word through clenched teeth. “You said you'd stay until I told you otherwise. I'm telling you now.”

The room pulsed around us.

“Leave me the fuck alone. ”

Silence.

She paused. Confused.

She didn’t move.

She didn’t flinch.

But her scent—

Gods.

It poured into me.

Too close.

Too warm.

Too good.

Sickening. Perfect. Mine.

My prey.

And I—

I snapped.

It was instant.

One blink, and her back slammed into the wall with a crack. Her yelp burst through my haze like a shattering wineglass.

I had her pinned.

Her wrists were crushed to stone. Her chest heaving against mine. My fangs bared. Breathless.

Close.

Too close.

One second more, and I'd—

“Astarion,” she whispered, voice hoarse against the wall, “are you hungry? Is that what this is?”

Her eyes searched mine—wide, open.

Only afraid I was in pain.

I didn’t answer.

Couldn’t.

I was shaking.

With effort. With restraint. With the sheer force it took not to sink my fangs into the curve of her neck and drink until this ache dissolved into silence.

“Because if you are,” she said, softer now, “you can feed. You can. It’s okay. It's been three days, but I didn't realize it got that bad.”

I bared my teeth without meaning to.

“Don’t tempt me,” I snarled, voice splintered and raw. “Gods, don’t you dare tempt me right now.”

“I’m not tempting you. I’m giving you permission.”

Her pulse fluttered beneath my hands. Her scent sang mermaid under moonlight. I could feel her blood—its warmth, its rhythm—like a hymn pressed against my lips.

I looked at her throat. I heard it.

“I don’t want your permission,” I growled. “I want—”

You.

Your warmth. Your breath. Your blood. Your silence. Your pain. Your scream. Your death. Your everything.

I slammed my eyes shut. My grip on her wrists tightened before I realized.

She didn’t flinch.

“Then take it,” she whispered. “Take whatever you need. If it's something I can't afford to give. I will figure it out. I don't want you feeling like that.”

I opened my eyes.

Saw her.

Saw me.

Saw the monster and the man locked in a still frame of ruin.

“I can’t,” I choked.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t trust myself,” I breathed. “Because I don’t know if I’ll stop. Because I don’t know if it’s me asking or him. ”

A beat.

Panic in her eyes flooded 

" Who? Did someone command you, Astarion? Tell me!"

“You told me it would come with a cost,” I muttered. “But I didn’t think it would feel like this.”

“What?” she asked.

“I used Malar’s blood,” I whispered. “I called on his blessing.”

Her breath caught. “Oh, Astarion…” Her voice broke around the edges. “I’m so sorry. What are you feeling?”

“Like I want more,” I said. “More blood. More death. I feel like a beast.”

The words hung between us like a curse.

She didn’t recoil.

Didn’t argue.

She pulled a scrap of cloth from her pack, dampened it with water, and wiped my hands with the same care one might use on a wounded animal—tender, cautious, unflinching.

“You’re not a beast, Astarion.”

“No,” I said. “But I think I have one. And it’s looking out through my eyes.”

Still, she stayed. Not moving. Not pushing. Not resisting.

Then she spoke.

“The offer still stands, if you need to feed,” she said, “I’m right here.”

I looked at her. Really looked.

She meant it. No flourish. Just her throat, her trust, her terrible, beautiful mercy.

It made me want to scream.

“Don’t,” I said, sharper. “Are you out of your mind. Just don't. Please. Don’t.”

Her brow furrowed. “Astarion—”

“I won't stop.”

The truth cut me open more than the hunger ever could.

“I don’t know what’s holding the leash,” I whispered. “Whether it’s guilt or willpower or sheer exhaustion. But it’s slipping.”

I turned my face from her, shame thick in my throat.

Silence.

Then she brushed my hand.

Just a brush. Light as a thread.

She leaned in, forehead nearly touching mine.

“You’ll pull through,” she whispered. “The effects are temporary.”

“I want to kill you right now,” I growled, fangs pressing forward. “You need to leave.”

“You’ve stopped before,” she said.

“That was not the same.”

“No,” she said. “But it was still you.”

Our eyes met.

Storm-blue. Threaded with lightning. Eyes that knew too much still looked at me like I was worth something.

“I’m scared,” I confessed, voice cracking.

“I know.”

“I don’t want this to kill you.”

“You won’t.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because if you try,” she said, dropping her head slowly until it rested on my shoulder, “I’ll stop you.”

No threat. No judgment. Just a vow.

And gods, it helped.

I closed my eyes.

“I won’t feed,” I murmured. “Not while it feels like this.”

But the truth was bleeding through every thought:

The Hunt had felt right.

Not necessary. Not defensive. Not protective.

Just... true.

Like instinct. Like clarity. Like the deepest part of me finally breathing.

I had called it freedom when I escaped Cazador. But what if that wasn’t freedom at all?

What if this were?

The chase. The kill. The power.

I looked at my hands. Pale. Still. The same hands that had torn out a man’s throat not with a dagger—but with delight.

The craving throbbed in my gums.

She had moved us to the reception hall, laying out the bedrolls. The dome spell flickered as she recast it.

I could walk to her. Drain her. Feel the warmth fade from her skin as her blood became mine.

She wouldn’t even realize it until it was too late.

But I didn’t move.

Not yet.

Because something deep inside still whispered no.

That voice was smaller now. Quieter.

But not gone.

Not yet.

And still—beneath everything—one question hissed like a lit fuse:

Would it really be so bad to stop fighting?

Because mercy hadn’t saved me.

The Hunt had.

No, the small voice snapped. Her mercy did.

I don’t remember lying down.

But suddenly I was on the floor, curled near the dome’s edge. The cool stone pressed against my spine.

And then—her voice.

She was singing.

Soft. Low. Her song of rest.

Not like before. Not for show. Not for hope.

This was lullaby-soft. The kind of softness meant to soothe a wild animal.

I closed my eyes.

And my mind crumbled in stupor and visions.

It was chaos at first—blades, screams, heat. Blood like ink on the inside of my skull. My laughter echoes like war drums.

I was running. No—I was hunting.

Everything bled. Everything broke. Everything feared me.

But slowly—

The drums faded.

The blood receded.

The beast curled tighter in its cage.

In me. 

Not trancing. Never trancing.

It won't let me rest before another kill. 

Notes:

Thank you for reading.
This one was dark—Astarion is fraying, and Elenya is trying to hold him together without losing herself.

All your comments are deeply appreciated. Thank you again!
Keep letting me know what you felt.

Chapter 31: Anathema and Hunger

(Ilmater’s POV)

---

Ilmater remembered the decree.

Undead—anathema.

Declared in divine authority. Righteous. Swift. Final.

Tyche had warned him. So had Murdane. Even Sune, in her own way.

But he hadn’t listened.
He’d wanted to help Lathander.
He’d wanted to lessen suffering.

He hadn’t seen then what he sees now.

So much time has passed. So much has broken.

The Morninglord’s idealism. Tyr’s judgments. The law that bound the Triad ideals—and led to Helm’s death—unraveling like a tapestry woven with too much certainty and too little love.

And Ilmater?

He learned. Slowly. Bitterly.

Loss after loss.

What he once called justice had been a cage. What he once called mercy had become a wall. He had meant to ease pain, to combat evil, but all he had preserved was purity—his own, the Triad’s, the sanctity of pain. And in doing so, he had denied mercy itself.

Most undead deserved that denial.
But some did not.

Some needed him.

Like the child of the night who whispered his name while his master carved his back.

So young when turned.
So naive.
He hadn’t seen the maw. The trap. He embraced damnation out of despair.

It all happened so fast.

And now—Ilmater could do nothing.

No god could.

The boy would suffer for eternity.

Because Ilmater had bound himself.

Because he had limited his creed.

And now it could not be undone. Not without endangering everything.

Too much of him was tied to Law. Too much to Lathander’s shining ideal of Good. Too much to Tyr’s vision of Order.

To rip out the rot meant uprooting the whole. Especially after Helm’s death.

No. To change this, he would have to change himself. Again.

Because once more, his creed was broken.

Sune had shown him that—not with argument, but with presence.

In her arms—yes, arms, for she never feared to hold what hurt—he glimpsed what his mercy lacked.

The same thing that child of the night had in abundance.

Hunger.

That broken creature, with blood in his mouth and prayers in his throat.
He brimmed with hunger.

Hope and hunger.
The drive not only to endure, but to live.
To want.

A hunger wrapped in a man’s skin.

Ilmater had felt it. Recognized it.

The very thing he himself lacked.

Not just endurance—but the ache to thrive. To take joy. To want.

Ilmater had always borne suffering. Always witnessed. But never this.

At first, he turned away.

Told himself the boy was an exception. That most undead were vile. That this one would become vile.

But wasn’t mercy supposed to be indiscriminate?

The child was innocent.

What sin had he truly chosen for himself?

None worthy of this.

Ilmater pondered. And kept watching.

Every time the boy prayed, Ilmater watched.

And the boy prayed often.

But Ilmater kept denying what he knew.

This was wrong.

Deeply wrong.

And he saw it clearly, a century too late.

A century of torture. A century of endurance. A century since he had watched the boy’s back carved open—sigils, punishments too cruel for mortals, let alone for one tricked into hunger.

Only then did Ilmater see the scheme.

The farm.
The leash.
The ritual hidden under law.

And when he understood, rage swallowed him.

“How is this lawful?” he cried into silence.

But it was.

Because the boy was undead.
Because divine law said so.
Because Ilmater had once said so.

Anathema.

Damned.

So no one cared.

Not even the gods.

The father of lies and his minions always knew how to twist a contract.

Ilmater had done nothing.

And that—was the sin.

Bound by the law he once believed would protect the suffering, he could not reach the boy. Could not ease the hunger. Could not answer the prayer.

And yes—the child had prayed.

Kept praying.

He could not look away.

So he watched.

And learned.

He saw how the boy hated him. Screamed his name in fury.

Ilmater did not resent him.

His rage was honest. Justified.

And still Ilmater could not help.

Even when the child showed mercy.

A selfless act. A sacrifice.

He used Ilmater’s creed.

And paid dearly.

Ilmater saw him then.

Not just the pain. But the truth beneath it.

A child. Hungry. Lonely. Still praying.

Not for salvation.
Not for forgiveness.

Just… for an end.

That was when Ilmater wept. Not for grief. For guilt.

Buried in stone. Claws scraping. Lips cracked. Mind rotting with starvation.

Still, he prayed.

To Selûne. To Shar. To the Seldarine. To anyone.

But mostly—to Ilmater.

Not for salvation.

For release.

And the voice reached him, ragged across the planes:

“Kill me. Please.”

And Ilmater had done nothing.

Because he could not.

Because he had forbidden himself to.

He had mistaken denial for mercy.

And in doing so, damned thousands like him.

That prayer echoed the same words Ilmater once heard from his little one.

“Kill me.”

He had answered her.

Why not him?

What was the difference?

A breath? A birth? A rule?

They had suffered the same. Endured the same. Prayed the same.

The truth was unbearable.

By declaring all undead anathema, he had not only denied abusers their sin—he had denied victims their salvation.

He had seen only desecrated corpses. Revenants.

Never asked:

What of those turned and trapped?
What of those too scared to die?
What of those made monsters before they could speak?

Naive. Perhaps cowardly.

How could he guide his little one—his most beloved—through desire, when he had only ever taught denial?

How could he show her the way out of the fog, if he did not understand hunger?

She survived, yes.

But she never wanted to live.

She stopped wanting altogether.

The child of the night did.

Even now, he clawed at the grave’s edge with blistered hands and bloodied lips—still reaching.

And Ilmater knew:

He might yet become a monster.

But not because he was born one.
Not because undeath made him one.

Because they left him no other choice.

Ilmater bowed his head.

“How many like him have prayed?”
“How many have I failed?”

Because want was not clean. Hunger not holy.

But it was real.

And Ilmater had always claimed to serve what was real in suffering.

So how could he deny it now?

Null laughed softly in the corners of his mind.

He remembered her wager. Not with Lolth—with him.

Her mischief. Her knife-truths. Her teasing.

“Maybe you should learn some of my trickery, Crying One.”

At the time he had dismissed it. She was right, as always.

Now he wondered.

What use was truth, if a falsehood could save?
What good was godhood, if a fae could plant freedom where he could not?

He whispered, alone:

“Enough.”

Not vow. Not command. Just hope.

Hope—his undoing.

But he would not become apathetic again.
Not witness and do nothing again.

He might yet become something else.

The child of the night had chosen mercy once.

That was enough to justify Ilmater’s choice.

So he acted.

He gave the little one the boy’s thread.

Just a nudge.

No mission. No decree. No divine call.

Just a dream. A direction. A name.

Astarion Ancunín.

That was all he could do.

If she chose to help him? That was her will. Her choice.

Mortal will was undeniable. Even the Overlord could not deny it.

A loophole.

The third he had ever used.

One with Loviatar and Bane.
One for his little one.
One for the child of the night.

Maybe that could be a new scream for him.

A new change.

So he might take the mantle his followers bore.

A wager, yes.

Hunger. Mercy. Choice.

A new name.

And maybe—just maybe—that would be enough to break this never-ending cycle.

Chapter 32: Apathy or Madness

Summary:

Maybe it's not just the fog that is corrupted.
But the body can't think on it too long.
Astarion needs help.

Eleyna's POV 

---

The room was quiet.

Too quiet.

Not the kind that brings peace—no. This was the kind that pressed against the ribs, that filled the ears with phantom sound, that made the air itself feel like it was holding its breath.

The silence before the shatter.

The dome hummed faintly at the edge of her senses, a heartbeat of protective magic pulsing low and steady. But it didn’t soothe her. It only made the rest of the stillness feel unnatural—like the quiet was deliberate. Like something had curled in on itself and gone still.

Elenya sat motionless, listening. Waiting. Her hand hovered over her satchel—not for a weapon, not for a spell component, but for something smaller. Thinner.

The journal.

She pulled it free, opened it with careful fingers. The leather was worn soft under her touch. The pages bore stains—ink smudged by weather, ash, or blood. She couldn’t always tell which anymore. But she knew exactly where to turn.

Day 32.

Four days ago.

She read it again, though she already knew every line. They were etched into her memory like quiet warnings.

But still—she needed to see them. To feel the ink beneath her fingertips. To remember who he had been, just days ago.

Before the Beastlord’s blessing.

Before the spiral began again.

---

Recovery Journal – Day 32
Patient #421 – 
Recorded by: Donor / Healer

---

Observation Summary:
The patient continues to exhibit exponential increases in physical strength and reflex coordination since transitioning exclusively to sentient blood. There has been a marked stabilization of psychical state—less volatility, fewer dissociative lapses, improved emotional regulation. Lucidity periods are lengthening, and engagement with surroundings has sharpened.

---

Rule #1 Almost completely dissolved:
Does no longer trigger compulsion responses.
Even subtle cues (tone shifts, sudden proximity, resistance gestures) can still activate engrained behavioral patterns shaped by years of conditioning. While these reactions are diminishing, their root—the punishment-reward neural tethering—is intact and requires vigilance. Recovery does not mean absence of triggers.

---

New Psychological Markers:

• Emergent symptoms of codependent bonding observed toward donor.
  Patient demonstrates proximity-seeking, protective hyperfocus, mild anxiety when donor leaves visual range.
  Emotional transference likely accelerated by blood exchange dynamic. Also, seeks increased levels of non sexual intimacy during and post feeding.
  Note: Currently manageable; may be beneficial in regulating some past trauma responses, and building and maintaining a boundary establishing systems.

---

Biological Stabilization:
Signs of normalized biological function include:

• Return of appetite regulation

• Sleep-like trance regularity

• Restoration of temperature equilibrium (rare in vampires)

• Reappearance of subtle hormonal cycles (possible vestiges of elven biology adapting) 

---

Causal Analysis of Instability:
It is now evident that much of the patient’s previous volatility stemmed not from inherent pathology, but from the stupor state—a state of prolonged starvation and psychophysiological collapse. This stupor was further compounded by 16 decades of violent abuse, ritual dehumanization, Sex slavery, torture and trauma conditioning that fractured baseline, identity, sense of worth and self-regulation mechanisms.

Long-term concealment mechanisms remain active (dissociation, humor, performance), and will require slow unwinding under safe conditions. Healing prognosis improves with every day of nutrient stability positive reinfocement and emotional continuity.

---

Memory Disruptions:
Patient made, repeated references to gaps in memory—pre- and post-turning. Some memories appear to have been forcibly extracted, altered, or self-censored.

Possible clues, Subject turned at age 39, extremely young by elven standards—not yet at full frontal lobe maturity.

No current reference to Reverie contents. Nor to past lifes. 
This may be significant.
Monitor trance states and track dream-like indicators for subconscious leakage or memory flare events.

---

Rule #4 Tension:
Patient is beginning to question Rule #4 (“Thou shalt know that thou art mine”), encouraged by therapeutic dialogue and environmental stability. Donor's influence is central to this shift.

Less and less conditioning and compulsion response are observed. 
Best reactions are obtained when the rule is denied during or post feeding.  

Positive reinforcement, permissive touch, and non-reactive responses to power displays appear to stabilize his ego state.

This is fragile work. The body is healing. The mind is only just beginning to wake.

---

Next Steps:

• Continue blood exchange routine: bi-daily, controlled setting, with affirmational post-care.

• Observe next trance: note duration, physical state, and emergence patterns.

• Begin reintroduction of neutral emotional vocabulary (joy, fear, want)

• Prepare for possible backlash should Rule #2 or #3 reassert through residual conditioning.

---

Astarion lay near the edge of the dome.

Not just at the perimeter—outside it.

Not like he was warding himself from a threat, but becoming one.
Not inside, where the warmth lingered faintly and the magical protections wrapped soft as a cloak.

No, he lay just beyond reach.

Like he wanted the barrier between us. Like it was safer that way.

Like he still believed I needed protecting.
From him.

As if I’d ever refuse him entry. As if the inside of the dome of my life wasn’t already his.

He wasn’t even close enough to warm himself. Just… near.

Near the edge.
Like a statue waiting to be broken.
Like a dead man pretending he wasn’t.

His skin had that marble stillness again. No blinking. No shifting. Just that eerie, porcelain hush that meant he was locked somewhere deep inside himself.

He hadn’t spoken in over an hour.

And deep down, we both knew why.

Curse Eater lay beside him, untouched. But I could feel it—like a vibration under my skin.

Hungry.

So was he.

His eyes weren’t red anymore. Not really.
More like iron rust. Dull. Unfocused. 
Like they were tracking something that wasn’t there. Or nothing at all.
Like he was stuck—halfway between.
Too starved to trance.
Too consumed to move.
Too lost to even ask for help.

I’d seen hunger in him before.

The sharp kind, all fangs and flirtation.
The desperate kind, where his hands trembled and his voice cracked with restraint.
Even the ravenous kind, when the beast in him clawed against his ribs and begged to be let loose.

But this?

This wasn’t hunger.

This was erosion.

Collapse.

Like his self—his will, his memory, his personhood—was peeling back from the inside, flaking away like ash.

And I could feel it.

The pull.

That same pull that had started everything.
The one that had dragged me across half the continent to find him.
The one that whispered in my gut when something was wrong.

It was humming again.

Not in fear. In warning.

Something was hurting him. Something old.

Something bestial.

Something that wasn’t just him was stretching too far in his chest.

The blood of Malar. Still burning.

His hunger—still calling.

He should have come down by now.

The worst of it should have passed.

Had we misread the item? Misread the nature of the blessing?

No.

No, I’d checked it myself.
The weave had been categorical.

The divine energy would flare, and then recede.

Full dissipation after one night of rest.

But that was the problem, wasn’t it?

He couldn’t rest.

His body wouldn’t let him. His mind refused to go quiet.

Something was keeping him awake. Something was keeping him here.

I took control of the body and went to him.

“Astarion,” I said softly, crossing the dome’s edge, letting it ripple over my skin like a sigh. “You need to rest.”

He didn’t answer.

Didn’t move.

Didn’t even blink.

Worry was eating me from the inside out, gnawing at the edge of every thought. The pull was no longer just a whisper in my gut—it was buzzing behind my eyes now, a low, insistent hum that refused to quiet.

Something was wrong.

Not just the kind of wrong that can be comforted away. Not fear, not pain.
Instability. Something elemental is unravelling under his skin. Something I couldn’t see—but could feel.

He wasn’t fighting. He was sinking.

I needed to think. Gods, I needed a plan. Anything.

But thinking through this kind of fear was like trying to read in a storm. Every part of me screamed to act—do something, say something, cast something. My fingers twitched, instinctively reaching for my satchel. For the cool, familiar spine of my spellbook. For wards, for runes, for shields.

But I didn’t touch it.

I forced myself to slow down. To breathe. Then crossed the space between us carefully—slowly—like one would approach a wounded animal in the dark. No sudden movements. No assumptions. Just steady, open steps.

I sat just at the edge of the doom. The faint magical barrier remains between us.

If this was going to mean anything—if he was going to mean anything—I couldn’t meet him as a mage. Or a healer with protocols and theories.

I had to meet him as Elenya.

As me. 

Unarmed. Open. Present.

unprotected.

So I did.

" Is the pull I am feeling your hunger?"

Still nothing.

But slight movements started transpiring.

I knelt beside him. “Astarion.”

His head turned—slow, sluggish. Like a statue yawning awake.
The motion was stiff, mechanical. It cost him something. Like he had to remember how to move.

“I’m not feeding,” he rasped. “Don’t ask again.”

The sound of his voice—hoarse, flat—barely sounded like him. Like all the edges had dulled, and his words were just breath shaped into denial.

“I didn’t,” I said softly.

“You want to. I can feel it.”

His lip curled, faintly. That familiar expression—his go-to when he flirted, teased, toyed. But this time, it didn’t carry heat or mischief.

Only mockery.

Only bitterness.

“Yes,” I said, steady. “I do.”

He blinked. A slow, tired thing. Almost disbelieving.

I stepped closer, barely. The air between us felt charged, like a thread pulled too tight.
“I want to help you,” I said. “But I don’t know how.”

The words landed hard. He didn’t flinch, but something in his expression tightened.

“And we need to go soon,” I added. My voice cracked—just slightly, but enough to feel like it echoed in the stillness. “I need you.”

A pause.

Not your strength.
Not your power.
You.

“You, not whatever this—this thing is, eating you from the inside.”

The silence that followed felt suffocating.

He looked away.

Not out of shame. Not entirely. More like… retreat.

Like he didn’t want me to see how close he was to unravelling.

I stared at him. His shoulders had curled inward. His breath was too shallow. His hands flexed and unflexed without rhythm, like they couldn’t remember how to rest, and it broke something in me.

“Fuck this,” I whispered, standing up. “Just—fuck it.”

I turned toward the other edge of the dome, dropped to my knees, and reached for the one presence that had never left me.

My hands folded in my lap.
My head bowed low.

And I prayed.

Not loud.
Not tearful.
Just the truth.

“Ilmater… if you’re still with me… if you can hear me—
I’m sorry for the Gur.
I’m sorry for not being enough.
I tried. I swear I tried.
But they left me no choice.”

The words slipped from my lips like wounds reopening—quiet, ragged, raw.

Then came the warmth.

A wave of mourning and mercy swept through my ribs, as if unseen hands wrapped gently around my heart. It wasn’t absolution. It wasn’t forgiveness.

It was presence.

A divine stillness that did not ask for perfection—only honesty.

I felt Ilmater’s embrace—not lifting my burden, but sharing it. Reminding me that I was seen. That I was not bearing this alone.

I breathed in. My hands trembled.
And then I stood.

This needed more than prayer.

I knelt beside my pack and unlatched the inner flap with careful fingers.
Inside: my second spellbook. The sacred one. The one given to me on the night after the broken bell tower, when I had nothing left but breath and faith.

Its cover was wrapped in soft, red-stained cloth. Its pages were etched in devotion—in a language older than prayer and pain.

I pressed my forehead to its spine.

Then drew out the pouch of ritual components.

I laid out the rite with deliberate grace:
— Chalk and ashes, to mark the circle.
— A thread of red silk, dyed in faith and blood.
— A vial of holy water.
— Ritual incense, bitter and pure.

Then I began.

The communion rite.
Slow. Rhythmic. Ancient.

Each syllable hummed through the Weave like a trembling harp string.

I spoke in tones only the broken and the bound would recognize.

The incense curled around me. The silk wound through my fingers.

The air grew still—heavy with sacred pressure.

The holy water in the vial began to darken.

Crystal.
Then wine.
Then something deeper.

Blood-red.

My vision blurred.

Something opened.

---

It wasn’t darkness.
It wasn’t light.
It was something in between—like the breath held before dawn breaks.

A field unfolded around me in endless waves of muted gold and indigo.
Night orchids bowed their twilight heads beside marigolds too stubborn to close, even under starlight.

The wind was soft.
Warm.
It carried no scent. No danger.
Only the hush of something sacred.
Something waiting.

And in the middle of it all—he stood.

Ilmater.

Not as a blinding light.
Not as a storm in robes.
Not some untouchable god carved from awe and flame.

No.

He was short. Broad of shoulder. His face plain, soft with kindness. His body—hairy, marred, mortal.

But wounded.

Mutilated. Tortured. A living testament to pain borne for others.

His joints were broken. His arms wrapped in crimson cloth, the bindings soaked and worn, revealing scars and burns and cuts in layers too old to name.

His robe was simple—tattered, soot-stained, the hem frayed. But threaded with gold. Not flashy. Not proud. Gold that shimmered only when the wind passed through it like a whisper.

His face was young and ancient at once—lined not by age, but by compassion.

And his eyes.

Gods, his eyes.

They were the color of honey.

The color of warmth when you’ve stopped believing in warmth.

Eyes that had seen everything—and still loved anyway.

I didn’t wait.

I ran.

Ran like a child crashing into the only home that ever mattered.

The grass bent around me. My heart thudded in my ribs like it remembered how to beat again.

He opened his arms without a word.

And I collapsed into him.

His embrace was warm. Real. His bound hands brushed my back like a memory of safety.

I buried my face in his chest. He smelled like cedar smoke. And salt. And grief.

My knees gave out.
But he held me.

Of course he held me.

“I’m sorry,” I choked. “I tried. I tried, but it’s not enough. I’m not enough.”

His hand found the back of my head, cradling me like something precious. His voice came—not as sound, but as weight.

Like the ground itself remembering it once held life.

“You were never meant to be enough, little one.
You were only meant to remember yourself.
Even then, you still tried.
Fret not, little one.
I know your heart all too well.”

I wept. Openly. Desperately.

But I didn’t disappear.

Because he didn’t let me.

He anchored me.

And I knew—no matter what came next—
No matter how much blood or silence or darkness followed—

He was still here.

My god.
My friend.
Still weeping.
Still with me.

He pulled back just enough to look me in the eyes.

“Now,” he said, “Why don’t you ask your questions, beloved child.
You know the bounds of what I can answer.
I implore you to think well.
Three answers. No more. Waste them not.”

I nodded, swallowing the ache in my throat.

“It’s about Astarion. I need you to look at him. Really look at him. What is going on?”

Ilmater’s honey eyes grew dark with sorrow.

“The same thing that has always happened to him, and his kind,” he said.
“Hunger. The Beastlord calls to all children of the night.
The hunt feeds the hunger. The hunger feeds the hunt.
And in him, it sings louder than most.”

I blinked through the weight in my chest. “How can I help him?”

He looked away, for the first time. His voice gentled.

“I am sorry, little one.
Many laws compel me to abstain.
I cannot alleviate the pain of an Anathema.
Even less one already promised.”

I swallowed. The ache inside me sharpened. “I know you can’t intervene. But I don’t know what to do. Neither does the body. He’s slipping. I think I’m losing him—not to death. But to the thing in the blood. Please.”

Ilmater placed a hand on my cheek. Calloused. Warm.

“Very well,” he murmured.
“What is your third question?”

My voice was barely a whisper.

“How can I help him hold himself together? The way you held me. The way you held us in the past.”

There was no flash of revelation.
No divine proclamation.

Just a soft hush behind my eyes. A silence that saw me.

And then—a thought.

Gentle. Certain.

“What he feels, he has felt before.
So have you. You always have.
He just cannot see it yet.
As you couldn’t—until you could.

I did not hold you, little one.

I only trusted.”

Memories, sharp and too long buried, resurfaced with a vengeance. 

---

Nere was still screaming when he fell into the pit.

Not a scream of surprise. Not even pain.

It was betrayal. Ragged. Wet.

The kind of sound that got under your nails and lived there.

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. She just watched—her borrowed face cold and perfect, a young drow woman with silver-threaded braids and a high-collared robe, the face of his only friend. His confidente. His love stayed motionless and expressionless as the man's shape tumbled into the dark.

A heartbeat later, the cackling began.

It echoed from the pit like laughter scraped through bone. The drider was waiting. It always was. 

Then came the sound of him hitting the floor. Wet. Final. The boy finaly met his father. 

The spidersong curled tighter around her spine.

It never left.

It lived behind her eyes, in the pit of her throat. It itched along her fingers, singing in strands she couldn’t sever. It didn’t need to shout anymore. It just... was. It hummed now, low and satisfied, its many legs twitching in joy.

Good girl. Good girl. Another off the list. Another one who will never hurt again.

She turned away, ascending the inverted ziggurat, Elegant boots padding silently on the sculpted obsidian. The air tasted like old perfume and ash. above her at the highest level, the chanting began again—the daily prayers. Praise for Lolth. Praise for dominion, cruelty, survival.

She felt none of it. Not rage. Not guilt. Not pride. No joy. 

Just… nothing.

She was empty long before her soul left. A hollow thing in a perfect shell. Every step up the black ziggurat was muscle memory now, not will. The spidersong had carved her hollow, and there was no her left to resist it. Not here. She was no one. Someone the slavers never even bothered to name. except by insults and even those were too irregular for her mind to latch to only one. it was ridicoulous really, when one thought about it. Highly impractical to have an unnamed servant. Most would give a name just for ease of scheduling and comanding. but she was never given one. 

Not just her, they were five no ones in the slave pens. Kept unnamed. She is the only one to survive. To graduate to the servant quarters. Yet she remained unamed. 

More, it whispered now, louder. Give me more. Kill them all. Kill the monsters or become one. Then I will give you a name. Then you won't be no one. You won't be empty anymore.

She reached the top. The mansion loomed in front of her, dark and gleaming, its windows flickering with mage-lights and secrets. It was beautiful. Wretched. She didn’t stop walking. Just turned, robes curling in the updraft of cavern wind.

And there it was.

The city.

Tier upon tier of cruelty carved into stone. Menzoberranzan spread before her like a wound that never scabbed over. Webs of silk bridged the towers. Spires of black iron pierced the ceiling. The screams were always distant, always somewhere below.

She stared for a long time.

And the spidersong sang louder than it ever had.

Burn it. Burn it all. Leave nothing but ash. Set them alight in their lies and their god and their cages. Kill them all. All. All—

Behind the song, she heard it.

A sob.

Soft. Mournful.

The friend. 

Maybe She has a name after all. 

Little one. 

She heard it again.

Not his voice. Just his weeping. Like it had always been.

He was crying.

But not for her.

No.

Because of her.

Because this time again, the girl he had touched—his friend, his little one, hadn't just suffered.

She’d done it.

She’d chosen the silence. Chosen the fall.

She told him he will regret it when he came to her.

She’d become the thing he was meant to protect her from becoming.

She clenched her hands. Nails bit into her palms. The spidersong shrieked, furious at the weakness.

But the weeping didn’t stop.

Ilmater, always crying.

And the girl, at last, realizing—

It wasn’t the spidersong that hollowed her out.

It was what she let it turn her into.

She was empty. 

I was empty 

His pact was wasted on us.

While we were feeding lolthite, monsters, child abusers to driders. 

While we were spitting and desacrating lolth's foul temples. 

At the end really, how well were we living her creed. 

---

I opened my eyes. Back to the feild

Was that what it was like for him? 

I have the spider song, now he is living the Beast Chant 

The friend kissed my forehead.

Still smokey and concealed my form at least was tracable here. 

Still, he kissed it, so lightly I almost thought I imagined it.

But the warmth lingered—right there, at the center of my brow—like a blessing carved in breath.

A gesture not of power, but of knowing.

Of pride.

Of love.

And then—
the field dissolved.

The marigolds, the twilight, the hush—
all gone in a single, soundless heartbeat.

The incense smoke cleared.

The red glow faded from the water.

And I was back beneath the dome.

Kneeling.

Still.

Alone—
But not really.

I pressed a trembling hand to my forehead, eyes closed, heart aching.

He hadn’t lifted the burden.

He hadn’t erased the hunger or promised safety.

But he had kissed me.

He had trusted me.
And I could see it now.
I was panicking.

This won’t do.

At the heart of it all, this was nothing more than a puzzle.
Something to be solved.
I just needed to remain calm.
To assess the situation objectively.

Logically.

I needed the body. I shouldn't have shut her off like this. But as I prepared to recede—to let her take over—I felt it.

A spark.

Anger.

Real anger.

She was seething.

As much of it as she was capable of.

Not at him.
Not at Malar.

At me.

I’m sorry.
I’ve always been a coward.

I’ve never been good with this.

I drifted, pulling back into the fog realm—nearly whole again, nearly restored—expecting her to stabilize. To start sorting through the facts. Crafting strategies. Hunting answers.

But she didn’t.

She didn’t start thinking about the ritual. Or the curse. Or Astarion.

She started thinking…
About me.

To me.

And I felt it.

Oh.

Oh, gods.

Now she knew.

She knew I’d always been watching.

“You are the cruellest of them all. You've gone too far but we will talk after he gets better. He is the priority.”

Shame twisted my gut, and I saw her stand up, go towards her pack and start meticulously gathering books about vampirism and the Beastlord.

---

She started reading—
Cross-referencing tomes, codices, scrolls, marginalia—
All at once.
A fever of pages.

The knowledge came in fragments, shards. But she was practiced in piecing things together.

She found more on Malar’s blood in two distinct sources:

First: the Book of Dead Gods—
A weighty, gold-embossed tome cataloguing deities past and present, their deaths, resurrections, and remnants.

Second: a rare entry from the God Books Table—
An unranked, scattered treasure table cataloging deific lore—never identical twice. One must be blessed or cursed to find what they truly need.

From both, she learned:

Malar revels in the hunt and the blood of the kill,
But not necessarily in massacre.
The difference, subtle yet essential.

In civilized lands, the Church of Malar is reviled. Its followers—often evil lycanthropes—are seen as predators among sheep.
But on the frontier? In the wild?
Those who live by the hunt know better.
They fear Malar.
They revere him.

Even as they whisper prayers to keep him away.

Malarite clerics pray at night,
Preferably beneath a full moon.

They chant the Bloodsong over slain beasts,
Offer toasts in blood,
Feast upon prey in sacred ritual.

Two rites stood out:

• The Feast of the Stags, where Malarites feed the hungry and gain rare public favour.

• And the High Hunt, where worshippers don the trophies of past kills and hunt a sentient humanoid, who may win their life through survival.

She read the dogma twice.

Survival of the fittest.
The winnowing of the weak.
A brutal, bloody end gives meaning to life.
Every task is a hunt.
Every choice is a kill.

Taste the blood.
Never kill from a distance.
Do not slay the young, the pregnant, or the deepspawn.

How interesting.
Do not slay the young.

So that explains why he hadn’t fixated on the children.
But he was tempted.
He had looked.

So… it wasn’t just Malar’s influence, was it?
Not just the Bloodsong.

When invoking Malar’s blessing, the heart is muted.
The instincts rise.

She found the line again and underlined it.

Then she found more.

Buried in a later chapter:
Divine blood, she read, may allow mortals to invoke an aspect of the deity—
To become something more.
Or less.

But Astarion hadn’t drunk the blood.

Not yet.

Still, Malar’s blood affects the instincts.

Anything deviating from Malar’s doctrine?

That’s not the Beastlord.

That’s him.

Astarion’s fixation. His trembling. His temptation.
That wasn’t the god.
That was the vampire.

And she knew—he was not cruel.
Not truly.

He had fed, yes.
But only when forced.
Only when cornered.
She had never seen him hunt children.

So what, then?

And then she found the name.

In The Blood Ledger: Known Vampire Lineages of the Sword Coast, a name surfaced like a wound reopened:

Huntmistress Dhusarra yr Fadila el Abhuk.

A Calishite vampire, once an adventurer, who served Malar.
She had held a High Hunt in Waterdeep, drawn from the Undermountain.
Her former master: Noreyth Harpell.

The name sparked recognition—
She scrambled through her pile until she found it.

Of Night and Hunger.
A bardic compilation of vampiric epics.
And there she was.

Dhusarra.

In 1311 DR, her adventuring party stumbled into Wyllowwood.
All but her were slaughtered by the High Hunts.
She survived by striking a pact.
Worship Malar. Live.

She agreed.
And she thrived.

By 1313 DR, she was a Huntmistress.
Slain, then resurrected by her vampire master.
And once again, she took to the Hunt.

But now, she was bolder.
She hunted through portals, tracked prey across planes.
She turned gray wolf Uthgardt werewolves into vampires.
Nine of them.
A twisted gift to Malar.

He was pleased.

So pleased, in fact,
That he gave her a vial of divine blood.

It transformed her.
Her power multiplied.
So did her hunger.

It was no longer survival.
It was no longer just a ritual.

It became a compulsion.

She consumed it.
And gained the ability to call forth the aspect of the Beastlord.
To make her prey into a vampire, a lycanthrope, or some abominable hybrid.

By 1374 DR, she wanted more.
She sought to make Waterdeep her private hunting reserve.

She declared a High Hunt.
But Malar punished her—
She had broken the sacred rules of the Hunt.

Trapped within the city.
Until either she or her rival was destroyed.
She manipulated others.
Murdered.
Fed.

All for the hunger.

That was the word that echoed now.

Hunger.

Vampiric.
Endless.
Devouring.

Ilmater had said: He’s felt this before. He just doesn’t see it.

Of course, he had.

Centuries of it.
Starved.
Controlled.
Trained to equate hunger with submission.

This wasn’t new.
It was compounded.

Like it had been for Dhusarra.

Compounded.

That word struck deep.
Like a knife slipped between ribs.

If Malar’s blood was amplifying Astarion’s hunger—
Then this wasn’t just divine madness.

It was vampirism, sharpened.

Malar’s rage. The vampire’s thirst. The weight of centuries.
This wasn’t a different curse.
This was the same one, tightened, like a noose.

And that fixation on her?
The way he looked at her was like a lifeline and a meal?

That wasn’t Malar.

That was conditioning.

She had become his anchor.
His source.
His familiar path to relief.

If this really was the vampiric hunger twisted through divine blood—
Then he was on the edge.

He would either—

• Fall into a feral frenzy, lose all reason, as the vampire treatises warned
  —or—

• Resist until he entered a stupor.

And stupor meant silence. Stillness. That marble skin.
Just like when she first found him.

He was reverting.

He was folding back into the crypt.

The curse was blooming inside him like rot.

Her chest tightened.
The realization dropped like iron in her gut.

He needs to feed.

Now.

That explains the catatonia.

He’s starting to enter a stupor.

He’s dying—without dying.

She turned back toward him,
The answer on her lips,
The spellbook was forgotten on the floor,
And crossed the distance again.

---

She knelt beside him slowly.

No sudden movements. No light. No noise.
No blood. Not yet.

Just her presence.

He hadn’t moved.

Still as a statue. Not just still—shut down.
His eyes open but dim. Dull.
That beautiful crimson drained to tarnished rust.

She swallowed.
It felt wrong, seeing him like this.
Like a violin unstrung. A blade dulled.
A prince made a beggar by a hunger he couldn’t name.

But she couldn’t panic again.
Not now.

Panic was a hammer.
She needed a key.

“Hi,” she whispered gently, almost playfully, as if greeting a wild animal in the dark.
“I know you can hear me.”

No answer.
Not yet.

That was fine.

“It’s alright if you don’t want to talk,” she murmured. “You don’t have to say anything. Just… listen.”

She took a slow breath. Let it fill her, anchor her.

“Your name is Astarion. You are funny, smart, and so incredibly strong. So resilient, I won’t ask you to feed, but I won't leave you like this.” She said. 

He didn’t move.

So she stayed close. Not touching. Just near.

Some battles were quieter.

And this one?

This one we would win by staying.

We need to trust him. 

Like Ilmater trusted us. 

He needs a friend.

“You’re not alone. Not now. Not anymore. Do you hear me?”

The tension in his shoulders never quite left, but it did lessen slightly.

She stayed anyway.

Sometimes that’s all you can do. Be there. Be constant.

I wish I could have been that. 
Her thought echoed again in my fog realm. 

“You are the cruellest of them all."

She really was the best of us.

He was worried about hurting her, but realistically. Without the scrolls and the potions and the items. He wasn't really a threat. My fog alone would incapacitate him in less than twenty seconds. Malar's blessing complicates the situation, but he can't call upon it twice in the same day. If he lost control, we could Misty step away. She could paralyze him. 

This is a calculated risk. 

But even beyond that. 

We trust him. 

We believe in him. 

He was so strong and so resilient in his core. 

He just needs a way to see it. 

to trust himself.

to remember himself

After a time, she reached into her satchel and pulled out the thin old journal she kept. It was filled with scribbled tales. Folk songs. Myths. Fables collected from dusty roadside taverns and wizened fishwives and ghost-haunted ruins where nobody sane should have lingered.

She opened it, let her fingers drift over a familiar crease, and began.

A tale from Rashemen. About a young girl who loved the wind too much to stay in one place. Who kept wandering off into the snowdrifts until she found the sky’s secret name, and whispered it, thus summoning a Djinni prince.

One from Chult, where a crocodile spirit fell in love with a celestial body, and every night, it climbed into the sky to try and reach her. But the stars never looked down.

Another from Icewind Dale, where a boy turned into a wolf, and his brother followed him into the wild so neither would be alone.

Some were strange. Some were sweet. Some didn’t have endings.

He didn’t look at her. But he didn’t tell her to stop either.

She kept reading.

Telling.

Then she paused.

“You tell me one.”

That got a reaction.

He blinked slowly. Like someone surfacing from under deep water.

“I don’t remember any,” he rasped.

“That’s alright,” she said gently, meeting his eyes. “Make one up.”

His brow furrowed. “What?”

“Make one up,” she repeated. “Stories don’t have to be factual to be true.”

A long silence followed. For a moment, she thought he’d refuse.

Then—quietly, cautiously—he shifted.

“There was a boy,” he said, his voice like rust scraping marble. “He lived in a house with red clay walls. The kind that bleeds when it rains. He used to climb the trees outside the estate, even though his mother told him not to. Called him a little monkey. He wasn’t very good at climbing. Always scraped his hands. But he got better at it. It was more of swinging and balancing than climbing. The boy has never been really strong.”

His fingers curled against his knees.

“One time, he found a crow’s nest. The mother was dead. Flies had eaten its eyes. But the chicks were still alive. So he brought them home. Hid them in a box under the stairs. Fed them scraps from the kitchens.”

His voice cracked. Just slightly.

“They died anyway,”

She said nothing. Just let the silence hold.

“But one of them lived the longest, I think. It used to cry when it was hungry. He hated the sound. Loved it, too. Because it meant it was still there.”

We reached out slowly and placed a hand on his head. Light. Just enough for him to feel the weight. Not guiding. Not forcing.

He didn’t pull away.

“I don’t remember what happened to that last crow,” he murmured. “I think someone found the box. Maybe the boy forgot to feed it. Maybe it starved. Maybe… he left it behind.”

She felt the tremor before she saw it. A single tear. Then another.

He didn’t sob. Didn’t shake.

Just sat there. Letting them fall.

And she kept her hand on his head, brushing through his curls with my fingers. Slowly. Gently. The way you’d calm a fevered child. The way you’d remind someone they’re still here.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

“For what?”

“For the story,” she said as she finished writing it.

He laughed softly. It was raw. Bitter. Beautiful.

She thought in her mind directly to me. 

"Come! He needs to be able to connect. Come and fuse but DO NOT SHUT ME OFF. I am driving here"

for the first time in a decade. I obeyed

---

I felt the fusing and became myself again. Elenya, the one from before I was ever called that. the body and the fogself. one. Just me.

I didn’t speak as he drifted quietly again.

I just lay down beside him. 

Slow. Careful.

Close, but not too close.

Not until my shoulder barely touched his.

Then I inched in further—let my forehead press into the curve of his neck, my hand slide over his chest until it found his.

He flinched.

Tried to push me.

His touch wasn’t harsh. Just uncertain. The kind of push that said “Don’t.” That said, “I’m dangerous.”

I didn’t move away.

Instead, I murmured against his shoulder, “You’re free to leave, you know. If you don’t want me touching you, you can move. But don’t choose for me. I’m a big girl.”

Silence stretched.

He didn’t leave.

His hand twitched once more.

Then it settled.

Then it gripped mine.

I nuzzled in closer, breath soft against his skin.

His arm wrapped around me.

Tight. Needy. Like something in him had been starved of this, too—not blood, not violence. Just the closeness. The warmth. The permission to want it.

We lay like that a while. Quiet. Breathing in sync.

Then I asked, “Why are you so afraid?”

He didn’t answer right away. When he did, it came out low. Gravelly.

“I want to hunt.”

I smiled faintly. “What else is new?”

That made him laugh—sharp, dry, and real. “It’s different this time.”

He shifted just enough to look at me, just enough for me to see the flicker behind his eyes. That old fire, but lit brighter now. Wilder. Less chained.

“It’s too strong. It’s like… It’s not just a craving anymore. It’s been amplified. Sanctified. Malar’s blessing didn’t give me anything new. It unleashed something that was already there. Something that liked to hurt.”

His voice dropped.

“I’ve resisted one pull before. The vampire. The hunger. The leash.” A pause. “But I don’t think I can resist two. Not both. Not this.”

I nodded.

Then I leaned in. Breathed him in. Earth and ash and something raw underneath, like lightning in bone.

Then I said softly, “Then don’t.”

His breath caught.

I kept going.

“Don’t waste your strength trying to deny the hunt. Don’t tear yourself apart resisting what you may be. Just… control it. Control who is prey. That’s what matters. That’s what makes you who you are.”

His grip tightened around me. Not painful. But shaking. Like he was holding on to that truth like a ledge.

I whispered into his collarbone, “You don’t have to be soft to be good. You don’t have to be safe to be worthy. You just have to choose to be you.”

For a long moment, he said nothing.

But I felt it when his forehead came to rest against mine.

When his breathing slowed.

When the spiral stopped spinning quite so fast.

Not tamed.

Not cured.

His hand found my hair and yanked my head upward.

Neither cruel nor controlled.

Desperate.

Like a drowning man clawing for the surface.

I gasped—not from pain, but from the rawness of it. The truth behind the grip. The way his fingers trembled, not from hesitation but from the effort of not letting go.

Our eyes locked.

His were red—redder than I’d ever seen them, glowing with something ancient and wild. A storm of hunger, guilt, and need. His lips parted, fangs bared just enough to make a threat of a promise.

But he didn’t lunge.
Didn’t snarl.
Just held.

Torn—beautifully, terribly—between instinct and memory. Between predator and man.

Someone I trust.

I didn’t flinch.
Didn’t pull away.

I let him see me.

My heartbeat is steady. My breath is soft.

His grip faltered. Not loosened, but softened. His thumb brushed along my cheekbone—hesitant, almost reverent. Like he was reminding himself what skin felt like. What I felt like.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he rasped.

“I know,” I breathed.

“I still might. It is taking everything not to.”

I smiled. Not mockery. Not dismissal. Just... truth.

“Again—what else is new?”

His brows knit, the storm in him flickering with frustration. “You’re not taking this seriously.”

“Because it doesn’t have to be.” I leaned in, my voice a low murmur against the heat of him. “Is it that hard to believe I trust you?”

His expression cracked. “What if that trust gets you killed?” he said. “I’m not... myself.”

“I don’t know about that,” I said lightly, tilting my head. “Dramatic, pouty, moody, bloodthirsty—you sound exactly like the Astarion I know.”

He opened his mouth to protest, but I cut him off with a grin.

“This must be, what—the eighth or ninth ‘Don’t come near me, I’m a big scary monster’ episode? And we’ve known each other what—three fortnights?”

“Elenya—”

“Astarion,” I echoed with matching exasperation, then flicked his nose—lightly. Gently. Just enough to startle him out of that spiralling mind.

And then, slowly, my fingers drifted to his ear. That spot. The one that made his shoulders soften and his breath catch.

He shuddered.

Still liked it. Of course he did.

“Still likes being touched there,” I murmured, lips curling. “As I said— seems like my good old Astarion to me.”

“Don’t pet me like a fucking dog. I’m not broken. Just dangerous.” He snapped, bearing fangs at me.

I chuckled and added, “Then bite. And prove you still have teeth.”

His eyes closed for a second, jaw tight. “I want to drain you.”

“Like you haven’t wanted that before.”

“I want it more.”

I didn’t flinch.
Didn’t move.

“Then, again, why am I alive?” I asked quietly.

He hesitated. Just a beat. But long enough.

“Because... I don’t want to.”

“No, you idiot,” I said softly, threading my hand into his hair again. “Because I’m not prey.”

His eyes opened. Searching. Aching. “Then what are you?”

I smiled, resting my forehead against his.

“That’s for you to decide later. But now? Feed. You’re always dramatic when you’re starving. It's been three days now since you last fed, and I doubt you drank much from the wizard.”

He didn’t answer right away. But when he did, it wasn’t soft. It wasn’t broken. It was sharp—sudden and furious, like glass cracking under heat.

“Stop dismissing this!” he snapped.

I froze.

“Stop acting like it’s nothing,” he said, louder now, breath ragged. “You think this is the same as before? That I’ll feed, and it’ll all just settle? That I’m still the same man you keep trying to patch up and pray better like some wounded bird?”

“I don’t—”

“Yes, you do! You talk about trust, but you’re not listening. I am telling you, Elenya, something inside me has changed. I feel it. I hear it. And I don’t know if it’s me anymore.”

My breath caught. My mouth opened to respond—but nothing came.

He laughed. Bitter. Breathless. “I want to touch you and to feed on you, that part is still the same. But not gently. I want to devour you. I want to kill you. I want to rip your throat out. I have NEVER wanted that before. Yet you keep tempting me because your saviour fucking complex just won't let it rest. If you trust me, trust what I am fucking saying.”

I stilled my breath and then simply said, "And then what?"

"What do you mean, then what?"

" Let's say I listen to you and leave you on your own. You have not been able to trance, I don't suspect you will be able to sleep it off, would you? So you will be stuck, unable to rest, feeling a hunger and a compulsion? The instinct to hunt keeps getting stronger. Then What? Do I wait until you go into either a full stupor or a frenzy? What comes next? I am not leaving you like this. But you will be less and less able to control yourself. So what do you want me to do? chain you until you collapse from exhaustion? How do you see all this resolving ?"

" I don't know! I haven't thought that far."
" Figures as much. But do tell me when I am finally allowed to intervene? "

"I am not dismissing your situation, Astarion. I just think that whatever you are going through is going to keep getting worse the longer you wait." I took a deep breath and added. " Malar is the god of the hunt, Astarion, not the god of slaughter. He is not Fucking Bhaal. He is not about Sadism. Not about torture, he is about culling the weak. Do I look fucking weak to you? I think not. If so, then why are you fixating on me? Why are you almost catatonic unless I am less than five feet away from you? You conditioned yourself, Astarion. "

"I suspect Malar's influence is compounding and amplifying your vampiric hunger. Which you seem to have associated mainly with me. The urges to kill are also probably compounding.  You said it yourself, you can resist one pull, not two.  If that's true, the worse the hunger gets, the more the hunting instincts surge. Also, just so you know. Malar may have been a decently powerful deity at a time, but he is not anymore. hell, most records I read report him dead since the Spellplague. Slain and hunted by his own beasts. It is said that he can only impact followers and mortals through dreams. Does that remind you of something? I guess what I am trying to say is that this is not a possession, it wasn't even a curse. It's amplifying some aspects of your nature. Of everyone's nature. We all hunt to live. You being a vampire is just worsening the weight of the bloodsong." 

"What if you are wrong. You don't understand. I will kill you."

I held his gaze. “You think I don’t see it? You think I don’t know what lives in you? You think I’ve never felt that monster rise under my skin, begging for something to hurt? I know what you are. And I am still here.” I gave a simple smile and simply added, " I am not ignoring what is happening to you. But I am betting you'll pull through. If you are so certain you will kill me, then do it.” 

His eyes flared. “What?”

“Then do it. Kill me now. Tear me apart. Drink me dry,” I whispered, nuzzling closer. “Let’s stop pretending. If you really can't stop yourself, then it will happen regardless. Because no one can resist those types of songs eternally. I'd rather do it now. There is no point arguing about it. Let's wager."

" Have you lost your mind?  You want to bet on me not killing you?"

"Why not? I've beaten worse odds. You believe that you won't be able to stop. I believe you will. Let's just fucking check. What's the point of all this bickering and back and forth? of you starving yourself, torturing yourself and me at the same time. If it's going to happen. Let's see how bad it is. Start the hunt. Give me all you've got, 'darling'. If I win, you would owe me a favour. If I lose, well, you get all that's in the pack. enough to start a new life.”

Silence. Just the thrum of tension between us, thick as blood.

His hands were trembling now.

A beat. Then:

“Feed, Astarion,” I added, just as gently,  “You’re not doomed just because you’re starving. Everything is clearer on a full belly.”

His jaw twitched. That telltale flicker of doubt in his eyes. “What if…” he began, voice frayed at the edges. 

“Astarion,” I repeated—firmer now, but not unkind. “I said feed.”

There was a command in it. No magic. Just my voice. My choice.

And something in him—something tired and aching and starved—shuddered in response. He stared at me like I was the answer to a question he hadn’t dared ask. Then, quickly, frantically, he bit. He fed.

That's the worst he's got? 

What an idiot.

I knew what it felt like to be prey. 

This was not it. 

This was not being hunted. 

This was helping. 

How could this idiot not see that? 

He was just feeding. Rougher than usual—firmer, hungrier—but never cruel. His usual moans turned to growls. His slow intakes were now hurried gulps, never beyond what I could bear. His grip held me down in bruising grasps, not in dominance, but in need—like if he let go, the world might collapse around us both.

I was pinned beneath him, breath shallow, skin flushed, heart pounding—but not once did I doubt. Not him. Not this.

And it felt… good.

The heat of it, the closeness. The way his mouth met my skin. The way he trembled with the effort of holding back, and still couldn’t help but take. And I let him. I gave because I chose to. Because something in this act—so often twisted by others into control—was healing when it was him.

I was not being hunted. 

I was feeding. 

Feeding Astarion. 

Not the beast. 

The beast wanted fear. I was not afraid.

The beast enjoyed the chase of my attempted escape.

I was not running.

The beast wanted screams. I only breathed slowly. 

I made that mistake once 

---

She was so happy until the slam against the obsidian wall stole the air from her lungs.

The impact was sharp. Final.
A black stone kiss to the spine.

Her head cracked back against it a moment later—vision flashing white.
And then came the bite.

No time to scream.
No warning.
No spell.

Just cold fangs tearing into her throat.

The pain was so sudden, so deep, her knees gave out.
But his grip on her hair kept her upright, neck cranked far beyond what it should bear.
Her spine screamed, every vertebra pushed past its edge—but the pressure didn’t ease.
He wanted access.
He needed it.

His body pressed into hers, pinning her hard against the wall, feeding off her like an animal at slaughter.

No—like something worse than an animal.

She thrashed. Kicked.
Choked out a spell she couldn’t finish.
She couldn’t breathe—not properly—not with the way his jaw kept closing around her throat, sealing it again and again.
Not with the way his claws dug into her scalp.
The way his hand gripped her ribs, slid beneath the edge of her tunic—fingers tracing her like the others had.
Like the ones before.

Feeding on her terror like it fed him, too.
Drinking deep and shuddering against her.
His breath was ragged with it.
Every cry she gave made him more frantic, more euphoric.

She felt her own blood pouring down her chest, soaking the collar of her tunic, slipping beneath the fabric.

It was warm.
It was hers.
It was leaving her.

No.
No, no, no, no—

Something was wrong.
Why?

Why?

His leg forced itself between hers, forcing them open.

WHY?
NO.

She’d survived this already.
This wasn’t supposed to happen again.

He was hard.

He was hard.

The betrayal hit harder than the pain.

She knew that scent.
Knew the shape of that shoulder.
That hand.

She looked into his eyes.

They weren’t his anymore.
Or maybe they never were.

Red.
Unfocused.
Glazed with hunger and something filthy.

He was hurting her.

He was a monster now.
Or maybe he always had been.
And maybe that was the worst part.

She thrashed harder as the scream tore from her throat—high and cracked and full of panic.
Her vision blurred.
She felt dizzy.

Then—

She went still.

Not because she gave in.
Never that.

But because everything inside her screamed:
Don’t move.

Habits.
Reflexes.
Safety drills carved into bone.

Because she had learned what happened to things that fought too hard.
It didn’t matter.

He hurt her the same.

Because since the first time someone touched her like this—when she was thirteen—
She’d learned to vanish from the inside out.

Thank the gods she didn’t need to this time.
He bled her out too fast.

She wouldn’t have to be here.
Not for long.

Darkness took her.

Maybe she could finally rest.

---

No, I knew Astarion wouldn't hurt me. 

I refuse to fear him.

I refuse to feed the beast again.

The only person I am feeding is Astarion. 

When he finally pulled back, his breath came in sharp, ragged bursts. Red stained his lips, his eyes, his thoughts. But his hands were steady. Reverent.

I flicked his nose.

“See,” I murmured, lips curling. “Told you you'll feel better.”

His mouth twitched into a grin, teeth still bared but softened by something real. “That you did, darling.”

He didn’t move away.

Instead, he leaned down again, slower this time. His tongue licked over the wound, kisses trailing like apologies that never had to be made. Gentle. Careful. Devoted.

We stayed like that—tangled, silent—for a long moment.

His hand moved to cradle the back of my head, fingers threading through my hair. He lowered his mouth to my ear, his voice barely a breath.

“Not prey.”

I closed my eyes and smiled against his shoulder.

“No,” I whispered. “Not even close.”

I knew it.

Because I knew what it was like to fight whispers.

Mine was a spidersong—soft, endless, curling through my veins like silk soaked in venom. His was a Beast Chant—louder, hungrier, howling at the moon for blood.

But they were kin, really. Both called to the marrow. Both demanded surrender.

I chose mercy to fight mine.

Perhaps he can choose hunger to fight his.

And why not?

Hunger is sacred, too.

It drives the body, the spirit. It gnaws at the edges of will, carves hollows where purpose grows. It’s thorny. Dangerous. Just like mercy. Both can cut. Both demand endurance. Both ask you to hurt—and keep enduring them—even when it is useless.

Hunger doesn't care about the availability of what you hunger for. It requires demand and dictate. Mercy doesn't care about whether you can afford it, nor if it will even change anything at the end.

But what he doesn’t see, not yet, is this:

You can hunger for good things.

For real things.

Not just for blood or power or vengeance.

But for safety. For home. For a name. For gentleness. For meaning.

Isn’t that where all the good begins?

A hunger for better.

A refusal to stop reaching.

Even through the dark.

Even when you don’t know what you’re reaching for.

That’s what the friend wanted me to see, wasn’t it?

The lesson I kept circling. Dodging.

My refusal to want. 

Maybe not refusal anymore. My inability to want is costing me. same as his.

Mercy without hunger is apathy. A hollow performance. A silence that watches suffering and calls it peace.

That's what we both are. My friend and I.

And hunger without mercy? Madness. Fire with no hearth. A knife that forgets it once had a hand.

Gods. I really am silly sometimes.

Trying to split the two apart like light from shadow. As if the world would ever let them live separately.

But I understand now.

Not just the lesson. Not just the logic.

The truth.

Even if… even if understanding and feeling still live a breath apart in me.

Like bone and skin. So close—but never the same.

I turned my head just slightly, eyes catching on the shape of him—his breath softer now, his hunger soothed, if only a little.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

He stirred, blinking slowly.

“For what?” he asked, voice barely a breath.

I smiled. It hurt a little, but how gentle it felt.

“For teaching me what I thought I already knew.”

And for still being here.

"Rest well, after trancing the effects should totally dissolve." 

"You are insane."

Now I needed to change. 

And that started by allowing the Bodyself to scream. 

The Fogself went too far. 

I could finally see that. 

I closed my eyes and allowed the unfusing. 

---

Later, when Astarion was finally trance. The body rose up and went back to the recovery journal. 

She set up her quill and started writing. 

Recovery Journal – Day 36
Patient #421 –
Recorded by: Donor / Healer

Observation Summary:
Patient initiated contact with a divine source: the Beastlord, Malar. Not a passive exposure—this was an active invocation, drawing on a blood-infused blessing granted by ritual or pact.

While the details of the acquisition remain partially obscured (likely intentional), patient confirmed using Malar’s blood and calling upon the Beastlord’s favor in a moment of acute need. The resulting transformation appears to function as a divine amplification, rather than a discrete curse or blessing.

Hypothesis:
Malar’s blood did not introduce new compulsions. It catalyzed and intensified existing ones—specifically, the latent predator-state tied to the patient’s vampirism. This creates a compound feedback loop: vampiric hunger and divine bloodlust amplifying one another until the patient can no longer distinguish between instinct and identity.

Backlash Effects:

• Trance Delay / Disruption: Patient was unable to enter trance for several hours post-use. Symptoms included physical tremors, obsessive fixation on prey behaviors, emotional dissociation, and sensory hyperfixation (notably scent and pulse).

• Identity Disassociation: Patient reported perceiving a second presence “looking through [his] eyes,” identifying as the Beast. This voice was not entirely external—it nested in known emotional pathways: starvation, pain, victory, and freedom.

• Compounded Hunger: Hunger intensity reached unprecedented levels. Unlike standard stupor symptoms, this hunger carried strategic cognition—not only the desire to feed, but calculated planning on how and who. In his words, “not survival hunger… purpose hunger.”

• Ego Fracture Warning: The restraint exhibited was not the result of instinctual guilt or revulsion, but of active relational tethering—to donor, to memory, to past moral anchors. Should these weaken, a full psychospiritual snap is possible.

Symptoms Noted (post-activation):

• Shallow breath, poor muscle coordination, blood scent fixation

• Momentary derealization, low verbal responsiveness

• Predatory ideation with full memory clarity (key difference from past trauma fugues)

Environmental Stabilization:
Donor was able to stabilize patient through close proximity, affirmational contact, and controlled feeding. Despite elevated hunger, patient maintained restraint during feeding event and displayed post-event lucidity.

New Considerations:
Malar’s influence may linger in the blood long after initial invocation, perhaps responding to emotional stimuli (rage, desire, starvation) rather than requiring active summoning. This creates a volatile situation where proximity to violent or oppressive environments (e.g., Warlock’s Crypt) may reactivate divine resonance.

Recommend:

• Strict feeding schedule until blood equilibrium is restored.

• No further divine contact until full metabolic reset.

• Monitor next trance closely: track dream content, emergence pattern, and post-trance hunger levels.

• Begin preparing counter-regulation strategies for divine compulsions, potentially involving symbolic denial rituals, grounding anchors, or neutralizing wards.

Tentative Prognosis:
If rest proceeds uninterrupted, symptoms should abate within 4–8 hours. However, repetition of divine invocation risks compounding effects. Recommend against multiple blessings within a single lunar cycle.

Notes:
Patient remains emotionally coherent. Fear present—but so is will. He resisted the spiral without external restraint. This is not regression. This is survival, re-patterned.

Additional discovery

Patient was unkowingly exposed to an unkown form of powerfull magic from an known non understood extraplanar source. The exposure is suspected to have occured repeatedly and possibly during the whole recovery period. 
The magic in question manifest as fog like energy particularly efficient at warding. 
Need to study it further 

Let him rest.
Watch the spiral.
Be the tether, until he can become his own.

---

It started as pressure deep behind the ribs, a slow and subtle swell until the breath itself became a jagged knife, threatening to split the seams of her skin. A tremor cascaded through her body—not wholly physical, not entirely magical—and then the divide opened, as though the very air itself had cracked wide.

The air changed.

Mist bled from the edges of her essence, curling from her shoulders, unfurling from her spine, and spilling over the floor in slow, deliberate drifts, as if the fog itself were sentient. It thickened, drawing her inward, until the outlines of the waking world dissolved into a dim, colourless expanse.

The Fog Realm.

It wasn’t a place; it was a saturation—an endless, muffled ocean of cloud and shadow, heavy with the weight of unspoken thoughts and half-drowned memories. The air here shifted with a strange, deliberate intelligence, folding and curling in patterns that whispered in a language older than sound.

And in the midst of it, stood the Fogself.

She wasn’t fixed—her form rose and fell like breath, her limbs bleeding into vapour before reassembling themselves again. The face, almost a mirror of the body’s, was softer, warped at the edges by something too vast, too ancient to be tied to one lifetime. Her eyes held that same clouded depth—stormlight veiled by shadows—and for all the shifting of her form, there was a tension in her stillness.

She knew why the Bodyself had come.

The Bodyself stepped forward, and the fog recoiled, retreating in slow, reluctant folds. Her movements were deliberate, her shoulders squared, each step cutting through the mist like a blade through silk. The quiet here wasn’t peaceful—it was the stillness before the predator strikes, the kind of silence that makes the sound of one’s own heartbeat feel thunderous.

The Fogself did not speak first.

It was the Bodyself who broke the silence, her voice carrying no hesitation—only the steady burn of anger long restrained. Her gaze swept over the fogscape as if measuring it, testing its walls, before fixing on the shifting figure before her. Even here, especially here, her presence was sharp, uncompromising. Her thoughts cut clear as a blade.

“You are the cruellest of them all. All of them hurt me. But you— You took my choice away. You took my power away.

You left me empty.

Without the ability to connect. To feel. To be real.
Just a witness in the world.
Suffering under the gaping, hollow, missing piece in my soul.
Suffering your absence.
Because you didn’t want to stay…in a useless, weak, broken body.”

And for the first time in decades, the Fogself looked small. Frozen.

“You abandoned me in a hollow vessel, an empty shell, as barely a fragment of a soul- just enough to pilot this husk. Enough to be bound. 

Yes bound! You bound me to service. Not service to the world. Not to the weak.

To you!

You used Lolth as an excuse. But tell me, fog self, while you get to stay hidden in your realm, am I not the only one left to pay for our choices?
While you get to not be hurt. Get to play the almighty, all-powerful in your little corner of the Realmspace.

And you DARE watch me—
Watch my struggle, my endurance—
Like some form of play.

Without my knowledge. Without my consent.”

Her fury scorched every word.

“You are the cruellest of them all. You pretend to love me when all you do is abuse me. You get to decide when to come.
When to pilot. And when you do, you don’t even speak to me. You don’t just refuse me.

You erase me! You shut me off.

Take control of MY body. The one you threw away. The only thing you fucking left me.
Until you’ve had your fun. Until you decide it’s time to go.

Or until things get too hard.

And you decide to turn me on again.
Like a little automaton.”

“I’m not your body. I’m just your shield. Your unwilling minion. Your doll. Your thrall.

I am nothing— Because you made me nothing.

You made me powerless.
Loveless.
Worthless."

“I’m your slave.”

Her voice cracked in the Fogrealm, the Fogself shrinking once again—not with tears, but with truth.

“And I don't even hate you for it. Because I can’t. Because you took that, too. I am bound to forgive you over and over. Because I wish you back. Back to me. So we can be whole again.”

“Even if you left me with nothing.”

“But now you dare—

Dare— to show up when I break, when I’m about to join oblivion.

Like you care? You want to talk to me as I die after avoiding me for decades? Even worse… as I escape the clutch of death— as he saves me from them,
When he needed me, you showed up and then—then—you shut me off again.

While he was so clearly in pain. When he so clearly needed help. When he was so clearly dissociating. You decide to take the reins. Push your way forward like you never left. You shut me off when I am talking to him. To do what? To scream at him. Over something so trivial, he said—That bruised your ego—that hurt you?

How dare you?

To quote you, 'Flash news,' the world hurts all THE FUCKING TIME. You are just used to me taking the blows. That's what you always do again and again. You run away.

You made it about us. About you. Kept talking and screaming. Didn't listen. You were too blind to see how guilty he felt. How he needed us. And you forced me to watch it all behind a glass panel.

Powerless.

To watch as you screamed at him. Demanded explanations when he was hurting. Got offended—offended!—as if we were owed something. You pushed him further into his shell. You made it worse."

The air began to thrum.

" So much worse! As you kept pushing and pushing. Against his wishes, even though you saw he was uncomfortable, and when he understandably lashed out. Asked you to stop pestering him. You just disappeared again. Got hurt in your precious little feelings because he established a fucking boundary.

You just dipped, ran, just left me to handle your mess, and forced me to sit in the consequences of your fucking slip-up.

Using ME.

Again.

Like you used me to give him the fog."

The shame churned in the Fogself before she even heard the words. A sick, oily twist in the pit of her stomach.

“You didn’t even tell me. Waited until I was dying and said it as if to reassure me. Told me like it was nothing that you slipped that in him without telling me.

You put your fog into my patient. Into the only thing I have left that’s real. You didn’t ask. Didn’t warn. You just did without either our knowledge or consent. Just… acted. Like you always do. With your half-formed thoughts and your starving hope and your dangerous, obscure magic—Like a good little proto-godling.

Did you really think that thought would reassure me? That knowing you used me to get to him, to test something neither of us understands, will make me leave in peace.

You exposed him to you—to that—without telling me what you were doing. Without even asking if I could hold him through it.”

To that, the Fogself started stirring as if to answer, but the Bodyself cut her sharply.

“Don't, I know—I know you thought you were helping. I know you may even love him in that big, terrible, rotten, and unformed way of yours. But that doesn’t make it okay.

You fucking overstepped.

He was fragile. He trusted me, and you used that, used him, and I both as you shoved a sliver of that fucking unknown magic that tore you from me down his throat.

You used my blood to touch him with that!”

Her fury kept rising like a tide until the scream tore through everything. 

“HOW DARE YOU.”

The statement reverberated all throughout the Fogrealm. Saking every corner, every stone, every memory. Absolute silence fell over the room, and everything was filled with the deafening sound of the body's accelerated pulse, attesting to her rage.

“This is where I draw the line, dear Fogself.

Dear Soul.

You don’t get to mess with him. You don’t get to play your games with those I saved. Those I help. Those who give a purpose to this empty shell animated by the rotten piece you threw away.

I may not be able to love them— you took that away from me—

But they are all I have. They are my meaning. All that fills the holes you left me.

So, hear me and hear me well, if you want to get involved? Fantastic. Get in the fucking program. Let’s function as a person for once.

But only if you fuse, like during the fight with the Gur or just now. If you don't want to, that's fine. You run your idea by me.

I DECIDE. You don’t get to shove me aside. You don’t get to shut me off like some puppet.

That is MY REALM.
THIS IS YOURS.

You don't see me interfering in here, do you? 

So, no, you don't get to do that either. You don’t get to fucking cast some magic that is not even connected to the Weave, on my purpose, my patient, without my knowledge. Do that one more time— And I swear to every god of every pantheon— I swear it above all else by his chain.

This body will choose to be fully soulless.

I found some very interesting rituals in the wizard’s notes. Fuck with Astarion or anyone I help, one more time, and I will sever the link. Burn the thread.

Leave you trapped in your precious little sad paradise.  

I will become truly empty.

And thanks to you— I already know too well how to survive like that.”

This landed like a curse, a warning, and a goodbye all at once.

Chapter 33: Warlock's Crypt

Astarion's POV

---

The trance broke like surf on stone.

Not violently. Not with revelation or horror.
Just… stillness.
Quiet, for once.

The Beast was gone.

Its chant had faded, no longer thrumming through my marrow. No claws at my throat. No whispers in my gums.
Only breath—steady, controlled, mine.

The air hadn’t changed. The dome still hummed softly. But something inside me had shifted—and I couldn’t yet tell if it was healing, or rot dragged into the light.

I opened my eyes.

She was still asleep beside me.

Half-curled on her side, arm stretched toward where I’d been. Her brow furrowed slightly, like she was still caught in some dream too heavy to shake. She usually looked ready to bolt or strike even in sleep—except now.
Now she looked… peaceful. No, exhausted. Her human body demanded more sleep than mine—seven, ten hours sometimes. No trance to shortcut the healing. No divine bypass to ease the cost of endurance. Just mortal rest.

She’d earned it. She’d been pushing too hard lately.

I watched her chest rise and fall. Once. Then again.
Proof of life. Proof of rest. Proof that at least one of us could still sleep like that.

I shouldn’t have kept looking. I told myself that.

Not after how I’d looked at her yesterday.

But I couldn’t stop.

Not from watching her fingers twitch against the bedroll, as if still trying to cast in her sleep. Not from noticing the angry bite mark at her throat, half-hidden in her silver hair. Not from remembering the exact pressure of her nose against mine, the way her voice never shook—even when she should have run.

Gods, she should have run.

I flexed my fingers. No tremor. No hunger. No bloodsong.
Not even the Beast.

Just me.

What remains when the howl fades?

The numbness ebbed, and the tenderness returned in a crashing wave.

There’s no denying it now.
Even she knows it.

Yesterday’s muting of those feelings had only made them sharper now.

She is not a resource. Not a mark. Not prey.
Then what in the hells is she?

I sat back, staring at her like the question might answer itself.

My mind—always sharp, always coiled for opportunity or threat—offered nothing. No tactic. No tidy category.

She’s not just my ally.
Not my lover, despite my attempts.
Not much more than my saviour.

Just… her.

She’s a fool.
My fool.

The girl who pulled me out of a grave without knowing what she’d find.
Who gave without asking what I’d take.
Who stayed when she had every reason to run.

I could spin a dozen excuses to pull away—name it codependence, call it her successful manipulation, wrap it in vampire lore and pretend it’s the feeding bond.
But that would be a lie.
Worse—it would be cowardice.

And I am done being a coward.

I remember the Beast’s claws in me. The moment I almost let it win. And her voice—steady, unflinching—calling me back with nothing but the unbearable weight of trust.

Her heart hadn’t even quickened as I bit her. Hard. Too deep. Too hungry. My worst feeding since she unearthed me.

And she didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull away. Didn’t protest.

This must have hurt.
Gods, it had to have hurt.
She should have screamed.

But all she did was hold me.

Like I was something precious. Someone worth enduring for.

I pressed a hand to my chest. It didn’t stop the feeling—only made it worse.

Because I had wanted to hurt her. Not out of malice, but for the sweetness of losing control. Of taking. Malar’s voice still echoed—low, guttural, right.

And she let me.

Not because she was weak. But because she wagered I could stop. Because she believed I would.

I didn’t deserve that belief. Maybe I never will.
And still, she offered it.

Freely.

A fool who risked her life for a favour she’ll never cash in—
not because I wouldn’t grant it, but because she’d never ask.

She sleeps now like an overworked scholar, arms tucked in, tension back in her frame. The world will demand more when she wakes—and I’ll be part of that burden.

I hate that.
I hate that I don’t want to let it go more.

I rose, moved to the dome’s edge. The air was cold, sharper than I expected. I noticed the hearths were nearly out and rekindled them.

The children in the other room were quiet. One snored softly. A blanket rustled.

The food we’d left was gone. Good.

I didn’t check on them. I didn’t want to see fear—or worse, trust—in their eyes.

Instead, I left more food. Dried meat, fruit, and the last crust of sweetbread. A small canteen. And I left quickly, before I wondered who would wake first.

Because shame was already coiling.

They were children.
Not metaphorically. Not in the drawn-out elven sense.
Literal. Bone-thin. Wide-eyed.

And I almost fed on them.

Not to survive. Not in desperation.
Just because something in me twitched and calculated.
Saw weakness. Warmth. Blood.
Saw prey.

I saw them as prey.

That wasn’t Cazador. Wasn’t Malar.
That was me.

And I thought: easy.

I’ve stepped over street urchins before, mocked them.
But children? That should have been too far—even for me.

Maybe it was only too far because I’d never had to cross it. If Cazador had ordered it, I wouldn’t have refused. I wouldn’t have lost sleep.

That’s the truth.

Because something in me is broken.

The trance had broken like surf on stone.
But this—this was sediment. Shame settling deep for the first time in a century and a half.

And I had to sit with it.

Because the same part of me had looked at her like that, too.
Alone. Strange. Soft-spoken. Bleeding purpose.
Perfect mark.

Only she wasn’t.

I would have ruined her if she had been less perceptive because I didn’t see people. I saw marks.

That’s not just Cazador’s fault.
That’s how I chose to survive him.
By hunting before I was hunted.
By killing what was weak in me—until I couldn’t tell where the rot ended and I began.

She told me once that who I am at my core is still mine to choose.
Maybe she’s right.

I don’t want that part of me anymore.
Not because I’m noble. Not because I’ve seen the light.
Because I want more.

More than a throat. More than a pulse. More than freedom.
I want a life.

I want her laughter when I’m not charming her. The quiet when she reads. The way she never bows, even to her god.

I want peace.
I want to live.
Not just feed. Not just take. Not hunt.
Live.

And that hunger is different.

But it doesn’t erase the fact that I saw her as prey. Saw children as prey.
The Beast didn’t create that—it just named it.
Gave it claws.

There is no separate Beast.
Just me.
The rot I allowed.

I’ll never be a hero. I’m a monster. But I don’t have to be that kind of monster.

I don’t have to be the one who tears out a child’s throat for no reason.

I slipped past the curtain. Didn’t look back—at the children, the bedroll, and her.

Before leaving, I set a note beside her head:

Out exploring. Needed to think.
Thank you for yesterday.
Will be back soon.

Then I stepped into the streets of the dead.

---

Warlock’s Crypt was no ruin.

It wasn’t some chaotic mire of clawed corpses flailing for scraps of life.
No, it was worse.

It was a marvel.
A monument to cold, meticulous purpose.
A city that had outlived gods and empires, thriving still—not despite its rot, but because of it.

And it was beautiful.

That was the part that unsettled me most. Horror wrapped in elegance. Death gilded in intellect.

The towers were the first thing I noticed—black stone, narrow as blades, rising in serrated ranks. Their surfaces crawled with glyphs that moved like insects, whispering at the edge of hearing if I looked too long. The air seemed to bend around them, drawn into the slow, deliberate gravity of the place.

Bridges spanned spire to spire—broad enough for carriages, delicate as spider silk. On them, processions passed in perfect formation: skeletal footmen bearing crates that shuddered with muffled sobs, vampire courtiers drifting behind like murder dressed in velvet.

Far below, the streets gleamed—a slate so polished it mirrored the towers above. Enchantments resisted bloodstains, though not wholly; faint smears lingered in the stone like memories that refused to be cleaned away. Lesser undead swept constantly, their motions mechanical, overseen by wights whose gestures were as precise as a conductor’s baton. Crawling claws scuttled through alleyways, ferrying scraps to vats that exhaled slow, chemical rot.

True to the Death Knight’s promise, the sun never reached this place.
Even at its zenith over the Troll Hills, light here was thin, strained.
Sometimes it felt as if the city refused it—some pact older than the stone banishing warmth and day in equal measure.

I took the narrow streets. Not because they were safer—they weren’t—but because they were quieter. Even here, order reigned. Zombies pushed carts of masonry to repair cracks no mortal eye would have noticed. Wraiths drifted overhead, their tendrils questing for thoughts to taste. I walked with my head high, gaze half-lidded with disdain, every inch the minor spawn with noble blood somewhere behind his fangs. It was a performance, and arrogance was the currency here.

Still, my shoulders eased only once the vampire knight patrol had passed—their skeletal steeds clattering, crimson plumes trailing like spilled lifeblood.

Necrotic gardens lined some courtyards: bone-white vines coiling around rusted trellises, black lilies whose petals rose and fell as though breathing. Lich apprentices knelt at a shallow pool in one square, chanting until the water quivered with sickly green motes. The air tasted of brine and dust.

I did not linger.

Before the vampire lords’ estates, the plazas bloomed into grotesque grandeur—iron balconies twisted into screaming faces, stained glass windows depicting scenes no mortal priest would dare sanctify. Here, beauty and cruelty were indistinguishable.

And then the Vein Market.

I had thought myself no stranger to horror.
Centuries in Baldur’s Gate under Cazador’s delicate hand had taught me how to walk past it and smile around it. But Warlock’s Crypt… this was horror refined into commerce.

Covered galleries displayed the living like artworks—captives frozen behind enchantments that gave them the illusion of calm, even cheer. Twenty glass alcoves faced the street, each occupant framed as though for admiration. Buyers strolled by—vampires, apprentices, Thayan necromancers—debating bloodlines in the tones wine merchants reserve for vintage years.

Practical. Efficient. Vile.

I stopped before one alcove. The illusion rippled—just for an instant. Beneath it, the truth surfaced: a sun elf girl, no more than thirty. Her beauty was undeniable; so was her terror. Her eyes were glazed, her collar glowing faint red, and chains forcing her upright. No mind-spell—just steel. Cheaper. Easier to replace.

A seneschal noticed me. He approached, bowed slightly, and smiled without warmth.
“Rare stock,” he purred. “Celestial blood, three generations back. The flavour is… revelatory. If you lack bartering rights, we offer merit points for recommendations to your master.”

I smiled back—all teeth, no sincerity—and drifted away before I opened his throat. Because in his smile I saw something familiar. Something in me.

And I couldn’t face that. Not here.

This was undead dominion perfected. The kind of power I told myself I didn’t want. The kind I wasn’t sure about anymore.

The Barterum of Secrets loomed ahead—a sprawl of annexes and vaults, corridors and counting rooms. Not the tallest building in the city, but perhaps the most dangerous. This was not a place of conquest, but of control.

Within, shadows muffled the sound of wealth changing hands. Murmured bargains bound in blood, ink, or soul. Liches traded the marrow of fallen celestials for phylacteries. Thayans haggled over the fate of fifty bound souls while skeletal scribes etched the terms into the air. Breaking a pact here meant vanishing into one of Larloch’s oubliettes, where eternity was spent in silence so perfect it scraped the mind raw.

Even the libraries were locked in transaction—books bound by sigils and mind-wards, every page a commodity.

And over it all, an unseen thrum. Old magic. Patient. Watching.

Even Curse Eater went still here. Not silent—never silent—but subdued.
It drank, discreetly.

I felt it hum in my grip, sipping threads of hex and oath from the air. Minor enchantments frayed as I passed: a ledger’s sigils guttered mid-entry, a cursed locket’s pull slackened, a scroll simply died. The air prickled with the faint scent of unbinding.

For more potent magics, the blade needed more than proximity.
It needed me.

I didn’t know how much of myself I could spare.

Too many minor disruptions, and even this city would notice. Here, magic was meant to stay bought. To obey. To perform. A single failed enchantment was a ripple; too many ripples, and someone starts to look for the stone.

So I drifted away, my pace slow, my posture unbothered—the image of a spoiled scion with nowhere urgent to be. Let them see that. Let them believe it.

The truth was that if I stayed, this city would notice me. And I wasn’t sure if it would destroy or welcome me home.

I took a side street to avoid another row of displays, hoping for something quieter—residential, muted.

How wrong I was.

The street opened into a courtyard paved in black, glass-smooth tiles, each reflecting the towers in fractured pieces. Shallow steps ringed the space, drawing the eye inevitably to the centre: a colossal glass cylinder, taller than two men and wide enough to swallow a carriage whole.

And inside…

A person.
Or rather, the pieces of one.

Arms. Legs. Torso. Head. Each severed from the rest, suspended at precise intervals in a thick, viscous fluid, the colour of bruised flesh. Necrotic sigils crawled over every fragment, pulsing faintly in time with a heartbeat that should not have existed.

The head’s eyes were open. They tracked movement—followed the slow prowl of my approach. Lips moved against the weight of the fluid, shaping words I could not hear.

Three vampires and a lich apprentice stood nearby, speaking in low, bored tones—not about the suffering on display, but about mundane matters. One idly flipped through a ledger. Another ran a fingertip along the tank’s etched frame, as if testing a fine goblet for flaws.

A brass plaque at the base told the story: an adventurer, captured while attempting to infiltrate the city. Eighty years ago. Granted “immortality” as a civic ornament—an unblinking reminder of Larloch’s reach and cruelty.

Then the left hand twitched.
Not random. Not spasm.
A pattern.

Tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
Pause.
Repeat.

It took me a moment to place it—then my stomach turned cold.

Thieves’ Cant.

Kill me, please.
Over and over.
The exact three words, repeated with perfect rhythm.

One of the mages noticed the motion, stepped forward, and traced a glyph into the glass. The body parts shifted, rotating slowly like meat turning on a spit so that he could examine each piece. They spoke idly about regenerative rates, wagering how many cycles the subject could endure before the soul collapsed.

The rotation brought the head around to face me again.
Eyes locked to mine.
Still tapping.
Still pleading.

Kill me, please.
Kill me, please.

I turned away, spine stiff, telling myself I didn’t care.
But long after I’d left the courtyard, I could still hear it—
that deliberate, patient code of taps,
chasing me down the street like footsteps I didn’t want to turn and see.

---

The mid-ring of the Crypt was busier than I’d expected.

Everything here gleamed—not with warmth, but with purpose. Obsidian arches rose like sharpened ribs, silver-inlaid facades caught the dim pallor and fractured it into cold reflections. Banners hung motionless overhead, their silks enchanted to suggest a breeze that no longer touched this place.

I slowed at an expansive plaza, its heart marked by four buildings standing in perfect, silent dominance—sleek, severe, arranged like cardinal points around a courtyard of black glass etched with sprawling sigils. At the exact center, a squat basalt plinth bore four carved masks, each fanged, each crowned with a different symbol.

The Trading Four.

I’d heard the name whispered in Barterum and servant halls. Here it was in stone.

Four vampiric houses controlled the Crypt’s lifeblood—commerce, import, and logistics—each one a vital organ in the city’s anatomy. House Noctelith was the most ruthless of them: a network spidering out through land and sea routes, unchallenged in its grip on storage vaults and supply chains. But even they didn’t rule the Crypt.

Power here was older. Stranger. Fractured into dozens of necrotic arteries, all pumping to serve the same heart—Larloch, the Shadow King.

Other houses commanded the military legions, cattle management, or architectural expansions. Beyond the vampires lurked older deathless lords: focusing on arcane enforcement, even mummy sovereigns, were active in the city's population management. Each governs their sphere with the cold patience of the necropolis. The entire system ran on a strict hierarchy and heavier bureaucracy than most mortal kingdoms could bear—every decree a vertebra in the spine of the city’s body.

And all of it bent, eventually, toward the throne.

I drifted into the northern building’s shadow, feigning interest in a statue—something angular and inhuman, all edges and jagged teeth. In truth, I was listening.

Soft voices carried through the archway—two men, close enough for the words to slip between the stone like a draft. One was nasal, drawling with boredom. The other cut his words short, like each one cost him.

“They’re pressing again,” the drawl muttered. “Noctelith won’t fund another expedition unless the lost ledger is recovered. We have to make it work with those bloody drow this time. They’ve come all the way here.”

“She doesn’t want to give it,” the clipped voice replied. “I think she may have burned it. Just to spite the master.”

“She wouldn’t dare—”

“She would. She won’t give anything. Not the ledger. Not the other matter. The master’s already furious—he asked Lord Vhol to intervene, thinking she wouldn’t dare refuse them. But who knows if the Blue Lord will even want to step in.”

“He will,” the drawl insisted. “Say what you like about Vhol, but he’s a vampire through and through—loyal to the true master. He’d never let a lich’s petty meddling ruin a deal this valuable.”

A sharp, dry laugh. “You’re too naïve, Turbal. Yes, he’s a vampire through and through—and that means he’ll keep the master in check if it suits him. I’m sure the master knows and has already planned for it, but the longer this drags on, the more we lose. They’re getting impatient.”

“We should appease them. Fabricate a second record. The inner-ring cell won’t protest—they’ve sold the same intel twice before. Dress it differently, the drow spawns won’t notice.”

“They will notice. They didn’t come this far for scrap. And the inner-ring mages refuse to cooperate.”

“Even if they notice, it’ll be later. In the meantime, they’ll be too busy poring over it to walk away. We just need them at the table until the master finds a solution. The whole city’s buzzing about this.”

I stayed until their voices dropped to a murmur I could no longer make out—just enough to taste the shape of intrigue on the air.

I moved on—careful, unhurried. The statue’s shadow fell away, with it, the faint shelter it had lent me.

I could still hear their words in my head. Ledger. Vhol. The master of the Noctelith patriarch, I assumed, or one of their minion. All of it knotted into the city’s structure. It was tempting—so tempting—to linger, to follow the thread until I had the whole weave in my hands. She had told me once that curiosity was a better leash than fear. It led her to the Naga court, but I knew better. In this place, curiosity wasn’t a hobby. It was an invitation.

After a long meander through the mid-ring’s arteries, I circled back, approaching the western side of the Scarlet Enclave from a few blocks away. Opposite from where I’d passed earlier, the view widened until it was unavoidable. I finally understood why they called their neighbourhoods rings.

The Enclave sat like a poliEnclaveart within its own loop of fortification—self-contained, defended, and deliberate in its boundaries. By the time I stepped back into it, the walls of Thayan red felt almost comforting. A lie of safety, perhaps—but one I preferred. 

The walls were high and unbroken, faced in stone, the deep, arterial shade of Thayan red. They didn’t simply stand there—they radiated an authority hammered into the grain by decades of spellcraft. The colour wasn’t paint but a permanent stain, drawn from volcanic stone quarried in the Sunrise Mountains and fused with powdered garnet during its shaping. Even the mortar glimmered faintly when the light caught it wrong—alive with wards laid generations ago, still pulsing in steady, patient rhythm.

Enchanted iron gates punctuated the perimeter—massive, blackened, and chased with runes in tarnished silver. Each one bore the stylized skull-and-flame sigil of Thay, its hollow eyes enchanted to flare at the approach of an intruder. Two undead guards flanked every entrance: shaven-scalped, pallid, their flesh stamped with binding glyphs in black ink no living skin could have endured. The marks identified their masters by lineage and school of magic. They did not move, did not breathe, yet their eyes tracked every motion with a flat, insect-like precision.

Inside, the streets were narrow but meticulously ordered, flanked by buildings with the tall, thin proportions favoured in Thay’s own cities. Crimson banners hung from wrought balconies, their hems preserved from fraying by a constant skein of threadbare cantrips. Even the cobblestones bore the red volcanic tint of Bezantur’s high courts—imported at staggering expense to recreate the feel of home.

The air smelled faintly of incense resin, parchment ink, and the sharp tang of embalming salts. Somewhere close, I caught the metallic ghost of ozone from lightning magic—Red Wizard wards being renewed. Even here, danger prowled. Dread warriors stood in lacquered armour at the choke points. Deathlocks drifted in the margins, their clouded eyes following every motion, weighing every trespass. 

The Enclave was not just an Enclaveion—it was an open secret. Part embassy, part trading hub, part asylum. A place where Thayan envoys rubbed shoulders with those their homeland had exiled: the too-ambitious, the politically inconvenient, the once-useful. They came here for a second chance… or simply a last one.

Here, exile was not disgrace—it was currency. The Crypt granted them permanent citizenship, and in return, they poured their talents into its necromantic machinery. Ritualists, fleshcrafters, alchemists—all of them trained in the rigid hierarchies of Thay’s magocracy even before the civil war, where magical talent was both your worth and your weapon.

But their eyes betrayed them.
Some still carried the thin-lipped arrogance of those who’d once stood in the shadow of a zulkir’s throne. Their hands were clean, their robes immaculate, their backs straight with the memory of authority. Others… others carried the same hunger I’d seen in the slums of Baldur’s Gate. Not the gnawing of empty bellies, but the sharper ache of ambition with nowhere left to climb. People tolerated, but never respected.

A necromancer knelt by a public channel where the city’s fluorescent, polluted water pulsed like a sluggish vein. Her robe hem was patched, stiff with dried ichor. Her fingers, stained black with the residue of reagents, moved with the precision of decades spent in ritual. She murmured—not prayer, but a working—her voice too soft to catch. She filled glass vials one by one, stopping them with wax stamped with her personal signature.

A boy stood behind her. Twelve, maybe. His scalp was freshly shaved, the beginnings of Thayan tattoos scored into his skin. But the lines were jagged, uneven—homemade. I’d seen the real thing before, each glyph an exacting mark denoting magical school, rank, and allegiances. His were crude imitations, but the intent was there: a child shaping himself in the image of the Red Wizards before he’d even grown into his bones. He watched her every movement, silent, memorizing.

In Thay, children born to magical promise were often marked young, trained as apprentices by family obligation or purchased outright by ambitious masters. Here, far from their homeland, that tradition had been warped—twisted into something more desperate, more personal. This boy’s tattoos were not sanctioned. No zulkir’s sigil protected him. If he failed to prove himself, he’d be just another exile in a city that only valued results.

I looked away before the boy’s eyes could meet mine.

Every street I walked was another whetstone, grinding the edge of my thoughts sharper.

It should have repulsed me—this city. It should have reinforced every reason any sane creature would recoil, spit, and turn away.

Instead, it whispered.

Warlock’s Crypt was horrific. Unforgivable.
And yet… it worked.

It endured.

As I had.

I’d spent too long hiding behind the excuse of being a monster, letting it be my shield and alibi. I told myself I was shaped by Cazador, hunger, and the leash around my throat that the instincts were his, not mine.

But here? Here, everyone had the same excuse. And they thrived on it.

They built. They organized. They planned.
Yes, they traded in rot—but with precision. With permanence. They gave even the damned a purpose.

Perfume on top of a corpse.

And yet, what did we have up there?
A collapsing alliance of squabbling city-states, chewing up the weak to fatten the strong. Street gangs were in the shadows, slave rings were behind noble crests, and empty temples were where no gods truly listened.

At least here, no one pretended.
They wore their cruelty like silk.
They polished their horror until it gleamed.

And the part of me that still echoed with Malar’s chant, that still remembered Cazador’s lessons, whispered back:
Is this really so different from what made you?

I reached the end of the ring and found myself staring at a half-sunken stairwell. Two skeletal porters flanked its entrance, heads tilting toward me in eerie unison—as though listening to some sound I couldn’t hear.

I stepped back.
Let the thought settle like silt.

And I hated what surfaced.

Because the truth was, I could live here. I could belong here.

That was the part that unsettled me most.

I turned toward the eastern side of the Enclave. She would be awake now, waiting. Looking at me the way she always did—like I was not a monster.

I needed air.
I needed her.

Because I could feel something soft in me curling inward, bracing like an animal before the pang of hunger.

The same instinct that had looked at a girl in chains and felt… nothing.
Not rage. Not grief. Just the quiet flicker of recognition.
Like looking into a mirror you didn’t want to admit was yours.

The same instinct that had, once upon a time, gazed over a room of sleeping strangers and seen nothing but veins.
Opportunity.
Prey.

And the city was making it easy to believe those instincts were right.

But the quiet unnerved me most—the way silence stretched between doorways like tripwires and the undead sidestepped one another without deference yet with perfect spatial awareness.

Predators, all of us.
Living, dead, and everything between.

Just trying not to get bitten first. I left before that belief could root itself deeper. 

Left to get back to sanity. 

Back to her.

---

Inside, I found her running back toward the entrance. She hadn’t gone far—just far enough to meet me as soon as the door opened, as though she’d been listening for it. Arms hanging loosely at her side, resting clothes rumpled with sleep, hair slightly mussed in a way she’d never notice, but I always did.

She looked… tired. Shadows smudged beneath her eyes, her skin pale even for her—but steady. Present. Real.

When her gaze caught mine, it didn’t waver. Slow, deliberate, her eyes swept over me—not to appraise, not to search for injury, but as though she were grounding herself in the fact that I was here. A smile began to form, small at first, curling upward until it cracked through the weariness like dawn slipping under a door.

“You’ve been gone hours,” she murmured. Her voice rasped like worn parchment, yet the sound carried a kind of quiet warmth I hadn’t realized I’d been craving.
“Fell in love with the city yet?” She added as she was sitting in the entrance divan waiting for me.  

I barked out a laugh—too sharp, too hollow—and crossed the room toward her before I could think better of it. When I sat, my hand found hers almost without permission, cold fingers sliding against her warm ones as though I’d done it a thousand times. I didn’t let go.

“It’s a masterpiece,” I said. “A necropolis that functions better than any kingdom I’ve ever walked through. Everything here is deliberate. Precise. Every horror is tucked neatly behind rules and rituals. It’s terrifying—almost admirable. I half wanted to applaud.”

She closed her eyes and leaned back against the stone wall, letting her head rest. A few loose strands of hair had fallen forward, brushing against the hollow of her throat. My eyes caught on them before I could help it, following how they shifted slightly with each breath.

“Told you to wait until the honeymoon.”

Something in me loosened at that. The sharp edges I’d been carrying all day dulled in an instant. I laughed—genuinely this time—until my ribs ached. The tension I hadn’t even known was wound into my spine bled away under her gaze, like a knot untying itself in the quiet.

“You did indeed.”

And I found I couldn’t quite stop looking at her—at the faint crease between her brows, the way her lashes clung together from sleep, at the soft, unconscious curl of her fingers still resting in mine. I told myself it was gratitude. Relief. Something simple. But I wasn’t entirely convinced, even as I sat there, thumb absently tracing the warm ridge of her knuckles.

Eventually, she opened one eye, a spark of mischief slipping past the fatigue.
“I don’t suppose you passed a bakery? Something sweet for breakfast?”

Her voice was still rough from sleep, and I found myself watching how her lips curved around the question, how the faint line at the corner of her mouth deepened when she smiled like that.

“None that I could see, no.”

“Pity. I suppose I’ll have to cook, then. There are some dried rations and cheese and… something greenish in the pack, but the kitchen is well stocked with more perishable items. I feel bad for the children, though. Between the rations and my culinary skills, bleak choices only! They may think feeding them is an act of torture, not mercy.”

She spoke with her arms folded loosely, thumb absentmindedly stroking the curve of her own forearm as if keeping herself anchored. Her hair, rumpled and escaping in fine strands, caught faint glints of light when she shifted.

I just watched her—this beautiful, half-mad creature with shifting, unflinching eyes and stupid jokes spilling past lips that always seemed to find their way into a smile. She was perfect. Not because she’d saved me. Not because she trusted me. Not even because she saw me—all of me—and stayed.

She just was. Perfect. In a way, I had no business trying to name.

She began to stand, brushing one hand against her hip in a habitual motion, probably to go to the kitchen.
“How about I try instead?” I said, surprising myself as much as her. My voice came out steadier than I felt. “I still owe you that meal you keep whining about. Though I make no promises, I can’t remember ever cooking before. You may have to serve as my brave little test subject.”

She froze mid-step, the faint sway of her hair settling against her cheek.
“You’re serious?”

“Tragically so. But if you ever breathe a word of it, I’ll deny it completely. With flair. Possibly violence. I have a reputation to uphold, darling.”

She tilted her head slightly, a few loose strands falling forward to frame her face. “Who would I tell, you ridiculous man?” Her voice had gone warmer now—softer, like the first sip of wine after days on the road. “Do you want a recipe? I have many cookbooks.”

“I was thinking something simple. Fried eggs. Sausages. Things even an untrained immortal might manage without setting fire to the kitchen.”

“You are an angel.”

“Ah, at last, we’re getting somewhere. Flattery—this is the currency I understand. It will get you everywhere with me, little dove. Now all that’s left is for you to call me beautiful, and we can declare breakfast a success.”

She tilted her head further, squinting at me in theatrical appraisal. The faintest dimple appeared in her cheek when she pretended to think.
“Is the breakfast conditional on my saying that?”

“I’m not saying it is… but I’m not saying it isn’t. What if it was?”

“In that case, I’d better cook.”

“Rude!”

She threw her head back and laughed—loud, unguarded, gloriously undignified. The sound filled the room like sunlight spilling through a cracked window, warming corners the city had left cold and shadowed. Her hair brushed her collarbone with the movement, catching the faintest trace of her scent—dry herbs, ink, and something sweet I could never quite name. So I pouted, dramatically, and stormed off toward the kitchen. The theatrics earned me a second peel of laughter—quieter this time, softer. Closer to affection than amusement.

And without meaning to, I matched her rhythm—breathing easier, sitting straighter, the last taut threads of the Crypt’s grip loosening in my chest. My hand, resting on the table, no longer clenched unconsciously. My jaw eased.

For a moment, I let myself believe the city couldn’t touch me here. Not while she was laughing.
Not while I could feel the echo of her warmth still humming against my skin from when we’d passed close.

---

The kitchen was small, cramped, and filled with the stale perfume of old Thayan incense—smoky, resinous—and the faint, overripe sweetness of fruit left a day too long. The air clung to my tongue like dust.

I dug through the supplies with deliberate theatrics, muttering under my breath about “medieval storage conditions” and “culinary sabotage,” flicking a bruised tomato into a bin with the disdain of a courtier rejecting a bad vintage.

But my hands… my hands moved with surprising steadiness.

I had no memory of cooking. Never needed to since being turned. And before that… well, either I never had to, or the memory had been swallowed whole by the centuries, along with all the other mundane pieces of a mortal life.

Still—precision I remembered. How to move without waste. How to slice things cleanly. How to arrange. I’d been trained to serve.

And maybe—just maybe—this could be a different kind of service.

For her.
For the two little terrors she’d taken in.
For the part of me that desperately needed to believe I could create something, instead of only tearing it apart.

Even if it was just breakfast.

If it went well… maybe next time I could attempt that Thayan Ogrish Sagaria she’d mentioned with such absurd enthusiasm last time. Apparently, it was “a dish worth killing for,” though hopefully not literally. The name certainly sounded in-theme.

The kitchen looked deceptively manageable—no obvious threats beyond my ineptitude. A wall of blackened pans. A neat fire rune array etched into the cooking surface. A few dried herbs dangling from a string like forgotten curses, their shadows swaying faintly with each draft. And, on the counter, a little mountain of fresh goods from the wizard’s stocks: eggs, sausages, potatoes. Mortal fare—plain, humble, familiar.

It almost felt too simple.

Unfortunately, none of that prepared me for the sheer carnage that ensued.

The first egg stuck to the bottom of the pan like a summoning seal that had decided my immortal soul was its property. When I tried to flip it, the yolk tore—bleeding golden across the pan like some wounded, one-eyed soldier.

The second egg fared no better. It somehow managed the arcane feat of being burnt to a crisp on one side and disturbingly raw on the other, an unholy union of cremation and salmonella. I stared down at its lopsided, sizzling corpse with growing offence.

From the other room, Elenya snorted. “Everything alright in there?”

“Perfectly,” I called back. “I am mastering the subtle art of humiliation via breakfast.”

The creak of her chair betrayed her, and moments later she appeared, leaning against the doorframe with her arms loosely folded. Hair still mussed from sleep, eyes half-lidded, smirk far too self-satisfied.

Her presence alone renewed my motivation—at least until the sausages turned on me.

They hissed at me like tiny, angry demons. One split open in a grotesque display, another rolled off the counter and onto the floor, earning a sharp hiss of disgust from me that mirrored theirs. I lunged to salvage the remaining ones, grabbed a jar without looking, and shook a generous helping over them.

Only when they began to caramelize did I realize it was sugar.

I stared. They hissed. Elenya's smirk deepened.

With all the dignity I could muster, I swept the eggs and sausages into the bin in one grand, sweeping motion, as though purging a cursed artifact, and turned my attention to the potatoes.

“Boil,” I muttered at them, pacing in front of the pot like a general berating his troops. “Be soft. Be obedient. Be nothing like the fucking eggs.”

“That bad?” she asked, voice warm with amusement.

I turned toward her, spoon in one hand, the other hand gesturing like I was conducting a tragic opera. “Darling, I’ve been bested by protein. I’ve seduced nobles, infiltrated guilds, survived unspeakable torture—but apparently, this is where I meet my end. The kitchen. A cruel, ignoble death at the hands of poultry.”

“Tragic,” she said, deadpan. “You’ll be remembered.”

“I’ll make sure of it,” I shot back. “A statue. In the shape of a burnt egg. Erected in the Vein Market.”

That finally broke her composure. She laughed—a bright, undignified sound that made the cramped kitchen feel almost… warm.

It hit me—mid-turn, mid-fumble with the tongs—that I was smiling. Not out of smugness or mockery, but because her laugh had climbed into me like heat through cold hands. It loosened something I hadn’t noticed was clenched.

I kept busing when I heard, “In all seriousness, though,” She spoke—quiet, measured, like a thought slipping out before she could decide to keep it. “Did you maybe want to stay in the city? Does it tempt you?” She paused, then added, “You could be safe here. Find employment. Build something. A life. Away from him. Suppose that’s what you want. I just... we’d need to plan accordingly.”

I slowed my pace. Not enough to stop cooking. Just enough to feel it. The impact of the words.

I looked over at her.

“Is that what you think I want? Is that what you think I am?” My voice came out sharper than intended. Not angry. Just… unsure.

“I thought you didn’t see me as a monster.”

She met my gaze without flinching. “I don’t. But that’s not my choice to make… I just wanted to check. In case… you’d hesitate to say so because of me. I know I lost my composure yesterday. I am sorry about that. Truly, I guess I felt a bit misunderstood. It wasn't my best moment. But your assumptions were, if not true, still fair. I do follow the broken god, and that means something. It is perfectly reasonable for you to infer that I have some moral considerations you may not want to be limited by. I just want to be clear and say that what matters is what you want—your choice, your decision, not what I think of them. I just want you to be comfortable voicing what you want, even if you believe it is not something I approve of. You do not need my approval. Your definition of safety and a happy ending doesn't need to be what I want for you. I am not saying this is where you belong. I am just asking you if this is what you want”.

There it was.
The million-gold question, wrapped in compassion and razor honesty. And gods help me, I’d spent the entire morning swimming in the filth of that city’s truth—its order, its beauty, its rot polished so thoroughly it gleamed like hope to the damned. I’d heard myself wondering if it was really so different. If the palace and the Crypt weren’t two branches of the same bleeding tree.

I gripped the spoon harder, knuckles pale. A thin ribbon of steam curled from the boiling pot, drifting toward the small, square window. I let my eyes follow it—past the wall, past the ring, as though I could catch one last glimpse of the city before turning my back on it.

And maybe I wasn’t better.
Maybe I never would be.

But I knew this much: 

“No,” I said softly. “Not like that. It’s too… I don’t know.”I exhaled, long and slow. “I don’t want this. There’s nothing left here but perfumed rot. Same as the palace. Just scaled up, disguised better. Slavery in script and ceremony instead of chains.”

She didn’t speak right away.
Just smiled.

Not mockingly. Not even gently.

Something sly, like relief wrapped in mischief.

“Good,” she said, her fingers brushing lightly against my arm as we reached the door.

I didn’t know what “good” meant.
Maybe I wasn’t tempted.
Perhaps I hadn’t lied.
Maybe just that she could still trust me, for one more day.

Whatever it was, I held onto it. Tightly. 

By the time the potatoes began to soften, I had regrouped. Refocused, refined my strategy. I cracked the next egg with ceremonial care, easing it into the pan like I was laying a glyph. Now free from sugar’s sabotage, the sausage sizzled under the proper amount of heat. I turned it gently, almost reverently, as though I’d been entrusted with the last sausage in the multiverse.

And then—there was the smell.

Not all at once. More like a door left ajar, the scent of warm fat and pepper drifting through. It reached in, tugged at something old.

Suddenly, I was small again, sitting at a narrow stone table. Sunlight streamed through a warped glass pane. In front of me stood a tall, silver-haired elf with sharp but kind cyan eyes, her white robe sleeves rolled up. She hummed softly as she flicked her wrist and flipped an egg in the pan with one hand.

Sunny side up. Crisp around the edges, gleaming in the middle.

She placed it on a chipped plate, smiled at me with rare, knowing softness, and said something I couldn’t remember. My chest went tight.

The kitchen snapped back into focus with the sizzle of the pan.

I said nothing. Did nothing—except slide the egg onto a plate as if it were fragile and holy, add the sausage beside it, and repeat the process twice.

By the time I plated the third dish, she’d moved into the room, standing close enough that the sleeve of her robe brushed my arm. “Smells good,” she murmured, and I had to look away—partly because the compliment felt like it might settle somewhere it shouldn’t, and partly because I’d just realized there were potato peels in my hair and I didn’t want her to see it.

She didn't—a quiet victory.

Three plates. Fried eggs, sausages, and mashed potatoes with herbs from our leftover supply. Balanced. Presentable. Almost respectable.

I wiped my hands and turned toward her, a lopsided grin on my lips.

“Would Madam like to sample the fruits of my exquisite labour?”

She raised an eyebrow, clearly suspicious, but took the offered plate. One bite later, her expression turned inscrutable.

“What?” I asked, cautiously.

She stared at the fork like it had betrayed her.

Then: “How is someone not able to differentiate sugar from salt a better fucking cook than me?”

I blinked.

And then I laughed—loud, unguarded, and possibly offensive. I doubled over, hands on my knees, until my ribs ached and the tightness in my chest shook loose like dust from a forgotten corner.

She glared at me over the plate, but her lips twitched, trying and failing to stay stern.

“Don’t you dare,” she said, pointing her fork at me.

“Oh, I already am,” I wheezed. “You pouted. It was adorable.”

“I won't be having this from someone who sugared a sausage!”

“And still outshone your culinary tragedies. Truly, I’m the hero of this tale. A budding culinary talent.”

She threw a napkin at me. I dodged.

And for a moment… I didn’t feel like a monster.

No hunger gnawed at me. No leash tugged at my spine. No curse whispered through my bones.

Just warmth. Laughter. Her.

And three very decent breakfasts.

We carried the plates down the corridor together—three modest meals balanced carefully between our hands. The scent of seared sausage and herbs clung to the air like a blessing, softening the ever-present weight of dust and iron and spell-laced stone.

We turned the corner toward the small chamber we’d made into a dining space for the children and walked inside.

---

I looked at the children.

I’d dragged them out of the wizard’s storage hall earlier—half-carrying, half-hauling—dumped them here in the reception because I wanted them in one place I could watch. Two human youths. Barely grown. Their bones looked like they might pierce through their skin if they leaned the wrong way. Clothes stiff with dried blood. The skin was filmed with grime, and every pore was clogged with the memory of fear. Their eyes… sunken, unfocused. Like someone had scooped them out and hastily put them back.

They’d been asleep—or rather, collapsed—when we entered. Not the gentle, replenishing kind of sleep. The kind you fall into when your body stops negotiating with you. The kind born from terror so deep the exhaustion becomes bone-deep marrow.

Elenya moved with that ghost’s grace of hers. Silent. Deliberate. She didn’t call them. Didn’t try to reach through the bars. She just knelt beside the cage and raised her hands.

She whispered something—too low for me to catch, the syllables barely disturbing the stale air.

Magic pooled from her palms. Not in flares or radiant circles, nothing showy—just a shimmer. Like dust suspended in a shaft of half-light. It drifted down, brushing their skin without touch.

The filth began to lift.

Layer by layer, the grime evaporated. Blood clots loosened and fell away like ash. Stains bled backwards from the fabric until the cloth was whole again. The sour, rotting stench faded, replaced by the clean sterility of freshly drawn water.

She didn’t try to open the cage.

Instead, she set a small plate just outside the door, angled so they’d have to unlatch it to reach it. I followed suit—two tin cups of water beside it. Not a feast. Not a victory. But warm. Real. Enough to remind someone their body was still theirs.

Then we stepped back, giving them space. I folded my arms, trying not to look like I was bracing for an attack. But inside… the whole scene was clawing at something raw I didn’t have a name for yet.

Eventually, they stirred.

It wasn’t sudden. More like watching life drip back into a dying fire—small sounds, a twitch, the faintest shift. The boy moved first. Muscles bunched tight, like an animal deciding between fight and flee before his eyes opened. When they did, they were too broad—too white in the gloom.

He flinched back so violently his shoulders struck the bars. The cage rattled hard enough to jolt the girl awake. She sat up with a sharp, breathless cry, her hands flying to cover her head.

No words. Just the raw noise of fear—the kind you feel in your ribs, the kind that lingers long after wounds have closed.

Then their eyes found the food.

Elenya stayed where she was, moving instead to settle cross-legged on the floor a few feet away. Her robes pooled like still water around her. She took the plate I’d made for her without looking at me and began eating in slow, unhurried bites. The soft clink of her spoon against the ceramic was the only sound in the room.

We hadn’t given the children utensils. Too much risk. Too easy to turn metal into something lethal.

They noticed. I could see the quick dart of their eyes toward our hands, her spoon, then back to their own empty fingers.

The boy looked at his hands. Clean now. Then he looked at the girl. She looked at hers too.

And then… they looked at her.

She was the image of patience. Calm, unthreatening, devastatingly kind. Kind in a way that shouldn’t survive in this place. She sat on the same floor they did. Ate the same food. No orders. No force. Just a nod—a simple, steady invitation.

Eat.

And gods help me, watching her take a bite of food I had cooked—it did something to me. It cracked something open. Something warm. Something terrifyingly soft.

Then their gaze shifted to me.

The warmth hardened. I forced my expression into something neutral. One short nod. No more.

The boy moved first. Inch by inch, breath catching, until his fingers brushed the latch. He hesitated… then undid it. The click of metal was deafening.

He looked at me, waiting—maybe for permission, maybe for punishment. I stayed still. And Elenya just took another slow bite, like nothing had changed.

So he reached. Quick. Desperate. He seized the plate and didn’t bother with the bread first—went straight for the egg, shoving it into his mouth whole. Tears blurred his eyes before he’d even swallowed. He chewed like someone afraid the food might vanish halfway through.

When he’d swallowed, he turned back to the girl and pushed the second plate toward her through the bars.

Then he shut the cage door.

She didn’t touch it. Just stared. Her shoulders trembled, hands shaking too violently to grip anything.

That’s when Elenya set down her spoon. She lifted her water, took a slow sip—and then began to sing.

It wasn’t a spell.

Just a song.

At first, more breath than melody. A threadbare tune, worn and windblown. Then her voice steadied—low, unadorned, each note carrying a weight I couldn’t name. It sounded like something you might hear on a cliffside at dusk, where the wind brought more memory than air.

The girl froze.

Then, slowly, her shoulders loosened. The shivering dulled to tremors. She glanced at the plate in her lap, then at the boy, who had pushed it toward her repeatedly until she’d accepted it.

He was already licking the last scraps from his fingers.

When she saw him shove mashed potatoes into his mouth, his face slick with snot and tears, she finally took the egg in trembling fingers. She bit—just a sliver—and chewed as if testing the world to see if it would punish her for it.

Her eyes stayed on us. As if daring us to shatter the illusion.

We didn’t.

Elenya kept singing.

The boy… gods, the way he looked at her.

Like she was more than food. More than safety. Like she was the first impossible thing he’d ever been allowed to believe in.

I leaned back against the wall. Let my arms hang loose. Breathed slowly. Careful.

I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath.

In this place—a city engineered for cruelty, where hope was rationed to the point of extinction—her song didn’t just sound like comfort.

It sounded like rebellion.

Aided by the scent of fried eggs and sausage, it became something more.

An offering.

A whisper of hope in a grave.

Because for all its grandeur and its cold, exquisite rot, Warlock’s Crypt was a monument to stillness. And she, despite everything, was still alive.

And in that moment, so was I.

---

Later, I returned to the study—but the woman who looked up at me wasn’t the one I’d left.

In truth, she wasn’t a woman at all.

Elenya wore the Red Wizard’s face.

Literally, her flesh had rippled and reformed into the narrow, hawkish lines of the man I’d killed—the same slivered cheekbones, the thin, cruel mouth, even the sigil-burn puckers at each temple, aged like old wax around his eyes. She wore his robes, too: black and blood-red damask that shimmered faintly with residual enchantments. They fit her unsettlingly well.

When she met my gaze, her eyes glittered—amused. Cold. Familiar.

“Well,” she said, and her voice was perfectly his. Gravelly. Slightly nasal. The precise timbre of a man who had never once needed to shout to make others afraid. “You picked an excellent form for me. And whatever qualms I might have had about killing him disappeared the moment I opened his journal. He wasn’t just a trade envoy. He was a ranking necrosavant of Thay—with contracts reaching back nearly a decade. Not quite as powerful as I’d hoped, but well connected.”

She gestured lazily around the richly austere study with a long-fingered hand that wasn’t hers.

“Smart, too. No comforts. No wine, no perfume, no books for pleasure. Just walls lined with soul-inked contracts, sealed coffers of reagents, and portable vaults stacked with spell scrolls. Everything useful. Everything planned.”

Her tone was almost admiring.

What followed were hours of meticulous, unnerving dismantling.

We didn’t ransack. We examined.

Elenya—still wrapped in another’s flesh—moved like she’d always belonged here. She whispered unlocking phrases in precise Thayan cadence, her gloved fingers gliding over glyph-trapped desks and chests that would’ve flayed an actual intruder. I followed, silent, blades ready, catching the faint scent of her—not her body, but her magic—as it crept through each corridor like a ghost mapping its grave.

What we found…

Neatly stacked soul-contracts tied in red silk. Ledgers showing tribute from minor necromancer cults. Correspondence with senior vampires of House Noctelith and brokers in the Vein Market. Ritual outlines for flesh-barter agreements. Signet seals wrapped in strands of true name-script, coded crystals humming with sending spells tuned to private enclaves.

A half-drawn summoning circle waited on the third floor. Freshly etched. Anchored to an Abyssal broker scheduled to arrive within the week.

Elenya perused it all with the eerie grace of someone wearing another man’s bones—and liking it. At one point, she practiced his signature in the air: fine traceries of glowing red sigils, sketched with an idle flourish. They snapped into place perfectly, indistinguishable from the originals in his letters.

She caught my stare and gave me a grin that was hers this time. Sharp. Wry. Wicked.

“This face will be beneficial,” she said. “His seal, his schedule, his spellwork. He was supposed to meet with House Valcorrin’s seneschal tomorrow, about increasing cattle shipments to Thay.”

She touched her borrowed throat thoughtfully, still smiling.

“I think I’ll keep him around a little longer.”

The true treasure, of course, was magical.

Shelves of rare components—powdered ghost orchid, marrow salt, phials of shadowstuff drawn from the Plane of Shadow, vials of ectoplasm that whimpered when shaken. Jars of alchemical blood crystals that pulsed faintly in the dark, still alive with stored vitality.

A locked cabinet held rows of potion vials. Some old. Some heartbreakingly fresh. Necrotic fortification. Cold resistance. Soul stabilizers. Elenya sorted them by smell and resonance, her touch so sure it almost hurt to watch. She pocketed the strongest without hesitation.

And then there were the artifacts.

A small onyx figurine that bled shadow when held to the light. A mirror the size of a locket, in which I saw not my reflection, but a flayed angel, mouth open in soundless agony. A circlet that left my temples tingling with a cold, whispering hunger. I dropped it quickly.

By the time we finished two rooms, the house felt… thinner. Like we’d peeled away something sacred and unspoken. Like we’d gutted a priest and rearranged his organs into storage bins.

I didn’t know whether to feel triumphant or violated.

Elenya—still wearing him—looked up from a scroll she was annotating. Her borrowed face was unreadable.

“I’ll start with the formal letters,” she murmured. “We may need to walk openly in the Enclave. Maybe even the Barterum. That’s what he did. Best to keep the pattern going for now.”

A pause. Her voice lowered.

“But we can’t ever meet the liches. Not in this body. I’d rather not test how well their truesight burns.”

She returned to her work, muttering low Thayan phrases that sank into the walls, setting new wards keyed to her own arcane signature.

I stood there a moment longer, just… watching her.

The skin. The voice. The absolute poise with which she slipped into this man’s life. The way she moved like she belonged in a house layered in soul-debts and blood bargains.

I thought of everything we’d found—the ledgers anchoring the lives of strangers to rituals they never consented to. The poisons are labelled carefully in High Thayan. The mirror that showed me not myself but a punishment.

And I realized we now held the threads of several veins in this city’s dark heart.

Contracts. Promises. Names.

Power.

I didn’t know what that made us.

Not yet.

So I smiled—sharp, brittle, hungry—and gathered the spoils.

Once the house was secured—each ward redrawn, each corpse hidden—we looted in earnest.

Chapter 34: The Red Wizard Suit

Summary:

Elenya and Astarion uncover disturbing secrets about Vaelrith Enmas and Thay’s dark practices. As they navigate the tension between them

Notes:

Hey everyone! This chapter dives into the emotional and moral struggles our characters face as they uncover dark secrets. Hope you enjoy the twists.

Elenya's POV

---

I really hope he remembers us fondly, sometimes.
That thought came as I recorded his latest development, my hand moving automatically while my mind wandered.
He’s doing so much better now. When he leaves—because he will—I hope he remembers us as more than a reminder of the lowest point in his life. That’s what we often become for the threads we help: living echoes of their worst days.

I hope Astarion remembers us fondly.
The thought kept circling like a hawk over the same patch of ground, refusing to land, especially now that I’ve begun noticing the changes.

Not the false seductions—the overplayed, almost lazy performances. The exaggerated sighs, the too-pretty compliments. That was just him wearing the mask, and lately, he hadn’t even been trying to keep it straight.

No, this was subtler.

The way his trances edged closer to her bedroll, like it wasn’t deliberate. How he checked her pack before every departure. How her waterskin was always full now. How a bit of food seemed to find its way into her hands without her asking. How he placed himself between her and danger, even when she didn’t need it.

Little things.
Quiet things.
Real things.

He didn’t even know he was doing them. Which made them precious in a way that nothing planned could ever be.

She called him a cat again, and he scowled—flushed, visibly, the kind of flush he hated because it betrayed him too fast. She saw it, of course. She always did. Which only made it better for her.

And when he fed from her now… it was different.

Gentle.

Reverent, almost.

He held her like she was warmth itself—not just a body or a meal. When it was done, he kissed the bite marks. Rested his head against her chest, eyes closing as if just listening to her heart was enough to quiet something in him. She would run her fingers through his hair, rubbing the back of his neck the same way we used to soothe younger slaves when nightmares chased them from sleep.

And he relaxed under her touch now.

That terrified her.
And thrilled her.

She didn’t want to get used to it.

I thought I should be reassured when he pulled back a little yesterday—when I saw the return of distance, the refusal of intimacy reclaiming him.
Until I realized what it meant.

If I ever needed proof that I wasn’t good, it was there: that slight, selfish relief.

I knew it wasn’t good for him. I knew it came from fear, from being emotionally ill-equipped. But so was I.

And his closeness was shifting something.

In her.
In me.
In whatever this was that we were becoming.

I’d been spending more time outside the fog lately. Stepping into the body, not thoroughly, but enough to take over when I felt I could. Like I was owed it.

I saw him when she collapsed.

I hadn’t meant to. I was hiding—where I always hide—in the seams of the self, in the cracks between thought and motion. But I felt it: his panic. It hit the body like a blow—made her fingers twitch, her breath catch, and made me blink into the world again without meaning.

He wasn’t thinking. That’s the thing.

Astarion always thinks. Always calculates. Charm, fear, hunger, manipulation—it’s all an equation to him. Rituals carved into him by centuries of pain. A theatre of survival.

But when she fell?

It shattered.

No mask. No script. Just raw, unguarded terror.

His hands shook. I remember the blood—hers and the wizard’s—still on his fingertips as he fumbled with the antidote, whispering her name like a prayer for a god who would never answer him. He fumbled. Astarion does not fumble. It was like watching a dancer forget their steps mid-leap and crash through their own grace.

And then: Don’t you die. Don’t you dare.

Like she owed it to him.

Like he couldn’t survive it.

And maybe… maybe he couldn’t.

He didn’t say he needed her. Of course not. He doesn’t say things like that. But I felt it—in the way he held her, as if the weight of her was the only anchor left in the world. As if her stillness was too loud. As if her skin going cold rewound something in him he thought he’d buried centuries ago.

He watched her like she was important.

Like she was his.

Not owned, the way we were owned before—not that kind of his. Something worse.

Her death scared him.
Odd.
Well, he did need her.
Need us.

For now.

Maybe that’s what scared him.

It feels good to be needed.

I saw it all from the corner of my mind. The fog—my fog—pulsed around him before I thought to stop it. It swaddled him like a child, took the sharp edge off the terror so he could move, so he could think enough to stop the bleeding, to find the potion, to hold her hand while he waited.

But I still felt his body shake.

And when she stirred—eyes fluttering open, smiling that crooked, dry smile that meant she was still there—he broke most quietly like a string snapping inside his chest that no one else could hear but me.

Don’t ever do that again, he told her.

Or what? she asked.

Or I’ll drain you myself. Only I get to kill you.

And they laughed, like fools who didn’t realize the joke wasn’t a joke at all.

She would do it again, and he would drain her, one way or another.

I watched it all. Felt it all not just through her—but through him.

Because in that moment, his heart wasn’t a hollow thing.
It was full. Terribly, terribly full.

Full of dread.

And it was tethered to us.
He doesn’t even know it yet.

But I do.

And that’s the problem.

Because things that become threads—they pull.
And I am made of unravelling.

The anger came when I felt him pulling away again and becoming distant. The hurt came. I took control, confronted him—and when that failed, I retreated into my realm, luxuriating in the false safety of the distance he’d just reestablished.

I didn’t even realize what I’d done. How much I’d overstepped.

When I finally understood—when I saw what he’d been going through, and what I’d done to her, to him, to both of them—shame came.

And with it, a reckoning.

---

As she rose from sleep, she found Astarion’s note waiting where she’d left her pack.

Not surprising. He needed to think.

He’d thanked her for yesterday.

What an idiot.

She folded the scrap of parchment away, wiped the dried blood from her hands, and decided to keep busy.

The wizard’s study had once been grand, now sagging into the decay of long neglect. Scroll racks leaned at uneasy angles like broken teeth. Maps of Faerûn were blotted with old ink spills and candle grease. The walls were scabbed with half-burned sigils, their protective wards long since cracked and inert.

Elenya sat cross-legged in the center of the room, surrounded by the treasures she’d hauled in yesterday from the study and the storage rooms beyond. Spells, ledgers, gem pouches, vials of poison, relics, a pried-open chest—all laid out in concentric circles around her like the spokes of some occult mandala. Her sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and the little copying quill hovered above a fresh notebook, scratching tirelessly as it duplicated page after page.

Vaelrith Enmas had been meticulous, even if his habits weren’t.

She began with his pack—a fine leather folio, warded, but sloppily. Enough to deter an amateur thief, not a practiced hand. The counter-sigils fell away under her touch in under a minute, and the interior unfolded like the opening of a secret flower: ritual scrolls, binding diagrams, personal correspondence, and two stoppered vials of shadowglass ink.

The chest was next—unlocked, strangely. Either he’d been careless, or he’d simply never expected guests.

Inside: more scrolls, loose diagrams of soul-tethers linking humanoid silhouettes to strange, abstract geometries—spheres, spirals, branching trees with screaming mouths. Dozens of gems, some large enough to be worth a minor fortune, others no bigger than a thumbnail. And eight ancient tomes, all concerning extraplanar binding.

Then the desk—and that’s when the picture began to form.
Treatises bearing his name in an elegant, assertive script: conjuration, summoning, necromancy. Pages dense with diagrams and footnotes. The letters Astarion had found the day before completed the portrait.

Vaelrith Enmas.

Not a necromancer, not truly. A conjurer with necromantic leanings, ambitious beyond reason. Young. Cunning. Loyal only when it suited him. The correspondence bore Szass Tam’s faction seal, but with none of the reverence others would show it. He was tolerated, not cherished.

He’d built his reputation on craft—author of no less than thirteen original spells before the age of forty. A living man among the dead in Thay’s higher ranks. Maverick, prodigy, pariah. Accepted because his mind produced weapons that others could not.

One crisp, formal letter congratulated him on securing a deal with a lord of House Noctelith. The terms were sickeningly clear: soul-binding diagrams designed to fragment mortal essence into chained fragments for siphoning.

A second note, half-finished and never sent, mentioned Moonrise Tower, Ketheric Thorm, and a Sharran necromancer in the general’s service. Vaelrith had been plotting to infiltrate their work—or steal it outright.

Five other locations were mentioned in similar terms. He had been planning something far-reaching.

It became clear: Vaelrith wasn’t chasing lichdom. Not the traditional kind. Not Szass Tam’s model.

No—he was after something rarer. More dangerous. A way to cheat both life and death without joining either.

He viewed Thay’s reliance on living sacrifices as a weakness—not out of mercy, but out of practicality. In his notes, Elenya found a cold and strangely lucid thesis: undead nations would collapse not through war, but through starvation.

“If living flesh is the foundation of our empire,” he wrote, “then immortality is inherently unsustainable. We will starve long before we are defeated.”

He wanted a different infrastructure. A system that didn’t depend on mortal stockpiles at all.

His field notes explored fragmented soul-links, planar siphoning, and tapping raw Weave energy. His ideas ranged from binding the Far Realm itself to harvesting power from Carceri’s prisoners. The most audacious theories sought to consume the Weave much like the baelnorn liches of elven legend—keepers of duty beyond death, bound to their clans and holdings. He had tried to pry that secret from Myth Drannor and Sharrven ruins, even daring infiltration attempts toward Evermeet and Evereska. All had failed—ancient elves kept their secrets as jealously as their borders.

Recently, his focus had shifted. Less grandiose, but more revolutionary.

Her eyes paused on a single sketch—a planar gate drawn in three overlapping circles: mortal, astral, and something unnamed. The center was not labelled, only depicted.

A spiral of eyes, all screaming.

She shuddered.

Vaelrith’s final gambit was clear: siphon immortality itself from extraplanar entities.

And it told her more than his spellcraft ever could.
He was brilliant, reckless, unorthodox, and cruel. But above all else, he was afraid.

A living wizard without allies in Thay had one of two futures: fade into obscurity, or become fuel for someone else’s phylactery. He’d chosen a third path. One that no one would control but him.

From his journals, it was plain he foresaw Thay’s eventual collapse—not in this century, but the next. Szass Tam’s vision might secure dominance for decades, but the resources to sustain an entirely undead nation were finite. Slave stocks were already dwindling. The free-living population was shrinking even faster.

Lichdom, vampirism, undeath—they all relied on the same fragile well. And Vaelrith would not drink from a dying spring.

So he chased something else. Power without dependence. Immortality without submission.

And in the end, fear had driven him too fast, too far.

Elenya glanced toward the other room, where his corpse lay rolled in a rug, already beginning to smell.

“Your dreams outpaced your lifespan,” she murmured.

She began folding the notes and diagrams back into the folio, slowly. Some of these ideas would not die with him. She would see to that.

Monster though he was, there was a seed of something here—an immortality free of mortal suffering. That, at least, was worth studying. Worth considering.

Of course, if a thousand liches ever learned to feed on the Weave, the consequences for magic itself could be catastrophic. Perhaps that was why the baelnorn’s secret had never been shared beyond the elves—limiting its reach, its danger.

But extraplanar siphoning… that could go somewhere. Primarily, if restricted to particular creatures.

She imagined, just for a moment, thousands of mortals drawing their years from Lolth herself.

The irony was exquisite.

One could only dream.

For legacy.
For understanding.

So she worked.
She studied. She copied. She compiled.

And the hours slipped away unnoticed.

---

While her mind stilled under the monotony of her careful work, mine kept echoing—sharp, hollow—with the remnants of our last conversation.

She was right about me.

I had overstepped.

I had used her.

I had abandoned her.

I needed to change.

She deserved better. And yet, I am all she has.

I broke her trust.

And I broke his.

I truly wanted to help them both, but I took away their choice. Stripped it clean from their hands, like it was mine to decide.

Maybe that’s why I laughed when he implied I’d do it. Too sharp, too flippant. Not because it was absurd—because it wasn’t. Because I already had.

I infused him with magic that none of us understood. I hid it from her because I was afraid of what understanding it might mean.

Finally, when I told her, I explained what I’d seen and why I’d hidden it. How if she realized the fog was shielding him from Cazador’s command—if she knew it was me—she’d want to understand it. Study it. Tear it apart thread by thread. She’d trace it back to the mindspace, to the fog, to the butterflies, to the crystal cave and the weeping angel. To the thing beneath the crystal. To it—its weight, its grip—holding me here.

And I… I can’t. Not yet.

I told her studying the fog would hurt us. That I was protecting her the way she protects me. She wouldn’t understand why—she doesn’t feel it. Not the way I do. I took more than one curse with me when I split.

I wasn’t using her to hurt.
I was hurting all the time.

But I can’t look there. Not at that place. Not at that memory—the before.
Before the self cracked in two.
Before pain calcified into numbness.
Before the spider. Before Menzoberranzan.
Before everything.

I don’t know what will happen if I touch it, only that I mustn’t.
Some truths are better sealed.

I’m not brave—just a reckless coward.
Ready to die. Never ready to live.

Why am I so scared?

The thought had barely finished when PAIN bloomed—bright, splitting—across my mind.

The butterflies were poisoning me again.

Her nose began to bleed. Thin red lines trickled from her ears.

What is hurting us?

The fog surged and thickened around me, wrapping my awareness in suffocating softness.

It didn’t want me to know.

Well, fuck that.

I stopped watching her. I started training—just like the friend had shown me.

The fog bent easier now, shaping under my will. I could stretch, sharpen, and wrap it clean around the leash on Astarion’s soul. Cloak it the way I cloak the spidersong.

Only cleaner.
Stronger.

I needed to pull it in.

I needed to change.

As I’d promised her when I apologized—when I told her I never wanted to hurt her. Never tried to control her.

But I had been keeping her in the dark.

She said that even without love, she knew this was not love.
It was control.

I begged. Again.

Eventually, she forgave me.

But she kept her oath.

If I’m going to keep her—keep any of this—I have to master this.

---

 

She froze, her fingertips trembling as she turned a brittle page in Vaelrith’s spellbook and found a folded slip of parchment tucked into the spine.

At first, it looked like just another coded note. But when her eyes fell on the recipient’s name, her breath caught.

Nevron.

The Zulkir of Conjuration. One of Thay's eight most powerful mages—before the Thayan Civil War shattered the council and left Szass Tam on the throne of an undead empire.

Gods.

What madness was this?

Nevron had been one of Tam’s fiercest, most unyielding enemies. In the Year of Blue Fire, 1385 DR, when the tide of battle turned irrevocably against the living, Nevron had made the desperate choice no one thought he would. He slew Zola Sethrakt, the other Zulkir of Necromancy, with the aid of one of his abyssal patrons. He orchestrated the death of Kumed Hahpret, newly appointed Zulkir of Evocation, in a single, savage strike. Then, abandoning Bezantur and the Zulkir council’s last stronghold, he led the survivors into exile, fleeing before Tam’s relentless, ever-marching dead.

For years, Nevron’s sheer power had been the only thing holding Tam’s aquatic undead legions at bay—summoning horrors from the Infernal Oceans to counter the lich’s drowned armies. But in the end, even he had to retreat, leading the remaining Zulkirs to the Wizard’s Reach, far from Tam’s grasp.

And yet… here was a letter from Vaelrith Enmas—a man deeply embedded in Szass Tam’s own faction—addressed to that same sworn enemy.

Her stomach sank. The truth was sharp, cold, inevitable.

Vaelrith had been playing both sides.

Her hands shook as she unfolded the brittle page. The ink had bled slightly into the fibres, as though written in haste, but the words were still legible. And chilling.

I have failed you, master. Ilyn has not been seen in the Crypt for at least seventy years. However, new trails have emerged. I shall travel there as soon as possible and track the whereabouts of the relic.

However, I did secure the devil and both other tomes. They are delivered to the Crypt.

As for the last experiment, as detailed in my report, it has been somewhat successful. However, the girl cannot be shaped—only burned. The link was still established, and we secured two more specimens. Haste is of the essence. Tam will not rest until not a single living soul in Thay joins either his permanent army or his phylactery.

The Apotheosis ritual he plans to attempt soon aims to unmake the world with the use of the Dread Rings his minions constructed across Thay. This is unsustainable. Even if his ascension succeeds—especially if it succeeds—Thay will collapse once he ascends to his divine realm. We will remain weak, vulnerable to the wrath of our former conquests and the Banite armies, for the Black Lord does not tolerate competition.

Elenya’s mouth went dry.

What in the Nine Hells…

Apotheosis.

Szass Tam was planning to ascend.

The words felt heavy, as if they’d been dragged out of the Lower Planes and pressed into her hands, each letter soaked in something black and irreversible.

The ramifications came in a rush, jagged and choking—like trying to breathe underwater.

What would ascension even mean for a lich like Tam?

What would it make of Thay?

Her mind, trained to map consequence into action, spun without traction. She caught fragments of possibility—none of them survivable.

And then, the other phrase in the letter seared its way to the front of her thoughts.

Dread Rings.

What in all the realms was a Dread Ring?

The name alone carried the taste of something old, engineered for cruelty, a vast work that would need to be built into the world's bones.

She had no memory of it from her own studies. Which meant it was either too rare to be taught openly… or too dangerous to be spoken of in any place not already sworn to it.

If Vaelrith—monster, butcher, obsessive—feared it, if this was enough to make him believe that Tam’s ascension would collapse Thay itself… then it was worse than she could imagine.

And Elenya could imagine plenty.

The thought turned her stomach.

Her fingers tightened on the page, the parchment crinkling softly, as if the letter itself didn’t want to be read aloud. The edges bit into her skin.

The Dread Rings—whatever they were—weren’t just some tool of conquest.
They were the heart of the ritual.

And if the ritual succeeded, Tam would leave the mortal plane—dragging the lifeblood of Thay’s power with him into whatever divine realm he carved for himself.

An empire of predators, suddenly masterless.

It was a thought so sharp she almost flinched from it.
Tam’s absence wouldn’t just topple the balance in Thay—it would spill chaos across Faerûn like a breached dam, flooding every shadow where power-hungry hands waited.

Her stomach turned. She could not stand idle.

She reached for her Candlekeep pin, the silver cool against her skin. Drawing it from her pack, she began layering wards with methodical precision—one to mask location, one to muffle divination, one to deflect intrusion. Each movement was muscle memory, but her hands still trembled faintly with the weight of what she was about to send.

The wards shimmered into place, faint and glass-like, before vanishing from sight.

Then she took a slow, steadying breath, forcing her pulse into something manageable.
Her thumb pressed against the etched sigil on the pin, and she felt the familiar hum of magic pooling in her chest.

She began the first Sending.

Urgent inside information. Szass Tam is working on a divine apotheosis ritual. Large, it alarms even the Red Wizards. B uilding  Dread Rings across Thay unkowns what…

The words sank into the pin, drawn into the Weave.

Moments later, the Keeper of Tomes’ voice returned—quieter than she’d expected, but edged with concern.

Are you certain? This is… very worrying. But politics is complex. Getting confirmation will not be simple. what is a dread ring. 

Her jaw tightened. Even the Keeper of tomes didn't know what the heck that was. This is even worse. Her fingers shifted on the pin, and she shaped the second spell.

Red wizard close to Tam Positive . Dread rings unknown. I am in one of the most dangerous, magically surveilled places I visited. It’s real.

The answer came almost instantly this time, sharper, clipped.

Then you must return. This news is far too important. We need to discuss it further, safely. Come back. Now.

Elenya’s gaze dropped to the open folio at her feet, the lines of Vaelrith’s hand curling like barbs across the parchment.
She could feel the Keeper’s urgency pressing against her, warm and suffocating.

She breathed in once. And out.
Then spoke the third and final message.

I can’t return yet. No access to teleportation, and I need to tie up loose ends. Do something. I’ll contact you once I’m out. Do not attempt to contact me directly.

The reply snapped back before she’d even pulled her hand away from the pin.

Amelia—don’t you dare. Where the hell are you? Get you behind back here. No heroics. You’re an observer, not a soldier. Get back.

Her mouth curved—just faintly. Hearing him fuss even here, in this cold tomb of ambition, was almost warmth, almost comfort.

But she didn’t answer. Couldn’t.

The charges for the day were spent, and she wouldn’t waste them on reassurance she didn’t intend to follow.
The Keeper would act. That was his role.

Hers was to remain exactly where she was.

The magic dissipated, leaving only silence. The pin felt heavier when she slid it back into her pack. Her choice pressed down on her shoulders—not like a burden, but like armour.

There was no going back now for sure. Not until she knew more. Not until the threads she’d found here could be pulled all the way to their source.

She bent over the desk again, eyes narrowing on the damning letter, copying it with patient, meticulous care.

My body—no, the Bodyself—was so brave.
I admired her for that.
Wise in ways I am not. Strong in ways I will never be.
Perhaps because I left those pieces with her when I broke.

Even the way she forgave.

Even the way she understood.

Because she did understand.

She said that for now, it was better to maintain what I was doing. But that she would tell him.
She would explain everything.

She couldn’t allow us to keep casting magic on him—magic he didn’t understand—without his consent.

I didn’t want him to know.
Only the friend knew about this place. This mindspace. The fog.
It’s stupid, but I didn’t want him to see how broken we were.

She said it didn’t matter what I wanted.
I forfeited that right the moment I did this to him.

She was right.

And if he knew… maybe…
My mind kept circling back to the blade at his side.

It would require his help.

It would require explaining everything.

I didn’t even know if it was truly a curse.

But trying to fix it would mean being exposed for too long.
It would mean bringing the wielder here.

I am not strong enough for that.

The friend is, but he does not know about the spider.
Nor does Astarion.

The fog won’t allow it to be known.
Not for a fleeting hope.

I know better than to hope.

Hope is for others. For the threads.

Like Astarion.

The fog covers most of his leash now, giving him a fighting chance—a real one.
He doesn’t know that, of course.

Even she can’t see through the fog without my permission.
No one can.

I still need to help him. The thread of him—Astarion—is important.
They all were, the ones we’ve helped. But this one…
This one feels different. Heavy. Necessary.
Like a challenge we must meet or shatter under its weight.

I begged her to wait until the House of Mercy.
It shouldn’t take more than a few days.
Wait until he is safe to tell him.

He could leave if he wanted nothing to do with us after that. He could find sanctuary there, hidden behind a hallow spell.
No more fear of Cazador’s leash without our protection.

I told her that telling him now would force his reaction.
It would take his choice away.

Reluctantly, she agreed.

So soon, he would know.

And soon, he would leave.

And when it’s resolved?

I’ll be the one empty again.

She will remain radiant.

If only she knew that of the two of us, I am the empty one.

But the fog will be stronger by then. I can already see how I can conjure, shape, and gift it like willwork woven into spellcraft.

The friend was right. I’ve been underusing it.
It’s stronger than anything we’ve ever seen.

He said it violates Mystra’s bane.

It can help others.
It can help him.

And when he’s free, I’ll recede. I’ll be quiet again.

That’s alright.
That’s what I do.

Because if I stay, I’m a reminder—to her, to him.
But if I go, she’ll survive.

I already hurt her.
She was right to be angry.

She’ll go on again.
But she won’t rest. She never stays anywhere long.
She’s always moving. Always pulled forward.

Not from curiosity. No. Not really.

Because of absence.

She feels me missing too much when she stands still.

She deserves better than me.
She always has.

---

She pressed deeper into the wizard’s correspondence, brittle pages whispering secrets in dry ink and careful hand.

And then she found it—
a letter exchanged with one of his contacts, complaining about the sheer amount of research being funnelled into the church’s newest obsession.

The church?

From everything she knew, the only worship sanctioned in Thay was to the Temple of Bane. Not even Myrkul was granted a foothold there. Why would the Temple of the Black Hand initiate large-scale research inside Thay?

Frowning, she combed through more exchanges with the same contact, cross-referencing them with any note, scrap, or journal entry that mentioned the Banite church.

And then she saw it.
Enough to send a cold shiver crawling down her spine.

Illithid experiments.

The script was steady, clinical—each letter carefully formed—but the content… no. This was not the detached curiosity of a scholar. This was meticulous butchery dressed in the language of research.

Four years ago, the Banite Church in Thay had begun a series of arcana-assisted bioengineering projects on illithid anatomy.
Not just breeding mind flayers.
Mixing them—splicing them—with other beings.
Exposing them to experimental transmutation magics and half-deciphered Netherese arcanum.

Dissections.
Physiology mapped like siege blueprints.
Organs and neural clusters excised, measured, altered.

Dark magic woven through flesh like a thread through cloth.

They weren’t merely studying.
They were reshaping.

Her breath hitched.

Why would the Black Lord’s church pour this much effort into a species so feared for its psychic dominance? This sort of project might make sense under Thay’s ruler—as a weapon, a new breed of servitors—but the temple?

And to her knowledge, mind flayers did not possess apostolic souls. What value could they possibly hold for Banites?
What did the temple hope to make?
What could they want from creatures whose minds alone could hollow out kingdoms?

The implications staggered her, coalescing in ugly patterns she couldn’t yet complete.

And then her mind betrayed her, flashing to the caravan she had found.
The containers.
The smell.
The weight of them.

Pieces of a puzzle slotted together in silence—slow, deliberate—each click leaving a sour taste at the back of her tongue.

Her chest tightened. This was getting too complicated—far beyond the shadows she was accustomed to navigating.

Mind flayer biology was already alien, unknowable.
To alter it—arcane or otherwise—wasn’t just dangerous.

It was madness.

Madness with a purpose.

And somewhere, at the edge of her senses, she thought she could almost hear it—
like a slow, steady pulse
beating at the farthest rim of the Weave.

Madness with a purpose—one that kept eluding her.

Something was brewing. That much was certain. She would need to make her way to Candlekeep eventually. Research was required—serious research. And she would need manpower for it, or at the very least, minds she trusted. Sooner rather than later.

But the very thought filled her with dread.

She would have to leave for Candlekeep as soon as she reached the House of Mercy, which meant leaving Astarion alone and unprotected. And that, she could not do.

Not before securing the clergy’s cooperation.

Apparently, never officially claiming the title of Chosen had its drawbacks. The High Priest would listen to her—she was sure of that—but the rest of the clergy? She didn’t know. And she couldn’t bet Astarion’s life on the uncertain tolerance of strangers.

As an undead, he was more vulnerable to divine magic than any blade. If some self-righteous zealot decided to strike while she was gone, he would have no defence. Ilmater Himself would be bound by His own laws—unable to withhold the magic granted to His faithful simply because Astarion was her ally. The god’s mercy would not overrule his status as Anathema.

No. This was far too risky.

As long as she stayed with him, the House of Mercy was a perfect haven. If anyone dared to question him, she could reveal herself. If someone tried to strike them both with Ilmatari magic, she could meet it with the Aspect. But leave him there alone? The sanctuary would turn into a deathtrap.

Every moment apart would be a moment he could be slaughtered.

She couldn’t afford that.

Couldn’t afford to lose this one.

She had helped many before.
Given without asking.
Helped without demanding thanks.

In fact, she hated thanks. Despised gratitude. It always made her feel like they were glad she had taken the wound for them—glad she was hurting in their place as if her pain were the acceptable price of their comfort.

She didn’t want to be owed.

She just wanted to matter.

And she did, to him.

Astarion didn’t express gratitude for the things that hurt.
Only for the silly things.

He was a very silly man.

He treated kindness like a loan—but not the way others did. He didn’t sanctify it with flowery thanks or put her on a pedestal as some paragon of virtue. He didn’t wave it around as a moral currency to be traded for loyalty. No—he mocked it, suspected it, the way cynics do. The way monsters do.

But where others would mock and use, he mocked and still secretly yearned. And he didn’t abuse it.

He saw mercy for what it was: a choice. A debt. And he refused to believe he was entitled to it.

Not like the soft things—those who had never known despair.
Those who lived in painted houses with warm hearths and stable lives.
They believed the lie that kindness was owed. That they were owed.

He and she knew the truth:
You are owed nothing. Not happiness. Not safety. Not peace.

Not mercy.

You should be. But you aren’t.
Sometimes you get them. Sometimes not. It’s just a game of luck.

And neither of them had drawn well.

Real mercy—true mercy—was a choice very few made. Most preferred the mask of it. She hated false mercy, the self-serving charity of those seeking glory or righteousness.

He hated it more.

Hated “justice” even more than she did. Because what justice is there? What could you ever be given that makes what was taken worth it?

Justice was a lie.
There was only mercy and revenge.

And both, at least, were honest.

Astarion knew this.

So he didn’t expect softness—he knew better. He didn’t demand forgiveness—he didn’t need it. He mocked the idea of being owed either, and in that mockery, there was something close to respect when he was given them.

No reverence. Never that. But an appreciation for the outlier—for those rare few who chose mercy knowing they didn’t have to.

And that’s what made him dangerous.

Because there was no “otherness” in him. No plea of unfairness. No guilt you could hang around his neck. You couldn’t use goodness against him—he had already discounted it.

He might relish in cruelties. But he was still good to those who had seen despair make monsters.

Maybe not to the soft things. But to her.

He would accept mercy with a laugh and a nod, and then go right on being himself. Not grateful. Not ungrateful. Just aware.

Because to him, mercy was not a covenant. It was a courtesy. And courtesy was always a gift.

So was life.

And he burned with both.

Hope.
Fury.
A broken loyalty that made him peel open—just a little—even when he was afraid.

But the self-righteous, those who thought in absolutes, who had never paid the price for real mercy… they would never see it. They would see only the monster—the Anathema.

And that was why she could not leave him.

Not yet.
Not for Candlekeep.

Not until the threat was gone.

The reality gnawed at her as she stared at the scattered correspondence on the desk. Every path forward felt like a gamble.

But this one? This one she could not afford to lose.

 

She couldn’t abandon her purpose, either. The Crypt was an ever-growing nest of suffering, deceit, and dark experimentation. It was a place she just knew about, but she couldn’t ignore what was happening within its walls. There was too much to be done, and too many she must help—so much suffering. And yet, no matter how much she longed to help, she could only do so much. The best she could offer was information—reaching the right people, galvanizing allies, and ensuring the truth found its way to those who could act.

Especially without a point of entry or exit. The city was a fortress. Hell, she almost died just to get in. She can only help the poor souls trapped here by gathering information and providing mercy when possible. She needed to galvanize a force. The Crypt can not be left unchecked anymore; apparently, neither can Thay.

But as her headache began to creep in, the pounding at her temples a constant reminder of her strained limits, she reminded herself again: You cannot save everyone.

One soul at a time.

But it's always worth trying. She considered Astarion, who had been at the center of her thoughts, as he often was. He was a wildcard, both a danger and an ally to her goal, a complex knot of pain and power. Could she bring him with her to Candlekeep? Would the scholars there accept him, or would they see him as something to dissect? She couldn’t risk his safety, not after everything he's been through together.

This is ridiculous. She knew they would know the moment they laid eyes on him. The non-detection would stand, but he fucking looked like a vampire; his presence would betray his true nature. Maybe she could sell him as a partner. She could present him as a source of information from the Crypt, someone who could provide insights into the workings of this dark city. But that was a gamble—a dangerous one.

The thought of the Candlekeep scholars—those readers—using Astarion for experiments or dissecting him like a curiosity was more than she could bear.

This was getting way too complicated.

Every choice branched into another, each path narrowing into sharper edges. She couldn’t leave him in the House of Mercy without her protection. But she couldn’t take him to Candlekeep without inviting risk. And the monsters in the world wouldn’t wait patiently while she decided.

They never did.

Her mind screamed for clarity. But she could only feel the weight of the choices pressing on her. So to clear it, Elenya decided to step away from the weight of her thoughts and the bigger machination and focus on something entirely different. She needed a distraction, something to channel her energy into that didn’t involve Astarion, the Crypt, or the ever-growing tension she felt. The documents she’d collected during their escape were the perfect answer. Cold, impersonal, they offered an almost clinical comfort, a way to bury herself in something tangible.

She sifted through the pile, her fingers grazing over the mix of old and new findings. From the Zhentarim hideout, she uncovered ledgers of bribes in Baldur’s Gate, blackmail dossiers on various individuals scattered across the Western Heartlands, and forged identity scrolls with travel permits. She’d seen this before—underground dealings, criminal empires, the underbelly of the world she hated and had learned to survive in. Still, it had a rhythm, a kind of dark logic that calmed the chaos in her mind. 

Something useful yet simple. 

Perfect to lose herself in. 

One lead, buried among the paperwork, pointed toward a set of cursed items hidden in both Waterdeep and Candlekeep. Valuable. Dangerous. Another mess she didn’t want to touch, but one that would likely be a thorn in her side later. And yet, it was another distraction. Her thoughts lingered on it, but only briefly. The order for retrieval had been sent, but whether anyone would actually act on it remained unclear. It seemed to be pending dispatch.

Her eyes skimmed further down the pile, landing on something more intriguing: a second enchanted ledger. The weight of it in her hands seemed to hum with magic. Unlike the others, this wasn’t just a collection of illicit transactions. No, this was something more devious. It functioned similarly to her Candlekeep pin—powered by a modified Sending spell that allowed for communication across vast distances, with one critical flaw: it left traces: a devilishly clever mechanism, no doubt crafted with a specific, tactical purpose in mind.

This ledger also has a contact log, which is still active, with recent exchanges clearly visible. Elenya’s mind raced. She knew the potential this held. If it could be used against Cazador, it would be invaluable. Imagine sending one monster sniffing after another—making them chase each other’s tails. A perfect distraction. A tool. She stored it carefully, tucking it away with grim satisfaction.

Most of the Zhentarim documents comprised ciphered missives and business ledgers, which were useful but not as pressing. But the map—ah, the map was a different story. She unrolled it carefully. At first glance, it seemed like an ordinary map, except for one thing: the ink moved. Alive, responding to the faintest sounds, to footfalls and the flow of time. It wasn’t functional here due to the divination wards installed by the mages in the Crypt, but it would be an invaluable asset out on the road. Her fingers traced the shifting lines, her thoughts drifting momentarily as the moving ink responded to the faintest vibrations, creating a map that lived, breathed, and adapted.

It was a thing of beauty, in a way. And it was alive. The shifting patterns spoke to her—unpredictable, yet familiar. Like her life right now. Constantly shifting, never still, always moving.

Alas, the reprieve was too brief. 

When the pounding headache receded and the unease finally calmed down, Elenya attacked the remaining documents with renewed focus. There was something that scratched at the edges of her mind—familiar but elusive, like a word caught just behind her teeth. She had to understand it.

One of the sealed scrolls, black-laced with House Val’thethel sigils, had resisted her attempts in the past. But now, with a steady hand and surgical precision, she cracked the brittle wax under her blade. The scroll, its waxy seal crumbling, revealed its contents: a diplomatic dispatch written in exquisite Undercommon script—slanted, serpentine, far too elegant for the rot it concealed.

It was a message from House Val’thethel of Menzoberranzan to a high-placed contact in Baldur’s Gate. The name was redacted, inked over in swirling glyphs designed to burn memory and repel divination. Yet, despite the clever words, the content was explicit enough.

It referenced the return of a Bhaalspawn.

Not just any Bhaalspawn. The Bhaalspawn. The one involved in the Iron Crisis, the devastating chain of events nearly leading to all-out war between the Flaming Fist of Baldur's Gate and the armies of Amn.

Her breath caught.

Certainly not!

No, that name should have been lost to legend—or history books—or buried deep in forgotten archives. And yet here it was, mentioned with casual indifference, like an actor waiting in the wings.

Sarevok Anchev was dead. The Current High Harper killed himHarper alongside her husband Khalid, the previous Baldurian Duke Abdel Adrian, and other heroes of the Realms.

It doesn't make any sense. Why wait almost a century to resurrect him? Why now? The significance was staggering. This wasn’t just some forgotten relic of a bygone time. This was an active player, someone who mattered—someone who had almost seized the control of half the Sword Coast and was now, inexplicably, returning.

Elenya copied the scroll immediately. The enchanted quill beside her fluttered to life, its feathered tip dancing across parchment with frantic speed, capturing every word and detail before the scroll could crumble or vanish into nothingness.

Once that was done, she turned to the Bhaalite ledgers, recovered from the shrine’s blood-streaked altar. The ledgers were grim catalogues, filled with records of offerings, sacrifices, and trophies taken in the name of the Lord of Murder. But it wasn’t the rites that made her hands tremble—the names.

Names that were repeated over and over again.

These names appeared in the Zhentarim documents. They were buried deep within coded inventories and death lists, marked in margins with underlined, rust-colored ink. Some were annotated with prices, others with locations. All were marked.

It wasn’t a coincidence.

No, this was a pipeline. A connection between the Black Network and the Bhaalite cults that went beyond ideology. It was logistical. Coordinated. And it was tied to something far darker than she had first realized. 

They were eliminating potential bhaalspawn. 

She sat still for a long moment, spine stiffening as the weight of the realization sank in. A cold, creeping chill slowly crawled up from her fingers, travelling into her bones. The pieces started falling into place, but what they revealed was far more terrifying than she could have imagined.

And then she found it: an illusion projector orb. It was small, inconspicuous, and when activated, it responded to heat. The orb, once powered, created a perfect illusory duplicate of the room it had last recorded. It could be used for infiltration, misdirection, or distraction—ideal for hiding or escaping.

The last room it had recorded was a study—bookshelves lined with dusty tomes, scattered papers, and arcane devices that hummed faintly with power—a study filled with knowledge.

Her brow furrowed. What was going on here?

Something was coming. Something big.

And the weight of that knowledge was enough to make her heart beat faster in the room's quiet.

She paused as her quill finished copying the last of the documents.

She needed a break.

---

That’s when she heard the door unlock.

She rose without thinking, her papers and the shifting ink-map abandoned, and went to meet him.

The moment she saw him—really saw him—everything settled.
The scattered threads in her head wove back together into something she could hold.
The noise quieted.
The chaos became manageable again.

The friend was right about him.

His hunger was sacred. Not in the hollow, ritual way priests talk of holy things, but in how the sea is sacred—vast, unfathomable, dangerous, and beautiful. Almost as deep as my mercy. Maybe deeper. Twice as beautiful.

And I—
I’m still lost.

Lost in the fog, I made for myself.
A fog that’s both shield and shackle. A place I hide from the truth—that I was never whole to begin with.

But maybe… maybe that’s not a failing.
Maybe I was made like this.

There is no before for me.
No soft childhood. No warm memory to return to. No golden thread to remind me of who I was.
Only pain.
Only numbness.
Only the witnesses—the voices that watched, the song that kept me breathing.

And now…

Now there’s him.

And the body—Elenya—likes him even more than I do.

That was made clear last time.
Clear enough that she threatened to cut me off for his sake.

And she’s not wrong.
He’s the first person she’s touched whose touch didn’t take, didn’t demand, didn’t hurt.

One day, he’ll be gone.
Of course he will.

But for now?

He sees us.

He sees us.

And even the fog… even the fog likes him.

Especially after earlier.

When he made her breakfast.
Made them breakfast.
She and the children.

---

The children slept again.

Fed, cleaned, wrapped in warmth and blankets salvaged from the guest wing. Their breaths came slow and shallow, barely stirring the fabric at their chests. Dreams flickered behind their closed eyes like fish beneath ice—thin, delicate things that didn’t dare rise to the surface. They didn’t speak. Hadn’t since waking. But they’d eaten.

That was enough—for now.

There would be time for more mercy later.

One fire at a time.

As Astarion went back to the kitchen to clean up the mess he’d created, Elenya

Let's finally meet this Red Wizard suit. 

She went to the room where the body was stored under the magic preservation cantrip. 

She simply unfurled the rung and saw Vaelrith Enmas for the first time. 

This face could serve her well beyond the necropolis—even granting her permanent access to some very hard-to-pierce Thayan circles—so many openings to places filled with suffering and no easy access. 

How did Asarion manage to kill him? He had the blood of Malar true, but still...

He could cast magic on the sixth level and had access to means and artifacts.

Her hands moved with mechanical precision, through the notes she had taken before cataloguing, sorting, flipping through ritual diagrams with fingers more patient than her mind. The pile of Vaelrith Enmas’s effects had grown into something almost sacred in its symmetry — scrolls stacked, arcane focus stones carefully laid out, and three separate rings nestled in a tray of crimson velvet.

And that was when she noticed it.

The patterns. The redundancies.

The unmistakable architecture of a scholar's paranoid, yet deeply flawed survival web.

This idiot has never seen the real world.

A Ring of Contingency — inert now, but layered with dormant glyphs designed to activate upon death. A phylactery shard, not on his person. An amulet engraved with a death-ward sigil, half-etched and not yet attuned. Boots with a silent step enchantment — scattered, half-buried under his spare robes.

All his fail-saves were item-based. 
Very stupid. 

For this exact situation.

They weren’t on him.

None of them.

She turned slowly, eyes narrowing, remembering the details Astarion had given her after the kill. How the wizard had been annoyed, tired, and caught off guard. He’d just returned from travel. He was barely clothed.

She went to his private chambers. 

Cold water fills the basin.

His effects were brought in after his arrival by skeletal servants.

He hadn’t even had his spellbook.

The realization settled like silk over glass.

He was interrupted while bathing. 

He had been utterly vulnerable.

Every safeguard, trigger, and arcane escape plan was left on the other side of the room.

She stared down at the velvet bed.

Poetic, she thought.

All those rituals. All those sigils. Years of careful, cunning design…  double crossing one of the most powerful liches in the world, all undone by the oldest of magics:

Timing.

One slip.

One tired moment, hastily dressed, and annoyed at multiple knocks on the door.

One knife in the throat, before a word could be spoken.

And just like that — the scholar of planar dominion, spy of the zulkir, the conjurer who sought to reshape Thay’s future, had bled out on his own tiles, heart pinned by a spawn with too much to lose. An enemy that didn't even know his name.

She breathed through her nose—a laugh, soft, sharp, and barely there.

"What a lucky idiot! I guess he was overdue for some luck," she murmured, gaze still on the tray holding the wizard's failsafe. "That was incredibly stupid".

But then again…he's never been much of a planner. 

That was part of his charm. 

She returned to the study.

Continued going through the New Working Suit documents. Plans were for later. First came understanding. 

At the bottom of one chest, tucked under a false panel, was a vault arcane key—a smooth black oval inscribed with an arcane sigil. A lock-breaker. It could override a magical seal if pressed against it and infused with a pulse of magic. She held it up to the light, turning it slowly.

“You’ll open something,” she whispered, tucking it into a her robe.

Next, she finally found out what the monster planned with the two children? 

She wished she had never looked. 

The blueprint had been tucked away like a secret, between a ledger of flesh-valuation codes and a half-melted glyph tablet, as though it belonged in a reliquary rather than a vault. The parchment crackled under her fingers as she unrolled it, and the bile rose in her throat before her eyes had even finished reading. It was surgical. Meticulous. Almost reverent in its cruelty. Inked in red and gold, a ritual schema mapped out the anatomical positioning of two human children—labelled only “Veylith” and “Sael.”

Twins. Twelve years old. Divine soul sorcerers. Born enslaved in Thay.

Feebleminded at six.

Fucking hell! That explained the growling and non-verbal behaviour.

The phrase appeared three times: “Cognitive inhibition is stable since application.”

“Mental quiescence preserved via neural ablation.” She pressed her lips together, suppressing the urge to vomit. They had crippled the children’s minds to silence their magic—to keep the divine spark from lashing out in protest. That spark had tried to heal them anyway and had tried, despite everything, to survive.

The notes grew worse. Each line plunges her deeper into horror.

“Living arcane foci. High Telepathic compatibility. Shared conduit potential. Bloodline anomaly possibly divine.”

They weren’t to be used as sacrifices—not in the traditional sense. They were vessels designed to survive the first hour of the rite, hold the pain, and keep the circuit open long enough to siphon whatever sliver of celestial blessing lingered in their veins. Their resonance—twinned and divine—had made them ideal for soul tunnelling into the outer planes—a direct feed.

A shortcut.

And in the margin, in script more alive than the text around it, a flourish of delighted cruelty: “Pain enhances alignment. Emotional synchrony peaks during shared distress. Preferably target two: code name Veylith.”

She folded the parchment with trembling fingers, slower than necessary, as if folding it carefully would make it less real. As if gentleness now could undo what had already been done.

What she thought were names were not just that. They hadn’t even been named as people.

Just tools. Batteries. A miracle, broken to make it more useful.

Veylith derived from Thayan Vay lilth—amplification regent—and Sael, for Sal—spark.

She thought again of the children as she left them. They lay curled together on the pile of blankets and pillows, heads tilted inward, and limbs unconsciously touching, as if they remembered being torn apart even in sleep. Neither one stirred when she entered. Neither one dreamed deeply enough yet to wake.

Her expression was unreadable.

Not cold.

Just… folded.

Like something placed gently in a box until it can be sorted. Grief. Rage. Something too big for now.

At least they had each other.

And now, I have two new threads.

Feebleminded and lobotomized at fucking six. 

She sighed again.  

One fire at a time. 

Curing an eighth-level enchantment of this magnitude was beyond her. They would need to be taken to a potent healer—one able to perform a greater restoration or even possibly a full divine Heal. Three times, the magic has been cast. Furthered by surgical modification of their brain, they kept healing.

Endurance is a curse sometimes. 

She turned away.

To wear the face of the monster who would have broken them further.

The transformation was silent.

Limbs shifted. Posture altered. The skin around her jaw darkened, sharpened. Her cheekbones cut upward into the regal angles of Thayan bloodlines. Her hair dissolved, receding into a polished scalp carved in arcane symmetry—runes in crimson and black crawling from crown to collarbone. Vaelrith Enmas stared back from the mirror shard propped atop the mantel.

---

When Astarion returned from the kitchen, her heart skipped a few beats at his sight. 

Curious, isn't it?

What an idiot she can be sometimes.  

Astarion had seen her change before.

This one unsettled him.

Because she didn’t just wear the face of the man he killed. 

She was practicing it.

Elenya stood before the glass, adjusting her shoulders and spine straight. She rolled her neck once, then twice. Tilted her head. Spoke a single word in perfect Zulkirate Thayan accent.

Then again.

Then, in a different pitch.

Again.

Until it wasn’t her voice anymore, it was his.

Astarion leaned against the doorway, arms crossed, lips pursed into a thin line of skepticism. “Do you have to sound like such an insufferable little prick?”

Elenya blinked once—Vaelrith’s face didn’t even twitch. “Yes.”

He sighed. “Well. At least you’re accurate.”

But he stayed.

Corrected her sounds and tweaked the edge of her vowels. Showed her how Vaelrith had dragged his S’s, dropped the endings of words. Taught her the vocal tics he remembered from their brief but fatal encounter. She also let him adjust her shoulders, smooth how she moved through the room. 

By the end of the hour, she wasn’t playing Vaelrith.

She was him, as close as she could, never seeing the man. 

Sharp. Arrogant. Impeccably restrained. A thing of posture and posture alone.

Astarion watched her adjust the fall of her crimson robe, tattoos shimmering faintly in the candlelight.

“…It’s horrifying,” he murmured, voice low. “But you’ll pass.”

Her expression broke briefly—something amused flickered beneath the mask.

Then she turned toward the stairs.

“I need your help reviewing the rest of his things."

He looked at her unpeering and said, "Let’s get to it.”

---

The second study near the living quarters revealed itself only after a quiet flick of the wrist and a false spine pulled from the shelf—"Conjurations of the Hollow Tongue," a title meant to repel the casual curious. The illusion collapsed inward like a ripple in still water, revealing a narrow passage lined with stale air and old wards. Dust clung to everything in here, undisturbed for years. Maybe decades.

Unlike the ostentatious display of the first study, this room was cramped, functional, and paranoid. Arcane locks nested inside each drawer. Glyphs for deterrence etched in silver across the backs of shelves. And deeper still, tucked beneath a tripwire ward of soulburning origin—they found it:

A box of letters, bound in coarse twine, tucked beneath a loose floorboard and shielded with a glyph of silence. The correspondence was dense, encoded in a cipher neither recognized at first glance—sigils tangled like roots, some penned in a hand that trembled with haste, others in elegant loops of predatory precision. But the wax seals were unmistakable.

House Noctelith.

Again.

That name.

It had surfaced like rot beneath a garden—appearing in ledgers, in whispered curses from undead thralls, in the half-burned notes of dead apprentices. And now, here it was in her hand: obsidian-black wax, stamped with a sigil shaped like a thorned spire—recognizably the Warlock Crypt—wrapped in the outstretched wings of a bat.

Their patriarch, Elenya recalled from earlier letters, was not merely a vampire lord. He was one of the city’s oldest surviving nobles, elder even by vampiric standards. House Noctelith didn’t thirst for blood. They controlled something more essential: logistics. Trade. Portals. Favors. Knowledge. Their power rested not in brute strength but infrastructure—a network of couriers, binders, smugglers, scribes, and soul brokers. While the liches concerned themselves with isoteric lore and Larlock’s endless pursuit of godhood, House Noctelith made the city function. Quietly. Completely.

Much of the city was still directly ruled by Larlock’s will, which rarely blinked. But even eternal masters need lieutenants. And within the city's first ring—the district occupied by nearly sixty liches—power struggles simmered, especially with the vampire lords, whose blood-bound control of the city’s undead army, breeding pens, and hunting operations gave them a stranglehold over both defence and the supply of fresh souls.

House Noctelith had gained significant favour by delivering vast quantities of Netherese relics and forgotten grimoires into Larlock’s hands. Through trade, not conquest. Through negotiation, not tribute. That subtle shift had unsettled the old hierarchy.

And others followed.

More vampire lords. Necromancers from distant towers. Warlocks from forbidden covens. Apprentices by the dozen. They weren’t part of the First Ring, but they were allowed. Sponsored. Patroned. Independent, but not unobserved.

Vaelrith Enmas’ early research noted the signs of a redistribution of influence—a careful shuffling of power among the undead elite. The liches still held dominion—but the vampire lords whispered closer to the master’s ear.

Elenya set the final letter down, fingers stained with wax, parchment dust clinging to her cuffs. Her voice was soft, but certain.

“They’re creating a market for necroarcana,” she said, glancing at Astarion.

A pause. Then a flicker of something darker crossed her face.

“Apparently, Larlock is… distracted. The return of the City of Shade, eighty years ago, rattled him. The Shade enclave’s trying to rebuild the Netherese Empire. And they’re hungry. Hunting ruins, artifacts, anything that belonged to their golden age. Including whatever is buried beneath this place.” She continued.

Astarion tilted his head, the faintest crease between his brows. "The what now? " 

"Thultanthar, the Shade Enclave and the City of Shade, was a Netherese flying city in the middle of the Anauroch desert. The only one that survived Karsus' folly. The city's high mage, known only as Lord Shadow, experimented with the Plane of Shadow for some time and successfully shifted the entire city into the Plane of Shadow mere days before Karsus cast the spell that temporarily destroyed the Weave and led to the destruction of all the empire as all the flying cities came to crash-

"I know what Karsus's folly is! Thank you very much. What do you mean by their return?" he interrupted, half offended. 

" Well, the shade enclave, Thultanthar, returned to Faerûn in the Year of Wild Magic, 1372 DR,  and almost immediately got busy looking for Netherese ruins and artifacts. And this city is built on top of a fallen Netherese ruin,” she said flippantly.

Astarion’s gaze narrowed. “So they’re preparing for war. All this is a fucking arms race ?”

Elenya nodded. “In case the living don’t deal with the Shade threat fast enough.”

She didn’t say it, but the implication was clear.

If the Shadowvar rose—and the living forces failed to stop them—Larlock and his court would not simply watch.

They would face what remained of their force and inherit its spoils.

And the vampires?  

They were positioning themselves to survive either outcome while advancing their master chances. 

Her eyes moved to a corner of the desk where a tarnished quill still rested in dried black ink. “He was trading ritual design. Selling blueprints for siphoning elevated souls.”

Astarion crouched beside an old trunk near the hearth, lifting its warped lid deliberately. Inside: jars. Bone fragments suspended in preserving fluid; some are labelled, and some are not. A row of ivory teeth floated behind one glass pane, each inscribed with runes too fine for mortal carving.

“To what end?” he asked.

Elenya didn’t look up. “What do all human wizards want?”

She found the answer in the next drawer. Her breath caught as she laid the papers flat.

“Power. And immortality.”

Diagrams, scrawled in a fevered hand, spilled across the parchment like veins—souls rendered not as radiant forms but as chains. Interlocked, looped, and knotted into impossible glyphs. Each design is more grotesque than the last. Instructions not to bind a soul in its entirety, but to segment it—to sever identity into fragments and pin them to planes outside mortal comprehension. Carceri. The Far Realm. Domains of endless echo, where suffering never resolved and names eroded like wet ash.

Glyphs danced at the edge of Elenya’s vision. She blinked twice to banish the vertigo.

“Fragments,” she whispered. “Anchor them to suffering. Dissolve the self across planes. Maintain power without housing the whole… without risking mortality. That's what he was planning for the children upstairs.” Elenya adjusted the collar of the red robes, smoothing the heavy silk where it draped too sharply across her borrowed shoulders. Vaelrith’s face stared back at Astarion, elegant and cold—though her voice, unmistakably hers, carried a wry undertone.

“Any moral reservations I may have had about killing an unarmed man in his home, as you feared,” she said, calmly folding one of the research diagrams, “vanished the moment I read what he planned to do to those children.”

Astarion didn’t respond immediately. His gaze flicked to the quiet and gleaming corner where the jars still sat.

“Well,” he said after a pause, “I suppose it’s not murder when it’s pest control.”

"Not just that, the children. You saved them from something worse than death," she added.

"Don't be ridiculous, darling. I was only thinking about ..."

"Saving me? Not very monster-like behaviours, don't you think? " She interrupted again. 

"I must be going soft." 

"It suits you. You know...” she said, gesturing vaguely at the wreckage of the study, “for all the horror, I do have to thank you. On top of saving me from potion-induced death, you’ve given me an outstanding working suit.”

Astarion arched a brow, lounging against the edge of the desk with a casual tilt. “Flattered to be your tailor via assassination.” She added, eyes glinting. “You brought us exactly where we needed to be. I wouldn’t have found any of this without you. I know you didn't know this when you chose him, but as you said, results are the only metric worth something. This is a game changer, Astarion. High clearance. Bad enough reputation to not have close allies. Just enough menace to walk into a warded archive without getting questioned. "

Astarion raised a brow, idly twirling one of the wizard’s discarded rings between his fingers. “Happy to help. Nothing quite says 'research grant' like murder and identity theft.”

She gave him a crooked smile—still Vaelrith’s mouth, which made it all the more unsettling. “I’m serious. The kill was clean. Strategic. And I never thought I’d say this, but—well done. He was powerful.”

Astarion preened just slightly. “Mmm. I do love it when you compliment my work, darling."

Elenya smiled—Vaelrith’s thin lips curled around something more alive than he’d ever worn.

"However, I do have to say this, Astarion. You gambled your life here with worse odds than I ever had. Please do not make a habit of it. Please!"

He simply smiled and nodded. 

---

They said nothing as they prepared to descend into the deeper chambers. Astarion followed just behind her. Loose, quiet, dagger-graceful. His eyes were half-lidded, but alert—constantly checking corners, reflections, silences too still. The stone beneath them changed as they moved lower. Colder. Smoother. These halls weren’t quarried; they had been carved with intention. Magic bled from every seam. Shadows lengthened even without light.

The lower levels of the house were not meant for guests. The first step past the threshold triggered a whisper of warning through her bones. Glyphs of Warding, etched into marrowstone beams, pulsed just once before dimming. They hadn’t been set to explode, merely observe. The house had expected him—not them. That would change. She gestured for Astarion to stop, then raised her hand. A thin sweep of abjuration magic unravelled like silk from her palm. The glyphs dimmed for good as she dispelled them. They moved forward, only to halt again—this time by the whispering flutter of pages. Dozens of books, animated and spiralling in midair, their leather bindings flayed open like wings.

Then came the shriek. Psychic force lashed outward, a blade with no edge, slashing thought instead of flesh. Elenya staggered, and Astarion swore under his breath, his hand flashing with a scroll. Three books dropped immediately, smoking.

The rest scattered.

It was larger than expected.

Not grand—efficient. Built not to impress, but to function. The ceilings arched high in a smooth dome of blackened stone, veined with silver sigils that pulsed faintly, like the heartbeat of some dormant thing. Every surface bore evidence of use, disuse, and sudden, recent reactivation. Dust had been swept aside in precise circles. Instruments realigned. Supplies restocked. The shelves brimmed with bottled reagents and soul-ink, glass vials of ichor, labelled carefully in multiple scripts—Abyssal, Thayan, Infernal.

He hadn’t used this space in months.

But someone—something had restocked it recently.

A central examination platform dominated the room, its steel frame scorched at the edges, fitted with old manacles and channels for blood runoff that glowed faintly with residual magic. Nearby, a constellation of surgical tools floated in stasis above a workbench—still hovering, their enchantments intact, as if waiting for hands that would never return.

Scroll racks lined the northern wall, their contents sorted by purpose: soul segmentation, planar anchoring, contract binding, and something stranger still—ritual taxonomy. A separate section had been devoted entirely to necro-psionic theory, folded neatly beside elven and aasimar neuroanatomy charts.

Elenya moved slowly, fingertips ghosting over a series of glyph-etched scalpel trays.

“This wasn’t just a workspace,” she murmured. “This was a sanctum. His sanctum.”

A small reading alcove nestled beneath a crystal dome on the far end—completely soundproofed, layered with anti-divination runes: a desk, a high-backed chair, a single half-burned candle.

Astarion ran a hand along the back of it.

“He read down here,” he said, voice low. “Alone. Quiet. For hours.”

“Obsessively.”

She turned toward the west wall—lined not with books, but with preserved memories. Glass orbs, each holding a suspended image: blood rituals mid-casting, children curled in pain, a dying celestial being siphoned into a binding ring.

Elenya didn’t speak. Her mouth was a line. Her hand trembled once before she curled it into a fist.

This was not just a laboratory.

It was a reliquary of cruelty—a cathedral of control.

And it had been waiting for its master to return.

They found the alcove first—tucked behind a velvet curtain that clung to the wall like a living thing. It reeked of sulphur and mirror-polish. Three full-length mirrors stood side by side, surrounded by etched sigils that shimmered faintly with containment magic. The frames dripped with old warding: twisted brass, carved obsidian, chalked runes barely visible unless caught in angled light. Bloodless handprints—hundreds—littered the glass, as if dozens had tried to escape.

And behind each mirror: something alive.

The center mirror held a spectre—its face lost to motionless screaming, spectral mouths sewn shut with gleaming threads of soul-silver. The figure pulsed with fear so strong Elenya could taste it. The sigils buckled faintly around it, as though the containment strained under the weight of the entity’s pain. It didn’t move, only trembled—anchored in agony.

The right mirror was different—obsidian glass, framed in infernal brass. The being behind it was not tortured—she smiled.

An Erinyes.

Her wings, lacquered and pinned like a butterfly, twitched slightly. Black armour clung to her like ink on muscle. Her eyes flared red-gold when she saw them. She laughed.

“Oh,” she purred, “a new dance partner. And who may you be, little pet?”

Her voice echoed through the mirror like a lilt across glass. She leaned forward—barely restrained—fingertips pressed to the surface like a lover’s touch.

“Did the wizard tire of our game and send a little vampire to crack me? He does have exquisite taste, I must say. But alas—you’re too late.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper, seductive and venomous. “Ilyn broke the pact. The secret no longer belongs to him. Tell that to the wizard, pretty. Maybe he can try to locate his quansit. Who knows…”

Elenya stepped back slightly and glanced toward Astarion. “Ask her something. See what she knows.”

Astarion grimaced. “You ask the devil. I’m not in the habit of chatting up the damned.”

The Erinyes turned, focusing now directly on him. “Who are you speaking to, pet?” Her tone curled. “You’re not alone, are you? Let me out. I’ll rid you of the Red Wizard and leave you his house and bones as a gift. And if you’re very clever, I’ll owe you a favour. The Dark Eight won’t forget.”

Elenya narrowed her eyes. “She can’t see me,” she murmured. “Interesting…”

She scanned the frame. A slight tremor of glyph lines—one, there. She pressed her fingers along the etched brass and released a targeted dispel. The mirror dimmed like a dying eye, the Erinyes vanishing with a sound like metal folding into itself.

The third mirror contained another whispering ghost. Female. Bound, 
She held a journal beneath cracked tiles—the journal of Ilyn Toth.  

Only when Elenya approached the mirror did she whisper a name—Vara. 

Across from them stood a desk—a flat stone slab with a flickering everlight above. A journal, half-written in broken Abyssal, lay open.

The journal changed everything. Ilyn had stolen Thayan secrets by fleeing with more than just the Necromancy of Thay. He had taken a relic for resurrection.

A single phrase was echoed, over and over, scrawled with increasing desperation:

“I broke the pact. She watches now. Too late. We are too late.”

Beside it: a large soul gem, glowing faintly, dense with something that didn’t shift. Didn’t flicker.

They exited the alcove.

What lay beyond was not a lab.

It was a cathedral to obsession.

A vast chamber, ringed with stone plinths and red-slate tables, unfolded before them like a scholar’s nightmare. The air pulsed—faintly rhythmic, like breath.

A codex bound in elfskin sat at the first table, titled The Soul Prism. Its pages radiated warmth—sickening, cloying, as if dipped in breath and sweat. Phantom screams seemed to flicker at the edges of sound as Elenya touched it.

She opened it.

Soulweight thresholds. Spiritual combustion events. Diagrams etched in layers—black ink, red blood, something worse beneath. It allowed Soul Cage to be used once per day.

Astarion moved to the next cabinet, fingers nimble. He picked the lock without comment.

Inside: a sealed packet of papers, crusted with red wax stamped with Szass Tam’s Apprentice's sigil.

He held them up.

“Recovered from the Tower of Ilyn Toth. 1359 DR. Property of the Enclave of Szass Tam.”

Elenya’s breath hitched.

The notes were frantic—names, trails, stolen artifacts. Ilyn had taken a copy—or a piece—of The Book of Necromancy of Thay. But more importantly, he had followed the trail it left.

Menuth Savar. Skullport. Tashluta. Moonheaven.

Over and over again, names circled in fading ink.

Elenya whispered, “A lead on Thayan necromancy. Finally.”

She barely looked up before moving to the following table.

The Ledger of the Unredeemed lay stretched open like a skinned corpse—a scroll-tome, sinew-bound and stitched in flesh.

Eighty-seven names.

All of them pacted. All of them marked as potential vessels—like the twins. But these were meant to contain infernal visitors.

And on the third page: a name.

Cazador Szarr. Scratched faintly in the margin.

Next to it: Cania.

Silence.

Elenya turned slowly to Astarion.

“You knew he had an infernal pact?”

He shook his head, slowly. “No,” he said quietly. “I didn’t.”

No one spoke for a moment.

She felt a slight tremor behind her ribs, in the place Ilmater's touched her. A memory of the comune whispered in her mind. 

“I am sorry, little one.
Many laws compel me to abstain.
I cannot alleviate the pain of an Anathema.
Even less one already promised.”

What ?! She knew he was damned; why bring it up now? What is she missing?

Before she could spiral further, Astarion ushered her to the following table.

A Treatise of Thar’Zuun the Gatekeeper. Rituals for planar breach. Carceri. Acheron. The Far Realm. In the margins: “He made the gate breathe.”

Above them, a low creak.

They looked up.

A massive arcane orrery, shaped like a chandelier, clung to the ceiling like a parasite—The Planar Star Chart.

It flickered to life as Elenya neared, its rings shifting with slow grace. Planets. Planes. Infernal alignments.

One thing was clear: it could anchor Plane Shift—but only to the Nine Hells.

“A tool,” Astarion murmured. “Or a trap.”

“Both,” Elenya replied.

They found scroll caches next. Behind a warded shelf, stacked with care: Wall of Force. Disintegrate. Magic Jar. Summon Undead—Infernal Calling.

High-tier. Dangerous. All intact.

And finally, at the far edge of the lab, two final discoveries.

---

They stepped beyond the last arch, past the velvet dark of Vaelrith’s final wards—and entered a sanctum that breathed with hunger.

It wasn’t just a vault. It was a wound in the world.

The shelves were arranged in a tight circle around a sunken plinth, artifacts displayed with reverence and dread. Every item here had weight—not just in gold, but in consequence.

A Phylactery Shard, splintered yet potent, hummed with necrotic resonance. It screamed to the undead—silent to the living, but Astarion flinched, and something deeper in the earth stirred in reply.

Next to it, folded over a stand of ebony bone: the Vestments of the Blood Pact. Robes soaked in old rites, their crimson thread still pulsing faintly as if remembering long fulfilled and broken oaths.

A small vial, stoppered in iron, rested beneath a warded dome. Its label read: Ashes of a Lesser God. When Elenya reached out, the glass warmed under her fingers, glowing faintly gold—light that had suffered.

On a shelf nearby sat two Netherese grimoires—bound in starmetal-threaded leather, sigils twitching as if unwilling to be read. The air around them hissed. They were tagged for trade: House Noctelith.

Beside them, a soft leather pouch wrapped in infernal script. Within: the Infernal Heartstone. It beat—not metaphorically. It was warm, wet, and very much alive. The smell of brimstone and blood clung to its threads.

Then came the coffer of wealth.

Cracked open on an obsidian pedestal, it spilled with arcane reagents—crystals, runescribed roots, petrified ichor, black pearls. Easily 5,000 gold in material. And at the center: soul jugs, each stoppered with bone and screaming through the glass. Elenya didn’t look at them too long.

In the back, half-hidden beneath a projection ward, sat the Vault of Phases. A shifting cabinet of overlapping reality. Unopened. Its latches shimmered out of sync with time.

Laid nearby like forgotten toys:

• A pouch of Dust of Disappearance, motes of shadow drifting even within containment.

• A Monocle of Truesight, lens etched with concentric rings of Divination sigils.

• A Black Opal Idol, clearly of demonic origin. The way its fanged mouth curled made Astarion grimace.

• The Black Censer of Tharizdun. Carved from collapsed starstone, reeking of rot and collapse. A relic of entropy—its smoke coiled upward despite the absence of flame.

The Bonework Keyring, keys carved from humanoid phalanges, lay on the table beneath it. Next to it floated a glyph sigil—spinning, pulsing. When Elenya leaned in, it flared hot and carved a Warlock Invocation into her skin without touch. She hissed and recoiled. The mark faded… but not fully.

And at the heart of the room: a locked brass contraption, shaped like a lantern but dense and rune-bolted on all sides. A Portable Planar Breach. Supposedly dormant.

They didn’t touch it.

They didn’t touch any of it.

Because in the center of the floor, glowing bright purple through basalt stone, was the second discovery—and the one that made them stop breathing.

A permanent teleportation sigil.

Inscribed in silver thread, masterwork-perfect. No tool marks. No burn lines. A design wrought by someone who understood planes not as destinations but as veins.

It pulsed softly.

Alive.

Waiting.

The Weave pulsed with recognition.

She stepped onto it — cautious, reverent — and felt the sudden absence of fear. Not the cold numbness that kept her alive in drow cages. Not the sharp calculation of danger she’d grown used to. But true absence.

A way out.

And just as rare: a way back in.

Her lips parted. A sharp breath. And then—

“We don’t have to run anymore,” she whispered.

Astarion blinked. His head tilted, brow furrowed, still tense from everything they had seen, killed, and stolen. “Pardon?”

She turned to him, eyes brighter than the circle’s glow.

“I can take us to Daggerford. Tonight.”

His silence was startled. Not from disbelief — no, not from that. From hope. From its sudden, unbearable weight,

“We use intermediary posts,” she continued, hands already moving in the air, drawing out the sequences. “Old circles I memorized in case we needed them. I hop us through multiple locations. No direct trace. No one will follow.”

“And in Daggerford?” he asked.

She smiled.

“We can move to The House of Mercy. They’ll take you in. Shield you. Wards Cazador couldn’t claw through. And as long as you are warned from divination. No pursuit.”

A pause. Then, soft:

“You’d be… unreachable. Safe. We need not stay here, Astarion. We could come back whenever we want. We can go wherever we want.”

The words sank into him like sunlight through snow.

And then she laughed.

Not softly. Not politely. Not like the ever-composed, mask-wearing scholar he’d seen performing mercy like a ritual. No — she laughed with her whole chest, dizzy, breathless.

And hugged him.

Her arms wrapped around him suddenly, fiercely, her body pressing into his with joy she didn’t know she had room for.

“You found it,” she gasped, still laughing. “You... genius. You found the one damned house with a backdoor into the teleportation web.”

He didn’t move at first. She stood there, stunned, her arms slightly open, as if she’d broken some rule.

Then — slowly, tentatively — he tried to return the embrace.

She felt his arms hovering and understood her mistake. 

She let him go. She was just so relieved. There would be many more things to do — mapping the wizard schedule, warding the sigil against outside teleportation, setting magical decoys along their travel path. They must stay at each location long enough to leave a false trace. Three places. Three burns in the Weave.

But finally?

Home.

Not a building. Not a bed.

Safety.

And for her, that was enough.

Her throat tightened, and the fog inside her stirred.

The body is feeling, I thought. She’s letting herself feel.

A dangerous thing, for us. But even I couldn't care.

Because maybe—just maybe—this once, we could afford it.

Even the fog curled closer, gentler than usual, like a hand shielding a candle flame. The air held its breath.

We still had work ahead. Research unfinished. And this face—the borrowed face of Vaelrith—was expected at a council meeting by next nightfall. If she didn’t attend, the city would stir. Whispers would bloom. The Thayan delegation might turn curious, or worse, suspicious.

But none of that mattered now.

Because now they had a way out.

The sigil pulsed faintly beneath the silver thread, its light rippling through the basalt like moonlight on deep water. A permanent teleportation array—anchored, stable, city-bound. Not just an exit. A lifeline.

Teleportation sigils leave scars in the Weave. Dangerous ones. Easy to trace if handled carelessly. But if they jumped to a transit point first—one of the wild junctions or collapsed ley nodes—the trail would vanish like steam.

Astarion hadn’t just found them a sanctuary.

He’d given them time.

And in a city like this, time was everything.

She started toward the sigil again, jaw set, already calculating what needed to be done to secure it—wards, decoys, layering enchantments to scatter their trail. But before her foot crossed the final threshold, Astarion’s hand caught her arm.

She turned, surprised.

His expression was unreadable for a moment. Then his voice came—quiet, but unmistakably strained.

“Drop it.”

“…What?”

“The Red Wizard. Drop the form.”

She hesitated. Just for a second. Confused. Reluctant.

But there was something in his voice—raw, threadbare beneath the calm. Something sharp. And then it hit her like a blow to the chest.

She had messed up.

“…Euh. Sure. Whatever you like,” she said gently, voice threading with worry. “Do you want me to look like something else?”

“Anything. Just… not this one.”

His voice didn’t rise. It didn’t crack.

But it folded inward. And that was worse.

She shouldn’t have hugged him while still wearing the face of someone he had killed.

That was… so profoundly wrong.

So utterly thoughtless.

Flesh shifted.

Chestnut brown hair unspooled from her skull. Her skin warmed to that familiar olive-gold hue. The cruel amber eyes of Vaelrith softened back into her own—clear, steady, human. Or at least, the version of herself he had first known. The travel suit that unearthed him.

The second the transformation was completed, Astarion moved.

He pulled her into him so suddenly she barely had time to inhale. His arms locked around her, iron-tight, like he was trying to keep the world from stealing her away. His whole body trembled against hers, and then—gods—he buried his face in the crook of her neck.

Like he couldn’t afford to be seen breaking anywhere else.

Elenya froze.

Her hands hovered, uncertain—then slowly came to rest against his back. Gentle. Steady.

The tremor in his shoulders said more than words ever could.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, throat tight. “I wasn’t thinking. I was so happy, I didn’t ask. I shouldn’t have touched you with… his face.”

“I know,” he murmured, voice muffled against her skin. “The scent was still yours. It’s just… I didn’t want to remember his face when I remembered this.”

He hugged her tighter, as if holding the moment still.

“…We might really be safe?” he said, just above a whisper.

She pulled him closer in return, her arms tightening around his chest, hands pressing firmly between his shoulder blades.

“You will be,” she said softly. “We can leave now, if you want.”

He didn’t answer, and she didn’t press.

Notes:

Thanks so much for reading! Things are picking up. I’m excited for the next few chapters and can’t wait to hear what you think!

Chapter 35: Feeding Schedules

Summary:

In the aftermath of violence, domesticity blooms. However, all is not well. Somethings may never be well again.

Notes:

Thank you so much for the 50 kudos, your comments, and the bookmarks—it really means a lot. As I’ve told some of you, this is my first-ever writing project, and the support has genuinely made my day. I wasn’t expecting such kindness, and it’s been incredibly motivating. I’m so grateful you’re here for the ride.

Astarion POV

---

I didn’t mean to fall apart.
Not here. Not now. Gods, certainly not like this—arms full of her, heart full of something, whatever that was.

But the moment she dropped the wizard’s form, I broke. Quietly. Without flair. No screams, no snarling, no exquisite monologue to mark the collapse.

Just… folded in.

She looked like the first face I’d seen out of the grave again—my first version of her, anyway. The face I remembered from the depths of madness and near-death starvation. The face that hadn’t sneered down at me as she unearthed the wretched, broken mess I was.

The face of salvation.

Not his face.

Not the one that looked at me with shock and horror while I plunged my dagger into its throat.

She thought it was guilt.

Again, I had none for killing him. Even if he were a saint, it wouldn’t have mattered. All that mattered was that she was dying, and killing him would save her.

But I didn’t want to see his face now. I didn’t want to be touched by that form now. I wanted something that felt fully her—completely, irrevocably her—to me.

So when she dropped the form, my body decided that was permission enough.

Now was not the time for past victims. It was for the sheer, bone-deep disorientation of hope.

We could be safe.
Not temporarily. Not conditionally. Not safe-until-the-next-threat-slithers-in. Safe safe—we had a waypoint sigil in our basement, a psafe ath to a gods-guarded heaven. 

An exit to anywhere in the realm where there was a teleportation sigil, she’d said.

She offered to leave right then. I didn’t take her up on it. Not yet. I wasn’t ready to let go of her. Didn’t even know I’d held her that tightly until my fingers ached.

Minutes passed. Hours, maybe—time was a soft blur when her warmth pressed against me, when the world felt smaller, quieter, somehow more bearable. We finally peeled away from each other, slowly, reluctantly, as if separating would shatter some fragile spell we’d woven in the darkness.

I composed myself, as one does. Posture. Poise. A little smirk for good measure. And yet even as we stepped back, something stayed raw under the skin. I couldn’t erase the sensation of her in my arms. Couldn’t unfeel the rhythm of her pulse against my chest, the heat that wasn’t mine, the living proof that survival wasn’t just a word, but a thing we could touch, and hold, and—maybe—keep.

We talked about what came next.
We agreed to stay.

The Warlock’s Crypt—grotesque, blood-slick, a temple to old obsessions—was as close to a sanctuary as we’d ever find. And gods help me, that made sense. A lair like this held more than bones and curses; it had opportunity. Not just for survival. For knowledge, leverage, the sort of information one could use to carve a better path forward. Especially now that a permanent teleportation sigil glimmered in the floor, etched deep into the stone. That sigil was a promise—an anchor I could return to when the world above got too heavy, or when the research demanded it.

Elenya was right. We needed to stay. To root ourselves. Secure the threads before they fray.

She framed it as a strategy: stabilizing our cover as Vaelrith, locking down the house’s influence network, keeping the Thayan delegation managed without rousing suspicion. Accessing the city’s hidden knowledge, one careful step at a time.

But I knew another truth. She was staying here—not for the city’s secrets or the political chessboard she so deftly manipulated—but because somewhere, buried in this mausoleum of power, there might be a clue to unhooking the chain at my throat. A door to freedom waited somewhere in this cathedral of liches, ghouls, and necrosavants.

And for the first time in a long time, I felt like maybe, just maybe, I could reach it.

We talked about whether to retrieve the rod in Daggerford now.

She was more cautious than I’d expected, though I couldn’t fault her. Teleporting from here to the House of Mercy carried too many risks to the place. Even by jumping through multiple intermediary points, she refused to endanger it. One misstep, one misjudged decision, and she’d expose the place before we even had a footing. She didn’t want to risk it—not yet. The House of Mercy had few fighters. Healers mainly, and many, many rescue and refugee. Exposing it could lead to carnage. So we decided against it. For now, the rod would wait. The city, the delegation, and the House of Mercy could all be handled in time. Right now, our priority is survival and strategy. We decided to stay here when the crypt offered a stable, predictable anchor and leave for Daggerford to retrieve the rob before making our way to the hidden temple. 

I still couldn’t believe her plan—to take a vampire to the Hollowed Grounds. The very idea seemed absurd, almost reckless, and yet she spoke of it with a certainty that made my skepticism falter. I did not understand how she intended to overcome the most basic, glaring problem: I could not step inside the place. The wards, the consecrations, the divine protections were designed to keep creatures like me out, and every instinct in my body screamed that even approaching would be madness. And yet, she seemed utterly sure it could be done.

Her confidence unsettled me, but the kind of conviction demanded a sort of blind trust. I didn’t have the heart—or perhaps the courage—to question it again. Her mind had already worked through details I couldn’t see, contingencies I couldn’t anticipate, and I could sense that pressing further would do nothing but weigh down the fragile balance we were threading together.

It didn’t really matter where we went. The exact destination, the precise risks, the convoluted steps of her plan—they all blurred into the background of one irrefutable truth: as long as she was there, as long as I could follow her lead, it would be enough. The world could be a labyrinth of danger, traps, and impossible magic, and I would still move with her through it. Far enough from Cazador, far enough from his reach, far enough from the chains that had bound me for so long—that was what mattered. And for once, that was enough to make me feel something close to hope.

This is maybe why her following proposal filled me with so much dread. The sigil on the floor pulsed faintly in the gloom, a pale light catching in the dust motes like powdered bone, and I felt that uneasy stillness settle over my chest—the kind that precedes disaster or revelation. She stood, hands neatly tucked behind her back, her posture deliberate, rigid in that way that betrayed a mind already racing through dangerous possibilities, threading contingencies I couldn’t even imagine.

“I could use this,” she said, her voice deceptively calm, almost casual. “Teleport to Candlekeep. Start some research while we’re still here.”

The words hung in the air a beat too long, allowing my mind to register their whole meaning. When they finally landed, it felt like the ground had been ripped from beneath me. My stomach dropped, heavy and twisting, like I’d been thrown off a cliff and left to fall in slow motion.

“Alone?” The word came out jagged, sharp against the low hum of the sigil’s glow.

She didn’t even glance at me—her eyes remained fixed on the faintly etched rune beneath her feet. Her nod was subtle, almost imperceptible, but it carried the weight of inevitability.

“Why?” My voice rose, sharper than I intended. “Why do you have to go?”

“Because,” she said evenly, her tone matter-of-fact, almost frighteningly so, “what we’ve uncovered is too big, too tangled. I can’t unravel it on my own. And Candlekeep… well, those library rats need a hook. But once invested, you’d be surprised how useful they can be. I must put the threads in the right hands before they slip away.”

I forced myself to breathe, but the tight coil in my chest only wound tighter. “Why alone?” I pressed again, a note of desperation creeping in. “Why leave me here?”

Now her eyes met mine—quiet, steady, infuriating. Her gaze wasn’t warm, not in the way that comforted; it was measured, intelligent, piercing through my panic with the precision of a surgeon.

“You coming with me could endanger you,” she said softly, yet each word cut deep. “The Avowed aren’t fools. You look exactly like what you are. No amount of nondetection will convince them you’re not a vampire. Any glamour will shatter under their gaze. They could see you as a threat… or worse.”

I knew exactly what she meant by worse.

A specimen. A curiosity to dissect, an anomaly to examine with clinical fascination. The thought made the hairs on my neck rise, a cold pulse of dread slipping through my veins.

“Then find another way,” I said, heat curling under my ribs, my words trembling with fear and anger. “You think I’m letting you teleport to another nest of self-important scholars without me?”

“You’d be safe here. I’d be gone for an hour or two at most. I could bring back scrolls and more sendings. Things we need.”

“I don’t care about scrolls,” I snapped, the words escaping before I could temper them. “I don’t want to be left alone.”

That stopped her. Not with words, a sigh, or the practiced lecture I had come to expect. Just… stillness. Heavy, charged silence. I waited for the usual response, the reminder that I’d survive, that she would return, that this was temporary. But nothing came.

Instead, after a moment that felt suspended in the air like a held breath, she simply said, “Alright.”

I blinked. “Alright?”

She shrugged, casual, effortless, as if agreeing to stay was the world's easiest choice. “It was just an idea.”

It wasn’t just an idea. Not for me.

Something small and desperate uncoiled in my chest. I’d expected resistance, a cold dismissal, the gentle but firm insistence that my attachment was irrational. But she’d given in, just like that. And that was worse somehow—because I had no map, compass, or skill to navigate this strange warmth she offered without consequence.

She moved ahead, already scribbling in her notes, her mind darting ahead six moves before reality could catch up. I watched her hands—ink-stained, precise, alive with intention—as if the horrors of this labyrinth, the hungering mirrors and sentient tomes, hadn’t just tried to swallow us whole. Each stroke of the pen radiated focus and power, and I realized how small, human, and impossibly brilliant she was all at once.

I hate that I want her to stop sometimes. Stop calculating, stop bending the world into submission, stop always running ahead of danger before it can touch her. Just… feel. Just exist, even for a moment, outside the constant web of plans and contingencies.

But then I remember myself. Look at what happens when I feel.

She was right. Candlekeep’s support would be invaluable. Every lesson, every ally, every subtle manipulation of knowledge could tilt the scales. I should want her to go. I should revel in her taking control of the chaos and shaping it to our benefit. I realize this is nothing but a tantrum—a childish, selfish refusal to accept reality. Even I can see that.

Yet she respected it. Silent, unwavering. Brilliant. And unbearable.

---

We continued cataloguing the relics together, whispering through the vault like two scholars navigating a mausoleum—our voices careful, measured, lest something long-dead and resentful of intruders still listened. The air was thick with dust and the faint tang of decay, but we moved with a rhythm born of necessity, attuned to each other’s pace, our fingers tracing the edges of tomes and crystalline components with reverent care.

By evening, we had mapped out the wizard contacts and appointments, a tangle of obligations and favours that needed delicate pruning. More skeletal attendants shuffled in and out, delivering components and documents with rattling efficiency. Together, we parsed what could be honoured, what should be postponed, and what was best left uncatalogued. We marked names to contact and names to avoid.

The council of the Thayan diplomats loomed in our planning. One of those unavoidable obligations, despite our wish to bypass it. Vaelrith, true to his habits, had spent the past six months gallivanting through planar studies and extraplanar funnelling research, leaving his duties to the Thayans largely unattended. Rumour had it he had been tasked with devising a permanent enchantment to stabilize… something soul-related—something intricate, dangerous, and probably significant.

Elenya moved with her usual precision, uncovering all the hidden levers and controls for the house’s intricate lattice of wards and alarms. I watched her as she traced diagrams from the wizard’s journal, her fingers flicking through pages like a maestro conducting symphonies from lifeless parchment. Runes shifted and danced under her breath, sigils bleeding faint streams of ink and light across the floor. Each motion seemed effortless, yet I knew it was mastery honed through relentless discipline.

I understood none of it. Truly—none. The words meant nothing: trigger-hexes, planar redundancy, weave funnels. My head swam with the abstraction of it all, and halfway through, I stopped trying. There was no point.

And yet… it worked.

By the time she paused, the house had transformed. It was no longer simply a repository of forgotten magic or a mausoleum of obsession. It was a fortress, alive in its secrecy, a network of intent and protection. Every corner hummed with wards, every threshold whispered of traps, every shadow held the weight of careful consideration.

I could see her pride in it, quiet and unassuming, but there. A pulse in her posture that said, I have made this place safe. For now, for us. And somehow, just knowing that—just standing in the aftermath of her work—made me feel we were untouchable, even if only for a while.

---

When we returned upstairs, she shifted again into the human vampire-looking form that felt most… neutral, approachable, almost comforting to the children. She decided to spend some time with them, settling among the blankets with her lyre at her side, music spilling quietly into the room. Not lullabies or simple rhymes—nothing meant for children’s ears alone—but old myths and legends, stories layered with history, power, and caution. Even I struggled to follow some of them. Her words were more sensation than meaning for the twins, resonating through tone and cadence rather than comprehension. The growling, hissing pair watched with eyes wide and uncomprehending, but they were attuned enough to sense the shift in the room, the quiet balm of her presence.

It became brutally clear, almost too quickly, that the twins would require more care than either of us had anticipated. Their damage wasn’t superficial. It couldn’t be patched up with a spell or a gentle word. They were shattered—not in ways visible at first glance, but in the hidden architecture of their minds. Elenya told me, quietly, almost as if sharing a burden, that they had been thrice intentionally feebleminded, trained and broken since as early as six years old. Cursed to silence their own potential, rendered docile, tools for someone else’s designs. Flesh-bound batteries, she said, for rituals I couldn’t even comprehend.

I should have felt pity. Part of me did. But I couldn’t let it stop there. Because watching her with them… tore at a different part of me.

They somehow felt like her new project. 

Her voice softened naturally, a lilt and cadence that coaxed even the sharpest edges out of the room. Her hands moved with slow deliberation, touching lightly where necessary, steady where it mattered, never flinching from contact. She tended to them like they were fragile creatures, birds with broken wings. Every gesture radiated care without being patronizing. Every movement was deliberate, surgical even, but warm. I hated it. Not her. Not the children. Just what it stirred in me—a restlessness, a gnawing ache that I couldn’t name.

By dinner, Sael had already begun to understand her. The boy couldn’t speak, could barely parse her words, yet he had learned how to reach for her in ways that mattered. Big, haunted eyes followed her every movement, small, purposeful trembles signalling need. He would stretch a tiny hand toward her, and when she responded, even with the gentlest of touches, his lips twitched in something almost like a smile—though not quite. Close enough to pierce, to remind me of the vulnerabilities I usually kept hidden.

He was manipulating her. Even in his shattered, limited mind, survival instincts endured. He instinctively knew how to extract kindness and make her mercy tangible. And I hated that I recognized it so easily.

Because Sael and I were not so different. Not really. Once, not so long ago, I had looked at her in much the same way—hungry for attention, desperate for care, clinging to the smallest gestures as proof of existence. Manipulating her. 

Except she saw through me. 

But left this little crawler get away with the lie. 

Veylith, in contrast, remained distant. The girl didn’t allow anyone but Sael near her. Her eyes were sharp, calculating, and every movement was slight and measured. She understood just enough to know that she remained prey, even here, even with Elenya’s presence. Elenya tried with her too—gentle, patient, soft—but there was a line Veylith wasn’t ready to cross.

Sael, meanwhile, had already claimed her lap as his own. He curled into her with the quiet certainty of someone who had found an anchor in a storm.

And I? I remained on the edge of the room, in the doorway, keeping my distance and watching and guarding my own reactions with meticulous attention. I reminded myself constantly: we are fine. This is temporary. The mission matters more than any fragile stirrings in my chest. There were ledgers to decode, archives to search, and Sirelink threads to follow. I could not let the boy’s small, desperate movements—his fragile, half-smiling gaze—unravel me.

The meal passed in silence and careful observation. When the children finally drifted into a hollow, heavy sleep, shadows curling around their small forms, she gathered her notes and instruments, preparing to dive back into her work. The room, quiet now except for the faint scratch of her quill and the low hum of magic, felt alive in a way the house hadn't without her. And I, standing still in the dim light, allowed myself a fraction of relief, knowing she was there, she won't leave and that somehow, her presence alone could hold the fractures of this place at bay.

The night continued, and the lure of rest started calling. Then, she padded toward—and into—his, well, her sleeping chamber.

The night pressed on, dark and heavy, the kind of silence that seemed to seep into the bones. Rest was calling, insistent, coaxing, but without preamble, as I prepared to set the bedroll in the reception room, she moved before I could even untangle my thoughts enough to prepare thoroughly for the day's reveries. Without preamble or word, she padded across the hall—across the cold stone that had already soaked up our whispered schemes, the careful plans scrawled on yellowed parchment—and entered the wizard’s chamber.

Her chamber, now hers.

No pause at the threshold. No lingering glance. Just the quiet click of her boots on stone and the faint rustle of fabric. And I—stupid, unthinking—remained seated on the edge of the hearth in the main room, staring after her like some tragic refrain spun from a bard’s melancholy imagination.

Shit.

Logically, it made sense. A proper bed for her. A guest room for me. Privacy. Comfort. Dignity. All of it. How long had it been since I’d lain down in a bed that wasn’t a floor, a cot, or a pile of blankets that smelled faintly of dust and old blood?

And yet—why did it gnaw at me?

At least she left the children in the reception room. At least I wasn’t being asked to sleep among the cots, the shadows, or the constant, soft creaks of the building settling. That was mercy. That was practical. That was… her.

Still, no words. Not even a goodnight. Not a glance to say, I see you, I notice you. She had gone silent, as she always did when the weight of the world pressed against her temples, and I had never exactly mastered the art of everyday conversation with her either.

But still.

Something in my chest twisted tight. I had grown accustomed to her presence in the space between us—the small movements, the quiet confidence, the way her figure cut across the dim halls like a shard of light. I had grown accustomed, and now the absence of proximity left a sharper ache than I expected.

I should rest. I should take the guest room. I should be grateful.

A proper bed for me alone. Space. Privacy. Solitude. And yet, I sat, staring at the door to her chamber like a fool, listening to the faint scratch of her movements on the other side.

I should go. We need to be sharp tomorrow. Masked. Watchful. The city won’t forgive sloppiness.

This is fine. No—more than fine.

I stayed there, motionless, for what felt like an eternity.

“Fuck!” I said, finally giving in, shoving the bedroll toward the doorway of her room with a huff. It landed unevenly, stiff and uncomfortable. The faint, lingering scent of embalming powder clung to the sheets, faint but pervasive. I flopped onto it anyway. It would do. I didn’t need comfort. I didn’t need warmth. I needed a space to trance, untangle, and hide from something I couldn’t name.

And then the door cracked. Just slightly.

Her head appeared, hair loose, dripping wet from whatever she had been doing, eyes wide and questioning. A single bead of water traced down her temple, catching the candlelight before it fell and vanished in the shadows.

She blinked once. Just once. And then spoke, softly, simply:

“Why are you sleeping there? Not coming?”

Her voice carried no plea, no suggestion, no curl of warmth. It was a statement of fact. And then, as if that alone explained everything:

“The dome’s not that big. You need to stay inside it.”

That was it. Nothing else. Just a fact. And yet, the faint crease between her brows, the almost imperceptible furrow of irritation—maybe concern—spoke louder than her words ever could.

I stood without thinking. My knees brushed the bedroll. The absurdity of it—the stubbornness, the childish protest of my own body—hit me like a slap.

Damn her.

Damn her for existing like this. For being utterly uncompromising in her logic, for her small, measured kindness that felt like a challenge, for the way she could see through the layers of pretense I had built around myself and leave me raw, unprotected, but too stupid to call it by its name.

I stepped into the dome's space, the faint hum of wards brushing against my skin, and exhaled. Not because I was yielding. Not because I was beaten. But because I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop myself.

Damn her.

 

---

She’d been bathing and hadn’t realized I’d stayed behind.
By the time she finished, she’d already drawn a second bath.
Prepared it—for me.

It was divine.

After nearly three weeks on the run, living on spells and desperation, the hot water alone felt like a benediction. Real warmth. Real steam. Not a cantrip’s hollow illusion of cleanliness, but something that lingered—seeped into bone and sinew. I leaned back until the stone rim bit into my shoulders and closed my eyes, letting it soak through me.

The grime. The blood. The smoke that never seemed to leave my skin. The half-waking memory of dirt beneath fingernails, shallow graves, cold, cold nights.

Small bottles lined the shelves beside the basin—soap, oils. I let my fingertips trail over them before picking up each one, sniffing, judging, until I found a satisfactory haul and, more importantly, two bottles of fragrant oil—rosemary and bergamot.

Not the perfume I used to make. Not enough components to recreate that. Some spiced brandy would have rounded the scent better, but beggars can’t be choosers. It would do.

I washed slowly, dragging my hands over my skin as if to push the last few weeks out of my pores. When I was done, I rubbed the oils into my arms, shoulders, throat—slow, measured motions, almost ritualistic as if I could scrub the undeath out of myself. Or at least mask it. The stink of the grave clung, always. But for once, I didn’t smell like a corpse.

When I stepped out, I reached for the towel—a soft, thick, clean one she must have placed there too. I buried my face in it for a moment before drying off. The scent clung to my neck: earthy, sharp, almost alive.

I followed the flicker of candlelight back into the chamber.

She was already curled into one of the low chairs next to the bed, dressed in fresh tights and a loose nightblouse—something pale, collar open just enough to reveal the hollow at her throat. Her hair was still damp, heavy strands leaving darker crescents on the fabric where they brushed her shoulders. One leg folded beneath her like a cat too dignified to stretch. A thick tome lay cracked across her lap, her quill hovering mid-word before gliding into the margin.

She didn’t look up when I entered.

But beside her chair, on the bed—neatly folded—was another set of nightclothes.
Clean. My size. My preference. The fabric looked like the fire had warmed it.

She didn’t say anything. Just turned a page, her thumb tapping lightly against the paper as her eyes moved.

And I—gods—I felt transparent.
Like glass. Like a mirror turned to her light and found lacking.

I stood there a moment too long, towel clutched around my waist like a warding talisman. The warmth from the bath still clung to my skin, but the air between us was cooler, filled with the faint scratch of her quill and the slow shift of her breathing.

She didn’t look up. She just kept reading, and ink smudged faintly along the side of her hand. A strand of hair slipped forward; she absently tucked it behind her ear without pausing her notes. She was probably setting another line of elegant, razor-witted defence between us and the next horror.

And what was I doing?
Stewing. Sulking. Watching her like some wounded dog, sullen from not getting enough attention.
Or worse—like a bored, bruised housewife pouting at her partner for not noticing the new gown.

Pathetic.

This wouldn’t do at all.

I dressed—mechanically, silently. The fabric was soft, worn in the right places. It smelled faintly of ash and her—a scent I’d never admit I could pick out in a crowded ballroom. The hem brushed my wrists just so; the stitching at the collar was slightly uneven, like it had been mended in haste—little signs of her hands on it.

I crossed the chamber and lowered myself onto the edge of the bed, careful not to disturb the dome she’d raised. A protective field—subtle, luxurious. It tingled faintly against my skin, a cool prickle that reminded me of wards around old noble estates. I sat within it like a trespasser pretending to belong.

Back straight. Hands folded in my lap like a well-mannered guest. Watching her.
Waiting for her to notice me.

Which was ridiculous.
She always noticed.

Sure enough, after another line of cramped, deliberate scribbles, she finally glanced up. Met my eyes. Tilted her head slightly—as though she was studying a map she’d seen a thousand times and still couldn’t quite trust.

The candlelight caught the wet ends of her hair, making them look almost silver. She had resumed her vampire-like form before interacting with the children. Her quill hovered above the page, ink pooling at its tip, before she set it down with a muted click. That was all it took—one tiny shift—and my spine felt less like posture and more like armour I wasn’t ready to take off.

“You should rest,” she said.
Not unkind. Not an order.
Just… fact.

That’s all. That’s what she had to say.

Some deeper frustration, unexplainable even to me, began bubbling up. I nodded and slid into the mattress, letting my head fall against the pillow. The dome shimmered faintly above us, catching the candlelight like a soap bubble. My eyes drifted toward it, then toward her again.

Does she ever fucking stop?
Does she sleep? Does she rest? Does she ever let the mission wait?

Even now—hair still damp from bathing, legs curled beneath her—she worked.
Like, stopping would kill her.
Like letting the quiet in might undo her completely.

And I hated it.
Because I knew the feeling.
I knew the gnawing need to keep moving. And watching her do it—
Gods, it twisted something awful in me.

She didn’t even notice what she was doing. How tightly she gripped the pen. How furiously her eyes scanned the page. Like the runes might bite her if she blinked too long.

“You should rest as well,” I said.

“I will. Later. I just wanted to finish reading this spellbook. He has a lot of unique spells.”

I turned onto my side. Watched her.
“I’m here, you know,” I said softly.

The candlelight flickered. Her pen stilled mid-curve, suspended over the page. I saw the moment the words landed—not in her ears, but somewhere deeper. Somewhere buried and aching and still learning to believe.

Slowly, deliberately, she placed the quill down.
“I know,” she said at last. Quiet. Not casual—like she wanted it to be—but careful, as though afraid speaking it might shatter something.

“...Are you hungry?” she asked.

“No, I am not,” I snarled.

That hurt her.

She didn’t flinch.
But I saw it.
The way her jaw tensed.
The way her eyes flicked—not toward me, but down—like the floor had just told her something cruel.

She didn’t move. Didn’t rise, didn’t argue.
Just said, “Alright,” like it didn’t matter.
Like she didn’t.

And I hated myself for it.
I didn’t mean to snap.
Gods, I didn’t mean it like that.

It was easier to hurt her than let her see how much I needed her not to leave that chair. Not to turn away. Not to stop seeing me.

I sat up, the sheets sighing beneath me.
“I didn’t mean—” I began.

She shook her head.
“It’s fine.”

That voice.
Flat. Controlled. Like she was pinning herself back behind glass.

“I just thought maybe…”
Still not looking at me. “You’ve barely had anything since the hunter’s cabin. Even yesterday, you fed, but it was about what you would usually take, and I thought we should keep a strict feeding schedule.”

My heart thudded. Ugly and slow.
“I’m not hungry,” I repeated. Quieter. This time, not a snarl.

“I understand.”

And that should have been the end of it. That should’ve been where I let the silence take over, let her keep her peace and mine.

But instead—
“Don’t do that.”

She blinked.
“Do what?”

“That thing where you… fold yourself away, and you treat me like one of your fucking projects. Like I’m a problem to solve. You only address me when you think I need food, or I’m hurt, or when it’s about the mission.”

She stared at me now. Really stared. And for a breath, I regretted it. The full force of her attention could be sharp. Clinical. Dismissive, even.

But it wasn’t.
Not now.
Now, it was just… sad.

“I wasn’t folding,” she said. “I was trying not to push.”

I swallowed.

She added, softer, “I’ve pushed too much and too often recently, haven’t I?”

“No,” I said—too fast, too hard. Then softer: “No. Not like that.”

She looked down, and for a moment I thought she might fold anyway. That she’d disappear into some intricate equation in her mind, reduce everything to sigils and contingencies again.

So I moved.
Slid off the bed, down onto the floor beside her chair, knees to stone. My hands found the edge of her blanket, then paused. She didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull away.

“I don’t need you to fix me,” I said, staring at her knuckles where they gripped the chair’s arm.

“I know,” she whispered.

“I just need…”
The words tangled in my throat. I closed my eyes, forcing them out. Gods, it was hard to say.
“I just need you to see me. Not the broken bits. Not the past. Just—me.”

Silence answered. Long. Still. The kind of silence that holds its breath.

Then, barely audible:
“I do. I just don’t know what to say.”

Her fingers reached out slowly and cautiously, grazing my cheek like I was fragile. Glass. Bone. Memory. Like she was afraid her touch might shatter me.

I leaned into it.

And then I said, soft but firm, “Then drop the automaton act. Come lie down.”

Just that. No pleading. No edge.

Her eyes flicked to mine, and she gave the slightest nod.
“Okay.”

---

Later, when we were both lying on the bed, the silence stretched between us like a living thing. She remained still, stoic in the dim glow of the wards, slow, deliberate, as if caught somewhere between thought and trance. I watched the faint rise and fall of her chest, the way her hair tumbled across the pillow in loose, damp waves. The faint scent of water still clung to her, mingling with the wax and candle smoke of the room.

Then something shifted in her expression, subtle, almost imperceptible—a twitch at the corner of her nose, a narrowing of her eyes.

“You put on perfume,” she said, surprised.

“I did,” I admitted, glancing away, trying not to let her see the flicker in my chest. “Do you… like it?”

She tilted her head, sniffing again, slower this time, deliberate, analytical, like she was cataloguing the information for some internal ledger. Then, a small, almost mischievous smile curved her lips.

“It does smell nice. But… I think I’m going to miss your scent.”

I froze mid-breath. Blinked. “You mean… the undead stench?”

Her gaze found mine calmly, eyebrows knitting faintly, confusion colouring her expression.

“What do you mean, stench? You do smell of undeath, yes—but it’s not like… rot, not like decay. It’s… subtler than that. More like… overripe fruits or fruits at the edge of being overripe dipped in honey and left on the counter. It smelled like a desert that should be consumed quickly. It's extremely sweet, even crisper, and more intoxicating when fed. Complex but ...” She paused, searching my face, and added softly, “ Not unpleasant. ”

“You said it was too strong,” I reminded her, “when you were smearing that awful alchemical putty all over me.”

She shrugged and turned fully toward me on the mattress, her movement rippling the blankets between us, brushing lightly against my knee. It was a small, casual contact, and yet it sent a tremor through the cold skin I’d grown so used to being alone in.

“It is too strong—you would have been trackable for miles by the creatures of the tunnel. It would have attracted predators. That’s why I masked it.” She spoke the fact lightly, almost dispassionately, but there was a calm certainty in her tone that made it feel weighty, indisputable.

Another pause, and then, as if stating something utterly factual:

“I never said it smelled bad, did I? I only said it was… too sweet. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. You do smell so sweet. That’s typical for vampires—your kind tend to have intoxicating scent profiles. One of the ways you lure prey, isn’t it? And yours is extremely intoxicating.”

I blinked again. “So… are you saying you like it?”

She squinted at me the way she always did before some careful, surgical observation, that tiny head tilt that felt like a challenge and an invitation.

“I’m saying it’s yours. It's not particularly unpleasant. Familiar even. It used to mark the room when you’re near. And now it doesn’t.”

Her voice was calm, almost scholarly, but the faint crease between her brows betrayed a flicker of something else—confusion, maybe curiosity. “Why do you look so shocked? What did I say?”

Because gods, I was shocked.

No one—no one—had ever called my scent anything but monstrous, dangerous, revolting. And now she… she would miss it. Miss me. Not the version I’d masked, cleaned, perfumed, hidden beneath bergamot, rosemary, and brandy—just… me.

I didn’t speak. I only shifted slightly, lifting the blanket and tilting my head—a silent invitation, a question with no words.

She caught it immediately. No hesitation. Just a soft, fluid motion as she slid closer under the covers, the sheet whispering around her, her warmth spreading gradually like molten gold. Her knee brushed mine beneath the fabric. My cold skin drank it in like stone meeting fire—not shocked, not resistant, just acknowledging, absorbing.

I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding.

“Magic it away, then,” I murmured.

“Why? If you like it, that's what's more important, isn't it? It’s fine by me. Did you wear this for me because you thought your scent bothered me? Gods above, Astarion—”

“No, I didn’t. But you saying you’d miss my real scent… it made it… I don’t know, pointless. Just remove the oil.”

“Okay, if that’s what you want.”

“Yeah. I think it is.”

Her fingers danced in the air, a subtle flourish of Prestidigitation, and a faint, tingling ripple of magic spread over my skin. The oil sheen vanished, leaving only the body's warmth next to me. She drew a deliberate inhale, shoulders easing as if some tension had lifted along with the scent.

My stomach coiled. It wasn’t heat—molten metal, pure fire in my chest, radiating outward, crawling up my neck. The dome above caught the flicker of candlelight one last time before it sputtered out, leaving only the soft luminescence of the wards. Darkness pooled around us, thick and alive, but her breathing remained steady, a rhythm I found myself matching without thinking.

She didn’t speak. Neither did I. And yet, the small space between us felt charged, the heat of proximity suffused with something I didn’t have words for. Her hand drifted across that space, brushing mine, lingering, and then threading between my fingers as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Her thumb moved once, slow, deliberate, absent-minded, over the ridge of my knuckle.

And I—my heart, lazy and undead though it was—stuttered. A pulse I hadn’t felt in decades, jolted awake by the softest, simplest touch.

I shifted closer to her, curling into the slight warmth she offered, my forehead almost brushing hers. The faint scent of her hair—a clean, herbal sharpness underlaid with something softer, something unmistakably her—drifted close enough that I could inhale it with every shallow breath. Her thumb continued its slow, unconscious rhythm over my knuckle, each deliberate, almost tender stroke setting a rhythm I didn’t realize I was following.

“I really think you should feed,” she murmured, the words soft but firm, each one deliberate, measured. “Unless you truly don’t want to—but I was serious about keeping you on a tight schedule for now. Ideally twice a day, but daily at the very least.”

I groaned low in my throat, a sound somewhere between protest and laziness, petulant, almost childish. “Gods… must we? Why are you being so insistent about it?”

Her brows furrowed faintly, but her gaze's intensity never wavered. “Listen, I know you said you don’t want me to fix you. And I don’t—not in the sense you mean. But I am a healer. Your healer. Or at least, you are my patient. I care about your well-being. I want you to be healthy. And the reluctance you seem to have developed toward feeding… worries me.”

“Darling, I am not reluctant to feed… it’s just…” My voice trailed off, unsteady, because even saying the words out loud made the chest tighten, the memories of every conditioned reaction, every flash of hunger and restraint, creep back in.

Her brows lifted higher, a soft arch in the dim light of the wards. “Does this have to do with the fact that you seem to have conditioned yourself to associate me with bloodlust?”

I swallowed, turning my gaze aside. “…Maybe. I just… don’t want to see you as prey anymore.” The words were whispered, almost fragile, but they carried a weight I hadn’t meant to admit.

A short, sharp sound escaped her—a laugh, light, half-amused, half-exasperated. “Prey doesn’t beg you to feed, Astarion.”

I flicked my gaze back to her, lips twitching despite myself, a half-smile forced against my guilt. “You think this is amusing.”

“I think you’re being silly about the whole thing, honestly,” she replied, calm, matter-of-fact. “But I think there are some deeper reasons.”

I rolled my eyes, the motion half irritation, half deflection. “I’m using you for blood.”

Her smile softened, gentle now, carrying a subtle gravity beneath its warmth. The curve of her lips hinted at something heavier, almost sorrowful, yet still entirely tender. “And I’m using you for meaning. Is that so wrong? You’re not taking advantage of me, Astarion. I chose this. If you truly don’t wish to feed from me anymore, that’s fine—but we need to find you a sustainable source of nourishment. I thought I’d be the easiest, and likely the preferable choice for you—especially since I can restore my blood twice a day—but it doesn’t have to be me. If you’d rather do something else, we have the waypoint now. We can go somewhere wooded, hunt, and come back. It’s better than you developing an unhealthy relationship with feeding. Please tell me what you want and what makes you comfortable, and I’ll make it happen. But please… don’t start starving yourself again.”

“A day without feeding is hardly starving, Elenya,” I scoffed, but the sound lacked conviction.

“How would you know that?” she asked flatly, unflinching, her voice carrying a precision that made it impossible to ignore. “You’ve been starved since the day you were turned, and you’ve never once looked into any vampiric research I compiled or even the recovery journals. How do you know what proper nourishment is for your kind? You can’t even do a third of what other spawns your age can.”

I frowned, pulling back slightly, confusion and irritation warring with a faint pulse of defensiveness. “What are you talking about?”

She tilted her head, a quiet, deliberate exasperation in the movement. “What do you mean, ‘what am I talking about’? Well… you don’t regenerate when you’re hurt, Astarion—that’s not normal for a mature vampire spawn. Your fangs don’t produce the usual venoms, nor drain vitality from a victim. You can’t spiderclimb. Your attack speed is… about half what it should be.”

My gaze sharpened, disbelief and a slow-burning anger creeping in. “What do you mean I can’t do what a typical spawn can? You think Spawn can do that? Surely not. That sounds more like something true vampires can manage.”

“Well,” she said, “according to Van Reich—the most famous vampire hunter in all the realms—yes. And that’s not the only source. All four tomes I consulted were remarkably consistent about what vampire spawn could do. All of them. From Barovia to the Shadowfell, from the Abyss to the Prime Material. I tried to summarize it in the report I gave you. I suspect it’s the effect of long-term starvation. You were fed so little, for so long, that your vampirism never fully developed.”

The words landed with a quiet, cutting weight.
Never fully developed.

It was the kind of assessment I’d heard a hundred times before, in other forms—too weak, too slow, too late, too broken—but never about the monster inside me. That part was supposed to be untouchable. At least there, I thought, I was whole.

“Are you serious? I’m… even less than the thing I was forced to become? A half-starved shadow of the predator I could have been?”

It shouldn’t have mattered. I didn’t want to be more of a monster. But gods… hearing it aloud, realizing Cazador hadn’t just caged me but deliberately kept me diminished—it was its own poison.

She said it like a fact, clinical and calm, but it scraped against something raw inside me. Not just because I wanted the fangs, the venom, the climb—but because somewhere deep down, I hated knowing he’d succeeded in making me smaller.

“I’m not trying to make you feel less than, Astarion,” she said quickly. “Even if this is permanent—which I doubt—it would be fine. I’m only trying to make a point: your baseline for hunger might be completely skewed, like someone who’s been underfed for so long that their body lowers its metabolism to survive. They keep underfeeding themselves even when they have food because it feels normal. What was done to you might have a similar long-term effect.”

She leaned forward slightly, gaze steady. “You need to take feeding seriously. So—how about a meal plan? You can always have more if needed, but there should be a minimum. Either we find you a medium-sized game animal every day, or I can provide a pint or two of blood without magic—up to eight if I use lesser restoration afterward. We won’t always be in a place where we can feed properly, so there’s no reason to skip it when we can.”

I dragged a hand down my face, exhaling through my teeth. “…Fine. I’ll take it more seriously.”

Her brow arched slightly, like she knew wringing that concession out of me was a minor miracle.

“Good,” she said. “Then we need to figure out what you actually want. Hunting? Stored blood? Me?”

That last word landed like a dropped blade. I hesitated—long enough for her to notice and for the silence to sharpen between us.

“…You,” I admitted finally. My voice came low, rough, like it had been dragged over stone. “I want you. I want it all the time. I’ve wanted it since the first vial—” My mouth pulled into a faint, humourless smile. “—long before the beastlord mess. I even almost bit you a couple of times without meaning to.”

Her eyes narrowed—not in fear, but in something far more dangerous. “And you didn’t think to mention that?”

I shrugged, defensive even as shame prickled hot in my chest. “What was I supposed to say? ‘Hello, darling, I’ve nearly sunk my fangs into your throat twice without asking’?”

“Yes,” she shot back, blunt as a thrown dagger. “That is exactly what you should have said. I can’t keep you—and myself—safe from yourself if you won’t tell me when something is wrong. And feeding from me isn’t wrong, Astarion—but compulsions are dangerous. They are always symptoms of something.”

Her tone wasn’t angry so much as unyielding. Worse than anger, that deliberate steadiness said she’d brook no argument, no evasion.

I dropped my gaze to the sheets. “I didn’t want to scare you… You may have never let me again?”

“Gods below, Astarion, get your story straight. You try to scare me constantly and then complain I don’t scare easily,” she said, half-amused. “Yes, I would have let you feed again.” No hesitation. No pretense. Just that maddening certainty she carried like a blade. “But on our terms, and safely. Which means you tell me when you want it. Not after.”

I almost laughed. Almost told her she was either the bravest mortal I’d met or the most foolish. But my mouth wouldn’t cooperate—it was too busy remembering the shape of her pulse in my thoughts, the way the want had sharpened lately, gone from a dull ache to something with teeth.

“…Fine,” I said finally, because there was nothing else to say that wouldn’t give too much away. “I’ll tell you.”

Her brow lifted slightly. “Every time.”

“Every time,” I echoed, hating the weight of it. Like I’d just signed some invisible contract I couldn’t wriggle out of.

“So… are you hungry?” she asked, as casually as if she’d been offering me tea.

I gave up. I fucking gave up. I can’t with her.

“I… yes.”

“Okay. Take as much as you need, but leave enough for me to stay conscious and cast the spell. I’ll tap you when it’s too much, alright?”

“…Okay.”

---

The mattress dipped under my weight as I moved, slow, deliberate, until I was straddling her hips. My hands pressed lightly to either side of her on the bedding—close enough to cage her in, far enough to avoid presuming anything more than what she’d offered.

For a long moment, I just looked at her.

She was so still. Steady. Watching me with that calm that wasn’t softness exactly—more like unshakable certainty. She tilted her head just enough, baring her throat without flourish, without artifice. No fear. No performance. Just… invitation.

Gods.

I fucking give up.

I leaned in slowly, letting my breath ghost against her skin. I could hear her pulse steady, strong, calling to me like the deepest bass note in a song only I could listen to. I could smell her—warmth laced with that faint trace of soap, damp hair, and the unique undercurrent that was hers alone: rich, like ripe summer fruit, with something sharper beneath, an edge that cut straight through the hunger and into something far more dangerous.

I bit. Not with the desperate snap of starvation, not with the cruelty Cazador had bred into me, but with deliberate care, my fangs sliding through skin like silk parting under a blade.

Her blood bloomed on my tongue.

Gods. It was everything.
Heat and vitality, heady and intoxicating, sliding down my throat like liquid gold. No copper tang of vermin, no stale thinness of desperation—this was alive. Rich. Layered. The kind of taste that could ruin me for anything else.

And for the first time in… gods, decades… There was no fear in it.

No guilt.
No shame.
No voice in my head was hissing that I was stealing, taking, ruining.

I wasn’t stealing anything.
It was given.
I wasn’t using her.
I wasn’t hurting her.

This was what she wanted.
This was what she chose.

And the choice—her choice—wrapped around me like a chain that didn’t bind, but anchored. I could feel my shoulders loosen, the tension in my jaw melting as I drank. My fingers curled against the bedding to keep from clutching her.

For a few impossible moments, I was free.

Free from the constant edge of restraint. Free from the gnawing paranoia that I’d push too far and lose everything. Safe in a way I didn’t even believe was real anymore.

The joy was almost unbearable—not like laughter, but the quiet, stunned kind. The kind that seeps in through the cracks and makes you dizzy. I could feel it in my chest, fluttering in time with her pulse against my tongue.

Trust.

That’s what it was.
Not the forced, brittle trust I’d been trained to counterfeit for survival. But the real thing—solid and quiet and terrifying in its permanence.

I let myself sink into it. Into her. Into the way she stayed perfectly still under me, not because she couldn’t move, but because she chose not to.

I drank, slow and steady, savouring each mouthful like I was memorizing it. The rhythm of it—pulse, draw, swallow—was almost hypnotic. Her breathing stayed even, her scent washing over me with every inhale.

And gods help me, I let myself enjoy it.

Truly enjoy it.

Like this was mine—not by right, not by conquest, but because she’d placed it in my hands and said here.

I let myself sink into it. Into her. Into the way she stayed perfectly still under me, not because she couldn’t move, but because she chose not to.

I drank, slow and steady, savouring each mouthful like I was committing it to memory. I drank, and drank again, letting the heat unfurl through me like sunlight through cold stone. The world outside the press of my mouth to her skin faded until there was nothing but the cocoon of warmth, the steady thrum of her heart, the safety of this narrow space we’d made between us. The rhythm of it—pulse, draw, swallow—was almost hypnotic. Her breathing stayed even, her scent washing over me with every inhale.

It was freedom.
It was trust.
It was—

Three gentle taps on my shoulder.

The sound of my own pulse in my ears dimmed. I reluctantly returned to myself, teeth withdrawing with deliberate care. Her blood lingered on my tongue, sweet and grounding, as if it didn’t want to leave me either.

When I looked down, she was pale—too pale. Weakness threaded her limbs, and her skin was cool under my hands. Her heartbeat was slower now, softer, as if it were catching its breath.

But her smile…

Gods, her smile was the brightest, most radiant thing I had ever seen. It didn’t just touch her mouth—it lit her eyes, warmed the curve of her cheeks, and for an instant she looked almost otherworldly.

Breath-taking.

Like she’d given me something and, in doing so, freed herself too.

Her hand found her holy symbol almost without thought, fingers curling around it as she murmured the incantation under her breath. A soft rose-gold light bloomed over her skin, warm and gentle, sinking into her like a tide returning to shore. I felt the shift under my hands—her pulse steadying, her warmth returning, the faint tension in her muscles easing as her blood and vitality knit themselves whole again.

Gods, she really was beautiful—no matter the face she wore.

…Well. Maybe not that fish-frog thing.

The memory surfaced unbidden, and before I could stop it, laughter burst out of me, quick and sharp.

Her eyes narrowed instantly. “What?”

“Nothing, darling,” I said, grinning shamelessly. “Just remembered that horrendous fish face you wore once.”

Her cheeks went crimson—truly crimson, now that her blood had returned—spreading all the way to the tips of her ears. “Why the hell would you think about that now?” she muttered, grumbling into embarrassment as she tried (and failed) to glare at me.

“No reason, really,” I said, voice low with amusement, before shifting forward.

I slid fully on top of her, fitting myself neatly between her legs, my weight pressing her into the mattress. My mouth found her neck again—not to drink this time, but to press slow, lingering kisses over the fading punctures. I licked over them with deliberate care, sealing the marks as I went, tasting the faint copper of her blood one last time before it was gone.

Yeah. I fucking give up.

---

My trance was peaceful—unusually so.

It wasn’t the restless half-sleep of the tunnels, or the brittle stillness of waiting for dawn in a stranger’s attic. It was… quiet. Full.

And she was everywhere in it.

Her faces were shifting in my mind like turning pages.

The first—when she unearthed me, dirt still clinging to my lashes, her gaze sharp and unflinching even as her hands trembled just enough for me to notice. The way the air had smelled then—damp earth, cold stone, and something faintly metallic I now knew was her blood.

Then, the hunt. Our first hunt together. She moved like a shadow through the brush, the controlled violence in her hands as she struck, the almost-smile she gave me when she saw I’d noticed.

Then the taste of her—the first time I drank. The way the world had narrowed to nothing but her pulse against my lips, her fingers braced against my shoulder.

The serpentfolk tunnel—glistening walls that smelled of musk and rot, our footsteps swallowed by the wet stone, her light steady ahead of me while I kept watch at her back.

And the fight with the Gur—her face set in that calm, calculated fury she wore better than any armour. Her movements were fluid and deliberate, and every strike was placed like a line in some greater pattern that only she could see.

Letting her fill my thoughts this way should have felt too much. But instead, it was… grounding. Like my mind, for once, had decided that if it was going to haunt me with something, it might as well be her.

When I finished my meditation, I opened my eyes to find myself still half-sprawled across her.

Her scent and warmth wrapped around me like that gentle cocoon I’d sunk into hours ago—sweet, faintly metallic, threaded through with something I’d started to think of simply as hers. I let myself stay there longer than I should have, cheek pressed just above her collarbone, feeling the slow, steady rise and fall of her breathing.

It was dangerous, how easy it was to stay like that.
How much I didn’t want to move.

Eventually, I forced myself to shift, untangling us carefully not to wake her. The absence of her warmth was immediate, a slow bleed of cold air against my skin.

She was right.
Gods help me, she was right.

I’d been putting this away for too long—pushing it aside, finding excuses, pretending there was no urgency.
But there was.
And I needed to start engaging with it.

Quietly, I padded over to my pack, fingers brushing past daggers, spare shirts, a few stolen coins, until they closed around the worn leather cover of the notebook she’d given me. The one she’d placed in my hands more than a week ago, telling me—without quite saying it—that it mattered.

The weight of it felt different now. Not just paper and ink, but a kind of trust I wasn’t sure I’d earned.

I sat down beside her sleeping form, cracked the cover open, and began reading.

VAMPIRISM RESEARCH SUMMARY – VERSION 1
Compiled from multiple credible sources, field reports, and confirmed encounters.
Focus: True Vampires vs. Vampire Spawn within the context of the Forgotten Realms.

---

1. General Appearance & Physical Markers

• Retain most of their living appearance.

• Common changes:

  • Pale, cold skin (pinkish hue returns temporarily when well-fed).

  • Sharpened facial features; predatory aspect.

  • Eyes shift to vivid, often unsettling, red.

  • Retractable fangs for piercing prey.

  • Glassy, claw-like nails.

• Can conceal undead traits with makeup/blush.

---

2. Sensory & Stealth Traits

• No shadow or mirror reflection.

• Move in complete silence.

• Darkvision (True Vampire: 120 ft. / Spawn: 60 ft.).

• Exceptional hearing and sense of smell.

• Olfactory signature: often intoxicating to prey; varies between individuals.

---

3. Abilities (True Vampire)

• Retains all skills from life plus:

  • Blood drain & life-force drain.

  • Gaze-based domination/charm.

  • Command vermin (rats, bats, wolves).

  • Shapechange into bat, wolf, or mist.

  • Spider Climb on any surface.

  • Regeneration: important unless damaged by radiant magic or holy water.

  • Immunities: Sleep, charm, hold spells, psionics, paralysis.

  • Resistances: Nonmagical bludgeoning/piercing/slashing, necrotic, cold, lightning.

---

4. Abilities (Vampire Spawn)

• Regeneration: half as effective as that of a true specimen (same radiant/holy water exception).

• Spider Climb on any surface.

• Strong unarmed combat capability and double average individual speed in combat

• Bite: drains life and heal and reduces target’s life force  until long rest.

• Cannot summon vermin, shapechange, or fully dominate as True Vampires do.

• Retain charm and intimidation potential.

---

5. Weaknesses & Limitations (All Vampire Types)

• Sunlight Hypersensitivity:

  • Continuous radiant damage; eventual destruction.

  • disorientation and weakness when exposed to sunlight.

• Running Water:

  • Causes severe acid damage each second of contact.

• Forbiddance:

  • Cannot enter a residence without invitation from a current occupant.

• Coffin & Burial Soil Dependency:

  • Bound to coffin and grave soil for rest/regeneration.

  • Stake through the heart while resting = destruction (True Vampire) or immediate death (Spawn).

• Garlic Aversion:

  • Cannot tolerate strong odor; will not enter affected areas.

---

6. Combat Notes

• Unarmed strikes count as magical for overcoming resistance.

• Prefer grappling prey before biting.

• Will attempt to charm before engaging physically.

• Can use strategies, weapon skills, and magic learned in life.

• In mist form: immune to nonmagical damage; must return to resting place within 2 hours.

---

7. Creation & Reproduction

• Victim must be drained of life by vampire bite, then buried to rise as a spawn the next night.

• Alternate creation methods historically recorded via necromantic magic (create undead, undeath after death). NB ; undeath after death seemed to be the most used way to create true vampires outside of vampiric transmission and propagation but very few records of the spell remain after bain's death during the time of trouble. Check Cyric temples)

• Rare reproductive cases:

  • Vampire + humanoid/monstrous humanoid breeding after significant feeding = half-vampire offspring.

  • Pregnant humanoid surviving a draining attack may birth a half-vampire child.

• Certain cursed weapons can confer vampirism upon wielder’s death.

---

8. Behavioral Observations (Vampire Spawn)

• Subservience to creator until freed (by death of creator or granted freedom). NB; nature of subserviance  severly undoccumented.

• Once freed, cannot be re-enslaved.

• Often prideful; believe themselves superior to living and undead alike.

• Motivations post-freedom: vengeance, penance, power, or knowledge.

---

Field Notes – Hypothesis on Long-term Starvation Effects on Patient #421
Prolonged underfeeding appears to cause underdeveloped vampiric traits in spawn.

• Weakened regeneration rate.

• Loss of spider climb.

• Incomplete venom production from fangs. The of all documented types. 

• Reduced physical resilience compared to typical spawn baseline.

• Suspected cause: Metabolic and arcane adaptation to chronic deprivation. Uncomplete curse espression due to the lack of feeding the necromatitic matrix. Fed must have been kept fed enough just to not enter stupor state. 

---

I closed the notebook.
Not gently. Not with care. Just… shut it and left my hand resting on the cover, as if holding it closed might keep the words inside from spreading further.

Gods.

It wasn’t even that any page shocked me—it was the accumulation. Line after line of things I didn’t know, didn’t understand, had never even thought to ask about. Abilities I’d never heard of, vulnerabilities no one had told me, entire swathes of what I am—or should be—that had simply… never existed for me.

I’d thought I knew my own cage. Thought I’d paced its edges enough times to know every inch.
But no.

This—
This was seeing the bars from the outside for the first time.

Every missing piece was deliberate.
Cazador had made sure of it.
Not just starving me of blood—no, that was almost merciful in comparison. He’d starved me of context. Of the language to even understand what I was. He’d left me thinking the scraps he gave me were a feast, that the meagre tricks I could manage were all a spawn could ever hope for.

And I’d believed him for centuries.

My jaw clenched so tightly it ached. I could almost feel his hand on my shoulder again, how he’d squeeze—not as comfort, never as comfort—but to remind me of his grip that I wasn’t to wander, not in body, not in thought.

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding and glanced toward her sleeping form. She’d handed me this notebook like it was nothing. Like she didn’t know what it would do to me. Or maybe she did, and that was the point.

She’s known me for a month and has already peeled back more of my reality than I managed in two centuries.
And I don’t know whether to thank her or throw the damned thing in the fire.

My fingers tightened on the cover. No
Not the fire.

I’m going to learn every word of it.
And then I will find out what else he kept from me.

---

I stayed there longer than I meant to, my fingers still pressed to the cover of that damned notebook, the words echoing in my skull like gnats I couldn’t swat away. Eventually, the quiet started to feel… too still. I needed to move.

And—gods help me—I found myself thinking about cooking again.

Because she would need food after the… feeding earlier, I wanted to give her something that wasn’t just taking.

Her bag of holding sat against the wall, half-slouched over itself like a sleeping cat. I crouched beside it, sliding my hand into the pocket of dimensional space. The enchantment was loose enough that I didn’t have to name exactly what I wanted— apparently, just thinking of a cookbook summoned an ungodly amount of tomes.

When my fingertips brushed the leather binding, I hesitated—a book. The texture was different. Softer. Worn in places like it had been thumbed through a thousand times.

When I pulled it free, I blinked at the title—the Adventurer's Cookbook.
Not just any cookbook—something bizarre, gaudy, with strange woodcut illustrations of grinning halflings holding pies bigger than their heads. The recipes ranged from “eel-and-acorn stew” to “goblin-approved mushroom loaf.” And gods, the marginalia—half in common, half in some dialect I didn’t recognize—was a fever dream of substitutions and questionable cooking advice.

Still, one recipe caught my eye: Herbed flatbread with foraged greens. Simple enough. Even I thought I could manage it. And it didn’t require anything ridiculous like the other recipes, like "pickled griffon eggs" or “Phase-spider torso meat.”

I glanced toward her sleeping form again, then tucked the cookbook under my arm.

I remembered her pouting face at tasting what I’d made the day prior—like a spoiled noble deciding whether to suffer through the soup course.
This could do nicely.

At least, I could make sure her following expression was less tragic martyr and more… well, something worth looking at.

---

The kitchen was still challenging but far more manageable than last time.

I set the odd little cookbook on the least-warped counter patch, flipped it open to the flatbread recipe, and weighted it with a mug. The recipe was deceptively simple—flour, water, oil, salt, and greens—but her handwriting in the margins told another story. Neat, deliberate script, annotated the way she annotated her grimoires, only this time with almost indulgent flourishes: “thyme, if possible,” “dried berries for sweetness,” “fresh sage if the day is cold.” Each note was precise, but there was a quiet personality in them, a sliver of her voice tucked between the lines.

Herbs first—something sharp enough to cut through the damp that seemed to cling to the stones here. I rummaged through the cupboards until I found a jar of dried thyme, which might have been sage if you squinted. The scent was faint, tired with age, but workable.

I gathered greens from the kitchen and pilfered a few from her pack, adding onions. I avoided the garlic—no sense in courting a rash for authenticity.

My thoughts kept drifting back to the journal. The neat columns of facts. The ugly truth in them. How little I knew about what I was, how much I’d been kept deliberately ignorant. Her offer to go to Candlekeep herself, to start the research… it had been foolish to refuse her. And yet, even knowing that, I’d refuse again. We needed the information, but the thought of her in another city, out of my reach, was unacceptable.

Flour. Salt. Water. Olive oil. I tipped them all into a bowl and mixed by hand—no point hunting for utensils that were probably more dust than metal. The coarse drag of the flour against my fingers softened as the water drew it together. The warmth from the hearth crept into my hands, forearms, and chest as I worked it smooth, kneading until the dough gave back under my fingers—elastic, warm, and faintly scented with thyme and onion.

I didn’t care for the tacky pull of it clinging to my fingers and catching beneath my claws, but the rhythm… gods, the rhythm was absurdly calming. Steady, grounding. Almost normal. The kind of morning I’d never had and never thought I’d want—quiet, deliberate, domestic.

I left the dough to rest and focused on coaxing the enchanted stove to life. I approached it the way I used to approach locks—patient, precise, knowing it would test me before it yielded.

Maybe we could find a way for me to accompany her to Candlekeep. Or send the request through her pin. There had to be a way.

I divided the dough into ten small rounds, flattened them, brushed their surfaces with oil, and laid one across the pan. The oil hissed and spat, carrying the faint scent of thyme, onion, and browning bread until it wrapped around the kitchen like a blanket. The place felt—strangely—like somewhere worth returning to.

The first two were burnt beyond redemption.
The blasted stove always demanded two sacrifices before obedience.
The third came out perfectly—its surface mottled with golden blistered spots, soft beneath the crust.

The faint creak as the bubbles settled, the low hiss of oil…

And the thought—traitorous thing—that she’d wake to the smell of baking bread and know it was for her.

Gods. I really was losing my edge.

Once the bread was done, I rifled through her pack again and found cheese—soft, pale, and fragrant despite the journey—and the last of her dried fruit. I sliced the cheese into neat wedges and scattered a few berries over each plate. Three plates again.

The walk to the children’s chamber was quieter than usual. When I pushed the door open, I froze for half a breath.

They weren’t in the cage.

Veylith and Sael lay curled on the bare stone floor, close together like pups, the bars of the empty cage behind them. The wards still hummed faintly, but they were sleeping outside of them.

I set the plates on the ground between us and waited there.

It didn’t take long. Veylith stirred first, her eyes blinking open. She caught sight of me, her gaze flicking to the food, then to the empty doorway behind me—expecting someone else. When she saw it was only me, her brows knit.

I gave a single nod, slow and deliberate.

To my surprise, she moved first—sitting up, reaching for the nearest plate, breaking off a piece of flatbread. She ate without hesitation. Sael, after a moment of watching her, reached for his own plate and began to chew, though his gaze kept darting toward the door.

I didn’t move; I just sat across from them, watching the faint smell of thyme and cheese curling in the air.

Halfway through her meal, Veylith looked at me and, without a word, held out a wedge of cheese across the space between us.

I stared at it—at her hand, steady in its offer. My mouth went dry.
I shook my head.

Her brows pulled together. Sael, chewing slowly, looked between us. They both seemed… thoughtful. Assessing me the way one might determine a puzzle missing too many pieces.

Sael swallowed the last bite of his bread, then—without warning—shifted to face me fully. He tilted his chin up. The line of his throat bared in the dim light.

Dread slammed into me like a wall. Bile rose hot in my throat. My head was already shaking before I realized I was doing it—sharper, faster, as if that alone could erase the image.

Sael’s brow furrowed. Veylith’s eyes narrowed in quiet confusion. They didn’t move. They didn’t lower their gazes.

And all I could do was keep shaking my head, my voice caught somewhere between my chest and my teeth, refusing to give them the thing they seemed to think I wanted.

That’s when I heard her calling my name.
I answered without thinking, voice carrying down the stone hall, and a few moments later, she stepped into the room.

She took in the scene—me cross-legged on the floor, the three plates between us, Veylith chewing, Sael still watching the doorway—and her mouth curved.

“Good morning, darling. Please, grab your plate before the bread gets cold,” I said, aiming for nonchalance. My tone might have almost passed for casual, if not for the slight stiffness in my shoulders.

Her eyes lit immediately. “You made food again?!” She crossed the space quickly, the sound of her boots soft against the stone. “Gods, you are heaven-sent.”

Then she glanced toward the children, smile warm but not patronizing.
“Good morning, you two. Happy to see you decided to leave your cubby hole.”

She didn’t wait for an answer—just lowered herself to the floor beside me, knees brushing mine as she reached for the plate I’d set aside. 

“You…” She paused, peeling off a piece of flatbread with reverent care. “…you fucking made bread. This is just unfair now.”

I allowed the faintest smirk. “Careful, darling, or I might start expecting worship.”

She bit into it, eyes closing for a fraction of a second like she was memorizing the taste, and—just for that moment—the weight in the room shifted. Less cage, less stone,

“Are you okay?” she asked, pausing mid-chew. Her eyes flicked over me, searching. “You seemed… a bit tense when I came in. Are you uncomfortable with the children? You don’t have to do this, you know.”

“No.” I hesitated. “I mean—yes, but… It’s not that.”

Her brow furrowed slightly. “Then what is it?”

I exhaled through my nose. “The boy offered me his throat.”

She froze mid-bite, the bread still in her hand. Across from us, both children went utterly still, watching her with sharp, wary eyes.

Her lips parted in realization. “…Oh, shit. They don’t know this face. Fuck.”

“Just shift back to the other one,” I said quietly. “Have them get used to it.”

She nodded once, already setting her plate aside. The air shimmered faintly around her as her features melted and rearranged, reforming into the face they knew.

The reaction was immediate. Fear sparked first—Sael’s shoulders tightening, Veylith’s eyes narrowing—but confusion followed quickly, their gazes darting between her face and her voice. And then, finally, understanding settled in.

Sael moved first, almost without thinking. He crossed the short distance to her and collapsed into her lap, clinging as though anchoring himself.

“How the—” I started, but bit back the rest. Her look was enough to tell me this wasn’t the moment for questions.

She started coaxing him in a low, steady voice, the kind she used when she wanted someone to believe the world was safe. One hand smoothed over his hair, the other gently shifting his tunic aside.

The boy went pliant under her touch—too pliant. I could smell it on him—the sour edge of fear threading through the stale air.

And just like that, the certainty locked into place. He didn’t trust her. Not really. This was performance—obedience played to perfection. The same trick I would’ve used. Be the quiet, clingy pet, and no one digs deeper.

I smiled. Gods, I even felt a flicker of respect at his sharpness—until I heard it.

Her heartbeat.

It was steady at first, then started hammering in a sharp, accelerating rhythm, beating out a melody that sang of rage. Not surprise—rage.

I followed her eyes down to the boy’s shoulder, now bared.

Scars. Dozens of them. Old and new, layered over each other in a grotesque map of his survival. Thin, jagged lines like lash marks. Round, puckered pits from burns. And bites—gods, so many bites, each one a story I didn’t want told, how he was so quick on the intake.

The air seemed to constrict around us, the smell of old blood and scar tissue choking out the scent of bread and herbs still lingering from the plates.

Her hand stilled on his shoulder, fingers hovering over a particularly deep set of teeth marks. She didn’t look at me, but the rage in her pulse was enough to burn through my own skin.

My hand went to the bite marks on his shoulder.
He flinched—just barely—but enough for me to feel the jolt of it, his heartbeat hammering against my palm in a rhythm too quick to be anything but fear.

Veylith started a low, keening whine, but I didn’t stop. Just a fleeting touch over the scarred flesh, enough to mark and acknowledge it.

Then I lifted my gaze and held the boy’s eyes. Long enough for him to see the refusal there. The shake of my head was slow, deliberate.

He only looked more confused.

I straightened, collected the empty plate, and without another word, left the room.

---

I don’t know what I’m feeling.

Only that something is stirring. Restless. Sharp. It scratches beneath my skin and refuses to let me ignore it.

A vague pressure in my chest. It doesn’t ache—not exactly. It swells.

With what? Guilt? Anger? Shame?

I don’t know.

I don’t know what to think.

The moment I try to pin my thoughts down, they scatter, slipping through my grasp.

And the more I try to sort them, to make sense of them, the more they dissolve into fog—into shifting, insistent shapes I cannot name.

What is bothering me?

It shouldn’t be the children.

They are hardly special. So many suffer. So many never make it out.

At least these oid. They were rescued. That’s more than most get.—more than I got.

No. That’s a lie.

I was rescued.

So why do I feel so unsettled?

Because the first time they saw me, I was killing.

Because they looked at me like I was a monster.

And maybe I am.

But I was trying.

Gods, I was trying.

Trying to be something different. Something better. Something other than the thing Cazador moulded me into.

Why did I even care?

Why did it matter how they saw me?

Except… it did.

And it wasn’t just that.

There was something else gnawing at me. Small. Insistent. Infuriating.

---

“Hey, thanks for the food—it was terrific. Do you need help with anything?” she said, her voice casual but warm, like sunlight slipping through the blinds.

“No, I’m almost done. But if you could prestidigitate the dishes, that would be great,” I answered, trying to steady myself, to keep my mind from spiralling into the quiet, gnawing restlessness I had carried all day.

“Sure.” She raised her hand, the small, elegant movements precise and effortless. A shimmer of light danced over the plates, lifting the grime gently from the surface, and I felt the subtle shift in the air as the magic wove itself through the room.

“It’s a really handy little cantrip. I wish I had picked it up,” I said, speaking more to the room than to her, to create some distraction from my own thoughts, to anchor myself outside the fog of my mind.

“You know some magic?” she asked, curious, tilting her head in a way that made me want to shrink and simultaneously confess everything I’d ever done or been taught.

“Not really. I can summon a firebolt. That’s about it,” I admitted, feeling the familiar sting of inadequacy behind the words.

“Where did you pick that up?” she questioned. The words were casual and offhand, but they opened something deep inside me for some reason.

Immediately, the memory rose, fragile and bright, as though sunlight itself had threaded through dust motes in an old, quiet room.

A study cluttered with shelves and books, the air heavy with ink and the scent of old paper.

My small pale hand hovered uncertainly over a tiny spark, trembling with anticipation and fear.

The flicker wavered, dancing on the edge of control.

I remember the joy, the frustration, the stubborn determination, each feeling sharp and burning in me even now.

And then, and then a careless gust of wind snuffed it out followed by a voice, melodic, warm, teasing, as if it had been waiting behind the door all along:

“Now what do you think you’re doing, young man? casting fire surrounded by books.”

“Probably picked it up from family,” I said, a nervous attempt at humour, “Being an elf and all—some stereotypes are true, you know.”

She rolled her eyes, the movement light but full of judgment I secretly cherished.

“Are you ever going to let me live that down?”

“Not a chance,” I replied, the words rough but honest.

She laughed, a soft, lilting sound that made the corners of my chest ache with a strange, unfamiliar warmth. “I could teach you, you know,” she said.

“Teach me what?” I asked, wary but intrigued.

“Magic. The cantrip. Or something else, if you want,” she said simply, almost dismissively, but there was a weight to it, a sincerity I couldn’t ignore.

“You want to make a bard out of me?” I asked, half in jest, half in disbelief.

“You don’t have to be a bard to learn how to inspire, or nudge the weave. I could show you some non-bardic spells too—it’s a bit harder, but not impossible,” she replied, her voice patient, encouraging, almost challenging.

“I’m sure you’ve got better things to do with your time than waste it on me,” I said, brushing it off, though the words rang hollow even as I spoke them.

“It wouldn’t be a waste,” she said, gentle now, almost tender. “But no pressure.”

“I’m better at stabbing things,” I said, letting a small smirk form, a shield against the weight of her attention.

“I don’t know about that. I’ve yet to find something you’re not good at,” she countered, amusement flickering in her eyes. Then, with a subtle pout: “Your embroidery alone makes me think you’d be excellent at magic.”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked, the confusion sneaking in, though my heart betrayed me with an erratic flutter.

“There’s a reason arcane magic is called The art. Wizards forget that too often. There is no more direct and instinctual way to connect with the weave than the act of creation. Casting, the way i practice it most of the time is no different than plucking a melody from strings or weaving meaning and a picture from thread. It’s about shaping the weave, influencing and convincing it to respond to your intent. Charming it,” she said, leaning a little closer, as if to make sure I truly understood. 

“Are you saying I’m charming?” I asked, almost a whisper, caught between defensiveness and curiosity.

“I’m saying you already have the instincts. Artists and craftsmen connect more naturally to the weave. That’s where most shamanic, intuitive casting comes from—artistry, not study, not bloodline and not patron or deity base, she replied, her eyes steady on mine, patient and unwavering.

“I’ll think about it,” I muttered, unsure whether I was thinking about magic, how she had said it, or how she looked at me.

“Okay,” she said, soft, almost tentative.

A pause fell between us, stretching long and quiet, she started to leave before stopping mid-steps. She looked at me intently before finally asking, with a hint of vulnerability beneath the calm: “Are you okay? That must have been really hard.”

“What?” I asked, caught off guard.

“Sael. How he responded ...Being perceived that way. When you were trying to help, that must have been hard,” she said, carefully, as if every word could fracture me if mishandled.

“I guess, it is what it is. Plus, the boy is not wrong.” I admitted, my voice uneven, betraying more than I intended.

“He is. You can feel sad about it, you know. I know it was hard for me when...” she added, quietly, as if sharing a burden I hadn’t expected.

“You? He didn’t bear his throat to you,” I said, trying to tease, to deflect.

“No,” she said, firm, serious. “Not him.”

“Who then?”

She looked at me, unflinching, her gaze steady, deliberate.

“You. You don’t remember, but you did the first night, right after feeding. You were so scared and confused. Even after,  you kept... the whole… seduction thing. You offered yourself,” she said, and it landed like a weight I couldn’t lift, sinking into the marrow of my thoughts.

Realization. 

I froze, every instinct screaming. The memory—or was it a recognition?—of myself, unguarded, vulnerable, performing seduction and offering myself with threads of something older, something darker beneath. The realization gnawed at me, relentless:

I thought it was controlling the situation. 

So was he earlier. 

Not but a week ago, she called me out on it. 

I didn't understand what I was doing. Had I ever wanted anything freely? Or had I only ever been offering, always offering, a reflection of what was safe, what was expected, what would be tolerated? Creating the expectation. Was this—the way I had always acted, always reached, always bared a part of myself—the pattern of my life?

Had I ever wanted anything freely? Or had it all been conditioned to think all this was okay?

Was that what I’d been doing all along? 

The little shit was a dark mirror indeed. 

 

Chapter 36: The One Who Endures.

Ilmater’s POV – After the Procession, −238 DR to 146 DR
House of the Triad, Celestia Reforged

---

He never regretted his scream. 

Even if Null came more often. 
He still carried her the same. 
But the world suffered less. 

As they began to say his name.

For the first time. 

He felt like a god. 

Prayers to him flooded from Faerunian mortals and from the rest of Toril. 

Few gods wanted his creed; in that aspect, he was stronger than most. 

Many across the pantheons of all native and outer deities claimed Mercy

Lady of Mercy Sharindlar for the Morndinsamman. Mother of life and healing. Tamara of the draconic pantheon. Even Eldath the  Quiet One, servant of Silvanus, called for compassion.  

Righteous suffering and pain alleviation were rarer; not many wanted that, and none wanted to feel pain. Not many were that. 
Only Naralis Analor, the Healer of the Seladrin, shared that with him, and his worship and name were few and waning. 

None but him claimed martyrdom. Suffering for others. 
In that sense, he was unique. 
Any martyrdom was a prayer to him, even done for another god. 

His power kept growing.

It was a whisper of thanks on a mother’s lips.

A sigh of relief in a broken man’s lungs.

The hush of a beggar who found rest beneath a temple’s eave.

Worship bloomed where silence had once rooted. The quiet, soft faith of those without strength left for grand temples or golden icons. The ones who bled into the world's cracks, and still endured.

He had changed.

And so did the world. And it was finally starting to catch up to what it needed.

As the gates of Jhaamdath closed behind the last of the procession’s echoes, Ilmater walked beside Tyr and Torm—not as a shadow, but as a partner and friend.

Not hidden. Not bowed. Not silent.

But still broken, still crying.

But for the first time since he crawled from the smoke and Ashes of the first sacrifice, for the first time, he took on a meaning he liked; he laughed as well.

He was doing well. He was doing good work.

There was a child in Chondath who screamed at night.
Not for fear, but for memory.
Tyr’s justice had liberated her.
Torm’s honour had fed her.

But Ilmater lay beside her in the straw and listened until the scream turned into sobs, and the sobs into silence.

No records marked it.
No miracles were recorded.
But the next day, the child played outside for the first time since the war.

Null was rattled. 

But she was powerless against him, as long as he still held her within. 

---

With the triad built, the three divine realms gathered together around Celestia. 

Stone by stone, realm by realm. A mountain each.

Not a place of judgment, not a throne of law, not a fortress of command.

A home.

They named it The House of Triad together and remade that corner of Celestia into a bastion of aligned wills.

Tyr laid the foundations in justice, tempered now with empathy.

Torm raised the halls with duty, shaped now with trust.

And Ilmater?

Ilmater opened the doors and let the suffering in.

---

Lathander came to visit often.

Too bright.

Too warm.

Too… morning.

Different from the brother he remembered.

He wasn’t Amaunator anymore—not truly. He was brighter, lighter, sterner, maddening in his zeal and joy, but still kissed with something old.

And when Ilmater looked at him, something in him steadied.

They often embraced on the mountaintop of his neck of the realm and watched east where the sun touched every stone.

He was relearning his brother, getting accustomed to the changes. To the new name, the new aspect. 

“Death ought to change a fella,” Lathander said once.

Ilmater just smiled. “So does coming back, I assume.”

They laughed.

They cried.

They didn’t explain everything. They didn’t need to.

They were brothers again.

---

New friendships followed.

Gods with open hands and tangled pasts.

Helm, the Watcher—his silences full of meaning. His guard was unwavering. A being who understood what it meant to stay. They found comfort in silence together, standing shoulder to shoulder in the aftermath of others' storms.

They often took long walks. 

Murdane, Helm’s consort—sharp, measured, pragmatism incarnate,  never cruel, only clear. She reminded him that mercy needed reason to be more than pity. They taught him to plan, be effective in his sacrifices, and prioritize to reduce overall suffering. They debated if not kindly but passionately. She challenged him in the best of ways, in a way only Null used to. She never once tried to “fix” him. He loved her more for that.

He told her of Null. 

She hugged him. Told him she understood his choice. Both understood suffering and pain. He found in them very dear friends. Ilmater loved them both. Loved them infinitely. They chose to reside in the house of the triad as well, and joy filled him for a time. 

His brother and his partners forced him to socialize more. Build allyship. 

He did leave his realm more often. 

Null hated it. That showed him it was the right thing to do. 

Later, he also met Tyche. What a revelation that was. She was fortune's breathless whim—her eyes gleamed with a tinge of unpredictability. She was coins spun mid-air. She loved Lathander. And thus was elated to meet his brother. She was outspoken and resolute. Mournful and joyfully. Whimsical and yet profoundly resolute. She often mocked lovingly Ilmater’s soft voice. She said she loved how his godhood was about defeating the odds. Liked his patience. He relearned himself through her eyes. he found himself almost as joyous to see her as he was to see Lathander. The three of them often drank together and talked of chance, renewal. Of fate, and of those who never got lucky. Lathander frequently spoke about the state of the multiverse, the need for change, and the unfairness of the current balance. He dreamed of a new dawn, of changing the realms. 

Ilmater laughed and often agreed with him, who wouldn't when they felt all the suffering in the realms, but in retrospect, he should have known better, listened better. 

Instead, he was too focused on Sune.

Sune was something else.

Something he still doesn't have a name for.

Only Sune.

Sune, who looked at his scars without flinching. Who declared beauty was not the absence of pain but how one bore it. She kissed his hands once, not with flirtation, but reverence. “You made something beautiful,” she said. “You.” 

Who learned of his refusal of true godhood for love until the loss of love became his godhood.

Sune, who admired what Null sullied, and in doing so repaired some of it in a way. Not right away. Not totally and not alone. Ibrandul helped as well. Wild god of dark places. Freedom and gloom incarnate. He reminded Ilmater of her—of what Null had been before she was poisoned. Of what she might still become. They shared long walks in the places between stars, where light failed and truth echoed.

He showed him a crystal cave once. 

Ilmater wept harder for days. 

But together with Sune, the pair put to rest his regrets. He did all he could.

He finally accepted that. 

Sixty thousand years too late, but he accepted it all the same.  

Of course, not all were as wonderful. Some he barely tolerated. Simorphe was one prime example of that. When the goddess of nobility joined the house of triad, he had ferociously opposed it, but the tyrannical decision had been final. Their realm needed bolstering, and her alignment matched theirs. Ilmater still disagreed but was outvoted. 

A concession had to be made.

Now, he knows he should have never allowed it. 

So many regrets.

While Simorphe had been pompous and outright entitled, she did represent the best of what to be expected from nobility. She bound herself in duty almost as much as Helm did.

That was not the case for all the others he met. Some of the newly ascended were downright vile, and Ilmater couldn't help but wonder why any mortal would want to become a god of such portfolios.  

The dead three and their minions, especially. 

He remembers seeing Jorgal before he gave away his divinity to the three. 

He understood why, but could not abide by it. 

They all hated Ilmater almost as much as he petted them. 

But no one hated him as much as Lovianthar did. 

Good, he hated her as well. Pettied the mortal she was, but hated her for how she wielded her story. Few he found unredeemable, but she, she was at the top of the list. She was exploiting what Null had become. Feasting on her. W ithout ever knowing her.

He hated her because she was the personification of what could happen to mortals who never knew pain. 

In Rashemen, He watched Loviatar offer favour to a woman if she flayed her own child.

That was her creed after all—pain to those who deserve it or those who will be the most hurt by it.

Ilmater wept as he smited the mother afterward. 

He could not supersede mortal free will. Could not condemn her before she sinned. 

So started Loviantar's sick little game. 

She kept asking her brood for children. 

The children. 

So many children. 

Loviantar was doing it on purpose. 

To hurt him. 

She knew he always took the suffering of children first. 

He did not always win.

But he never stopped.

Kept redirecting the pain she craved and lessening the one she fed upon. 

With his creed. 

He became significantly invested in the world. 

Actively participating 

Often facing all that spreads suffering. 

Bane and Loviantar were often in his way. 

The triad did not seek war with the Black Lord.

But Bane made it so.

Tyranny never rests.
It waits, starless and seething, under every stone laid by law.
When Tyr built roads of justice, Bane buried chains beneath them.
When Torm raised banners of courage, Bane slit throats in their shadow.

And when Ilmater whispered mercy into broken places—

Bane laughed.

---

When Myrkul gained more and more power from his tomb of ambition, feeding on the souls of the living—cloaked in necromantic majesty, hungry for dominion—Ilmater did not hesitate.

He stood beside Lathander. Empowered him. 

Spoke the truth of pain’s dignity and life’s sacred spark.

Where Myrkul saw soul energy for his liches and abbominations, Ilmater saw breath.

Where Myrkul saw tools, Ilmater saw children.

As Lathander started his campaign, Ilmater declared undeath anathema—not out of hatred, but out of devotion. To be able to join and aid his brother. 

To suffering that ended.

To peace that must not be stolen.

To grief that must never be mocked by endless puppetry.

He swore to AO himself: the grave must mean something.

Tyr and Torm supported him and joined in. 

And when the armies of light clashed with the dead—

He stood at the front.

No blade.

Just chains.

Enduring the cries of all the suffering souls and carrying everyone who fell with gentleness.

He should have listened to Tyche or Murdane.

---

He eventually met—unexpectedly—Selûne.

Well, that was awkward. 

He decided not to say a thing. 

let bygone be bygone. 

What's the point of reopening a wound older than the world? 

It wasn't her fault after all.

She did not know 

She did not see. 

Pain is too often silent. 

She must have been relieved to be rid of hers. 

Did not question where it went. 

He still liked her. Will always remember her. 

Remember watching her fight for life when he and his brother were but a mote of divine essence. 

She had asked him about where he came from. 

Oh, the irony. 

She said that she often passed the sanctum of silent suffering before his scream and always wondered who the god that lived there was.

Ilmater could not stop himself from laughing. He deflected the question. Not to deceive, but out of mercy. Selûne was many things, but she was emotional. More than many gave her credit for. He knew that the truth would only hurt her. He bid her farewell politely. She smiled politely as well, not knowing.

And that was that. 

Or so he thought. 

But little did he know that when Lathander heard of the meeting. He could not let it rest. Broke the oath he had made when he was Amaunator.  Exploited the fact that reincarnating freed him from all oaths and spoke to her of who Ilmater really was.

Ilmater didn't know what to feel about that. Lathander meant well. But that wasn't his choice to make. Yet he did it anyway.

Tyche helped Ilmater reconcile with his brother. Called it a whim of fate.

She had a way of disarming Ilmater of disarming everyone, really. She was headstrong, willful, mercurial, and always believed her way was best. She was playful, neither malicious nor vengeful unless provoked. She liked good jokes and was known for occasionally playing practical pranks on the more stern and straight-minded deities, including his own brother, her consort. 

Many moons later, he agreed to meet Selûne again. 

She saw him with starlit eyes. Wearing the face she used to wear when the world was but a cradle of life, she held half of the available divinity. 

She saw him and, for the first time, saw through him. Saw the ashes, and the burns and the smoke. 

And she finally understood. 

Well, it was undoubtedly more awkward now. 

“How…?” 

She started crying, and Ilmater didn't know what to do with himself. He cried for the world's pain, but only one ever cried for his pain. She was gone now. Now Selûne is crying about a pain he barely remembered suffering. Too long a time has passed. Yet she cried, did so like mortals do. Ugly and gutwrenching. This is why he never wanted her to know. It was too little too late. It won't change anything, only bring pain to her. She looked at him again after a time and asked, "You took it all, how did I not see that, how did I not see you. How is it possible?" 

“I didn’t see you,” she wept. “I never even knew… I thought it was my powers. You took it all. I should have known. ”

Ilmater touched her hand.

“You were just happy to not be in pain anymore. That does not make you cruel. It's okay. I know you couldn't have known. It took me a long time to fully stabilize, and even after I did, I didn't claim a domain for even longer. You were focused on the war with Shar, and I was in love,” he said.

“But. I should have held you. Helped you like I did with him. ”

“You could not. Not then. And he helped me plenty, you know. After stabilizing, I was happiest with him and ... it's okay, moodmaiden. I never sought you either. I was happy where I was.”

“If only I could change it— that was mine to bear.”

“I wouldn't,” he whispered. “ I was born, wasn't I. Mercy can only be born in suffering. I do not regret what made me. Neither shall you. ”

She hugged him.

And he still didn't feel whole.

Like he thought, too little, too late.

But it strangely gave him closure. 

He decided not to dwell on the past. 

He was still the weeper.

Still the one who Endured.

But now?

He did not endure alone anymore.

He did not rule.

He did not command.

He loved.

And the House of the Triad stood taller for it.

He no longer believed suffering must always be silent.

He sang.

He screamed.

He held the world in bleeding hands.

And the heavens, at last, listened.

He was the cloth they wrapped around what broke.

He, with the triad, is never ahead.
But always where the hurt lived.
His path was not straight. It circled. It doubled back. It paused.

There was no glory in it.
Only need.

He walked into cities where justice had come and gone.
Where law had broken the oppressor but left the orphan untouched.
He walked into temples still burning from wars of righteousness.
Into homes where no prayers reached.

And he touched them.

He touched the bruises that others' mercy forgot.

---

Many battles against Bane were led. 
Many places his worship bloomed 

Tyr wanted to purge them.
Torm wanted to lead them.

Ilmater walked through it barefoot.

The cries rang loudest in the cellars, in the places even Bane’s priests did not visit.
He found children who did not speak.
He found women who cut silence into their tongues.
He found men who dreamt only in flinches.

He carried them. All of them.
One by one, until the city noticed.
Until Bane did.

When the black hand eventually came for him, as well. 

Not with wrath, but with an offer—Exchanged the suffering of one mortal living under his tyranny for every lash under Bane lover's whip for as long as he could endure. 

Bane was many things, but he was not an oathbreaker. 

Order was as much his domain as it was Torm. 

So Ilmater accepted.

They thought themselves coy and clever. 

This was nothing. 

The terms of the agreement were made so that only Ilmater could stop this. 

They never suspected they would want it to end before him. 

Of course, they couldn't. Loviantar never felt pain. 
She can't understand.

He walked alone into the Black Bastion. 

Not to convert.

But to suffer.

So that the world won't have to. 

Loviatar came in perfume and barbs.

The Maiden of Pain was relentlessly attacking Ilmater's worshiper before this.

She delighted in Ilmater's suffering.

She was obsessed. 

She mocked him with ecstasy and knives. He understood Null's disdain for his kind when he learned Loviantar's true nature. 

“You don’t get to keep the pain if you never give it,” she laughed when she attacked him.

But he did keep it.
He did keep her. 

Every lash.
Every scream.
Every orphaned ache that no other god would carry.

He wrapped them in himself and said nothing.

That was how he fought her.

He endured, almost amused by the illusion Loviantar had. 
She thought she would break him. 

She may feed on pain itself. 

He was bound in ceremony to the personification of pain. 

Her lashes were nothing to him against what Null put him through. 

He endured with a light heart.

She became even more obsessed. 
Neglected her worship, trying to break him. 
While his bloomed further and stronger. 

As every mortal freed whispered his name. 
followed his creed 

Spread his deed. 
Built more temples. 

In the eighth year, her power level decreased.
She was barely above a lesser deity now. 

And Bane became impatient. 

2 569 600 souls and living mortals freed from his tyranny.

They fell into their own trap. Loviantar was bound to torture him and only him, no matter the cost to her. She could not turn to his worshipers or to mortals to break him. And Bane was bound to lessen his church's atrocities and undermine their advance to pay for his lover's costly hobby.

Proposing such a losing bet, Ilmater was filled with serenity under the rack, and they say Loviantar is insightful. 

He only saw a rabid beast behind the whip. 

Her inability to sense pain took everything from her. 

That's why few rattled her. 

Her relationship with Bane worsened due to her obsession and his jealousy, and his anger at losing the sheep sustaining his tyrannical order. 

He was the one being flayed. But they were the ones bleeding. 

And they could do nothing to escape this. 

They were stuck, for as long as he endured

And endured he did. 

He could endure forevermore. 

But he knew deep down this could not last. 

Not because he couldn't, but because he could. Because sooner or later. Null will learn of this. 

He may have used the cloak before coming. 

But even without sensing him 

She will learn of this. 

Once her pride was put aside, she would send someone to investigate his whereabouts. 

And she did, because a little after the 17th year, she appeared in the torture room next to Loviantar. As soon as she saw him, she finally understood why she could not sense him anymore. She saw the cloak and was absolutely furious. That made everything even better. 

But he knew this would soon end. Now that she knew, she would make him break. At least that's what he thought before hearing Loviantar trying to press her to join the fun, going as far as lying to Null and telling her that the deal can only be broken by her and Bane. That I was theirs to torment for as long as they wanted. 

It took all of Ilmater's restraint not to explode laughing right then. 

Grave mistake.

How she is reputed to be so insightful is beyond him. 

He guessed that both Bane and Loviantar were mortal before. They could be excused for their ignorance. They are too young to know what she is, who really Null is, or what she was before. 

They did not even know her name. And even if they did, few from that time knew what was between him and Null. 

So, really, their mistake could be understandable. 

But claiming him as theirs to torture in front of Null was a particularly damning one. 

Shivers ran along his spine, not caused by Loviantar's whip but by the frost-filled stare fixed in the Null current visage. 

Null should have been insightful enough to see through the crude lie. But she was rattled and thus easy to deceive.

They would pay for this. 

While even she could not intervene in godly affairs. Especially not with this new twisted aspect of her, but he knew that to her, it mattered not. 

Especially after what she just witnessed. 

They will pay dearly for this. Soon, attacks on both Bane and Loviantar worship started to occur secretly, covertly and chaotically all across the realm. 

They were perplexed and paranoid. 

Ilmater knew it was her doing. That was the nature of her kind

This turned the bleeding of their divine power into a full-on hemorrhage. 

Many of their followers ended up with their souls bound through pacts. Effectively cutting both Bane and Loviantar supplies in soul power. Loviantar, in particular, was even more weakened now; her power level was meek even amongst lesser deities. Pain as a domain kept resisting her control without her understanding why. 

Ilmater understood all too well. 
You can't feed on pain if pain itself swore to destroy you. 

Loviantar's whip became weaker by the month. She tried to convince him to leave. 

He was perfectly content with where he was until many more years after.

When Null finally learned the truth of their pact.

Perplexed by the couple's reluctance to let Ilmater go, even as their worship was facing multiple attacks threatening the foundation of their divinity, she finally understood the pact's terms. 

Soon after, a small patch of moss appeared and grew slowly in the torture chamber. 
No torture in all those years has ever filled Ilmater with so much dread. 

She knew. 
Soon enough, the moss, no, not moss, the Obliviax delivered a message directly into ILMATER's mind. 

He sighed;  she always knew how to convince him. How to break him. He could never allow what she was threatening to occur. 

He simply said "STOP". 

During his captivity, the world experienced a boom of prosperity and some of the most peaceful times in fearunian history. The democratic republic of Turmish was officially founded. Even the savage lands north of the established territories saw some settlement during this time, indicating a period of expansion and relative stability. Most of the continent was discovered as people had more time for exploration than for war. New cities, societies, and settlements, such as Mimph and Ormath, bloomed across the continent. New territories are reached, such as Shoun In Luiren. This prolonged relative peace led to an explosion in commerce and shared knowledge. This led to the rise of many societies and laid the foundation stones for the kingdom of Mhan, which aimed to bring order and civilization to the Western Heartlands. And above all, that alliance was the one to negotiate with the elves to open Cormanthor to non-elves and leading to the establishment of Myth Drannor less than a century later, thus becoming the pinnacle of shared knowledge, culture, and civilization in Faerûn, as well as a beacon of serenity and solidarity in the chaotic Realms, establishing a period of unprecedented. 

Giving the world a glimpse at what could happen when Mercy keeps Tyranny and Pain on a leash. 

But alas, Ilmater was forced to stop, and he left the Barrens of Doom and Despair after enduring 8,351,227 leash strikes, thus saving as many souls and mortals, making him stronger than he ever was before. That's probably what saved him from the betrayal that awaited him at home.

Chapter 37: Masks and Madness

Summary:

A council of monsters. A mask that should not hold. A lie balanced on the knife-edge of madness. In Warlock’s Crypt, Elenya and Astarion play roles neither of them can afford to break—while every glance, every word, risks unmaking them both.

Notes:

I had way too much fun writing this one — Elenya gets to test her limits, Astarion gets to show off in his own dangerous way, and the council scene is one of my favorites so far. Expect political tension, psychological games, and just a touch of unhinged theatre.

Elenya's POV

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Elenya’s gaze lingered on him—quiet, careful—as if she were trying to memorize the way the morning’s diffuse light caught the edges of his hair, the faint rise and fall of his chest as he ate without hesitation. No tremors. No guilty glances. No silent apologies weighing on his shoulders. A small miracle—but in this world, small miracles were enough to change the shape of a day.

It was clean. Uncomplicated. Almost ordinary. And in the ordinary, she felt something she hadn’t in a long time: relief. He was finding his footing. Accepting that feeding could be a ritual without shame. That it could be necessary, and allowed. Not every sip had to echo the chains of what had been done to him, what had been stolen.

Even the animal feedings had once been laced with guilt. He would clean his hands, wipe his mouth, pretend it meant nothing—but it always left a hollow ache, a reminder of what survival demanded. Now, she watched him settle into the act, and it felt like reclamation. A small piece of himself, returned.

He deserved this. Everyone did. Needing sustenance shouldn’t make anyone monstrous. And it didn’t make him—or her—monstrous either. She had offered herself willingly, without hesitation. That should have mattered more to him than it did. Yet he had asked today. Clumsy, awkward, hesitant—but real. He had asked. That alone was progress.

Breakfast was simple, humble—flatbread warm from the pan, strong coffee, the dried berry mix she had scavenged, and cheese. She sat beside him afterward, hair still damp from the bath, humming softly under her breath—a quiet counterpoint to his focus. If breakfast was always included, well, he wasn’t the only one benefiting from this fragile routine.

And then there was his cooking. She had asked for dinner that first time not because it mattered, not because she needed it, but to show him the futility of his imagined debts. He had fretted, hesitated, assumed obligation where none existed. And now he cooked without prompting, without expectation, without apology.

And this idiot was good at it. Decent, at least. For someone who had never cooked, who couldn’t taste, who had never cared for the small rituals others took for granted, he was… more than competent.

Truth be told, she struggled to find anything he wasn’t good at—save, perhaps, communication. But she wasn’t about to point that out without risking hypocrisy. For the rest, she marvelled, as she often did, at the breadth of his abilities. Was there anything this pouty gremlin wasn’t good at? He would be a natural at magic—she was sure of it. He delighted in minutiae, in small rituals and subtle patterns others overlooked. Every action—tentative, careful, precise—spoke to a mind attuned to detail, to beauty, to pattern.

And yet he was flawed. Reckless. Annoying. Short-sighted. Stunning in ability and glaring in imperfection. That blend—the brilliance and the weakness—made him real. Vulnerable and unbreakable in ways she admired deeply.

He reminded her of her mentor. Not the broken shell wrapped in madness, hatred, and monstrosity who had vanished—but the man he must have been before: kind, patient, brilliant, charming, funny. Untainted by the corruption that eventually claimed him. It had been so long since she thought of him. She hadn’t forgotten, but the image had dimmed. All that remained was his voice—the cadence of instruction, the rhythm of teaching. The rest—his face, his expressions—fragmented, slipping through memory.

She should have watched him more closely before they separated.
She shouldn’t have begrudged the resemblance.

Was he still alive? Still waiting in that dark corner of the world? And if so, what choice did he have? Perhaps she should have helped him. Perhaps she could have. But at the time, they were all monsters, in one way or another—her, the mentor, the familiar. He had helped them endure, and she had survived because of it.

She should have taken him with her.

No—he would have killed her for suggesting it. He was a monster, after all.

And yet… she should have tried.

The familiar was still with her, after all. And the familiar was the biggest monster of the three. Yet she had taken her with her. The tether she carried had bound them all. And she—she had been a monster too.

Why had she never returned for him? Because he asked her not to? Because he demanded she forget? Leave the climb behind?

And yet, she hadn’t. She had kept the dagger—the Lolthite ritual blade—despite everything. And now it hung at Astarion’s belt, a silent, ironic testament to the past. She had asked him not to use it. He had chosen differently.

Still, Astarion reminded her of what her mentor might have been—of a life untaken, a kindness never surrendered to cruelty. She wished she could remember his face clearly. But memory had fused it with the shadow of Nere, shaping recognition into something she couldn’t quite untangle.

Perhaps the Familiar remembered. But it wasn’t here. It was still with Cazador. She hadn’t checked on it in a long while—not since before the crypt, since the lodge. Too much had happened. She had let the present drown the past.

Tonight, she thought. Tonight she would check. She owed that much—to memory, to what fragments still remained.

For now, though, things were quiet. Clean. Uncomplicated.

And it felt—finally—normal.

She finished humming under her breath and prepared for the day ahead, ready to explore the necropolis.

Astarion was waiting at the door, regal, resplendent—still wearing the Lolthite dagger she had stolen from her mentor.

The perfect image of an Underdark noble heir.

Much like the one she once swore to kill with that same dagger.

She smiled. And together, they left the house.

Something was wrong.

Far too much power, amassed in ways that did not align with what was known of Larloch’s goals.

From all accounts—Vaelrith’s notes, scattered fragments of espionage, the whispers caught in the Scarlet Enclave—Larloch sought apotheosis. The archlich’s obsession was not merely dominion, nor even survival; it was transcendence. Godhood. And every tale of ascension made clear: it demanded unfathomable reservoirs of energy, drawn from magic, souls, or divine essence itself.

So why waste so much of his accumulated power and lore raising an army?

Not just an army of bound undead, either. He was cultivating something new. Something crafted. Legions of freshly wrought undead, strong and varied, built as though to resist every conceivable countermeasure. This was not simply dominion—it was engineering. A design.

The contradiction sharpened when she reviewed the historical record: the Year of Lightning Storms, seventy-six years ago. Over two hundred liches, all branded with Larloch’s mark, descended upon the Knights of Myth Drannor in an attempt to corrupt the Weave itself. The city had only just been rebuilt after centuries of ruin, newly sanctified under Mystra’s blessing. The battle was cataclysmic. Mystra’s clockwork soldiers marched alongside the Knights, and though the liches were repelled—many destroyed—the cost was staggering. Dozens of baelnorns, guardians of elven lineages, were twisted into corruption and slain.

And afterward, Larloch himself appeared to the Knights. Contrite. Almost apologetic. He explained that he had merely “freed” the liches, curious to see what they would do with their liberty. That their attack had been foolish, beneath his interest. That he desired only the pursuit of the Art, not conflict with Mystra. He even confessed his fascination with Storm Silverhand’s silver fire, calling her kindness in showing him its brilliance the first grace he had been granted in centuries.

It rang false. It always had.

Two hundred liches loosed at once, yet seventy-six years later he commands nearly three hundred. Did they return to him? Did he reclaim them? Or had they never been free to begin with, but simply actors in a broader design? The explanation of their “freedom” was laughable. Larloch, of all beings, was paranoid beyond reason. He demanded control, absolute and unyielding. To release two hundred liches at once was lunacy, unless he had prepared the leash beforehand—or unless their rebellion served a hidden purpose.

And why target the Weave itself? Wizards—even liches—know the folly of wounding Mystra’s web. The Art is their lifeblood. To shatter it is to court their own undoing. Why risk her wrath? Why invite annihilation? Unless… the goal had never been to win. Unless the battle was never the true play.

No, this had the stink of misdirection. A screen of smoke and flame to distract from some quieter theft. Larloch had wanted something in that clash, and he had taken it. Whatever it was, he hid it well, for in the years that followed his empire shifted. His expenditures of magic turned not toward hoarding for apotheosis, but toward militarization. Armies. Strongholds. Factories of undeath. He squandered resources that by all logic should have been reserved for ascension.

And yet, patterns emerged. Around that time he allied with the Imprisoners, working to craft Blueflame items—arcane vessels that bound spirits within, preserving not just mortal essence but, as some whispered, fragments of divine power itself. Mystra forbade her clergy to interfere. The Simbul later theorized those items contained strands of Mystra’s essence, a hidden reservoir of her power. Perhaps even a hedge against her death, a means of restoring her.

If true, then Larloch had woven a net not just of souls, but of godstuff.

But if that was so, why waste his hoard? Why expend so much energy on soldiers, rituals, and the slow churn of a necrotic city-state? Even the hundreds of thousands of souls in Warlock’s Crypt could not fuel godhood alone. Not when he bled his magic into walls, wards, and armies.

So how did he mean to ascend?

It was the question that gnawed at every theory. Ascension required a singular focus, a hoarding so absolute that every breath, every life, every mote of energy bent toward the goal. And yet, here was Larloch, squandering his treasure on fortifications and dominion.

Unless his path was different.

Unless he had already found a way to sidestep the traditional ladders of apotheosis.

What if the army wasn’t the waste, but the engine? What if the power wasn’t squandered, but cycled—each new creation feeding into a structure larger than itself? A web of undead souls, rituals, and bound artifacts, not meant for battle at all, but meant to be fuel for a transformation so vast it required an entire city-state to sustain it.

Perhaps the army was not meant to conquer Netheril, nor the living. Perhaps it was the ritual itself.

No, that doesn't make sense either. 

Ascention requires energy. Even the magic stored here would not suffice; he expanded too much of it to be even close. Same for souls. There was not enough living for that. He would need to absorb either magic or souls to ascend. And he is squandering both on building an army to fight the returning Netheril city. 

Something is not making sense. 

The city’s collaboration with Thay made the entire situation all the more unnerving. Tam and his Zulkirs, for all their ruthlessness, were still fractured, prone to vanity and betrayal. Larloch was not. If he ever shifted from cold apathy toward Faerûn to ambition—if he ever lifted his gaze from his experiments and took a page from Szass Tam’s book—there would be no stopping him. Thay’s armies marched with noise and discord; Warlock’s Crypt would march in silence, tireless, precise, unstoppable.

On the surface, the Crypt appeared as an immaculate hierarchy, its obedience absolute. Every servant moved with purpose, every order carried down the chain without hesitation. Yet beneath that rigid facade, Elenya could sense something subtler: not loyalty, but terror. The fear of a master who knew not only your secrets, but the measure of your soul, and could strip either away with a thought.

At the apex stood Larloch, supreme and unquestioned. His supremacy was not debated in salons, not whispered about in hidden corners—it was reality, reinforced by the weight of centuries, the residue of his arcane supremacy. Rumour said that no oath, no binding, no spell of fealty tied his court together. The only leash was the knowledge that to rise against him was to vanish, unmade so thoroughly that even memory recoiled.

Beneath him, the society split into two dominant castes: lich lords and vampire lords.

The lich lords held dominion over knowledge. Their towers bristled with wards and wards-within-wards, laboratories thrummed with soul-engines, and entire vaults of captured minds whispered in the dark. They were scholars of annihilation, tasked with unravelling the mysteries of undeath and binding them into weapons, engines, and works of eternal preservation. Every discovery was catalogued, siphoned upward, and used to expand Larloch’s dominion.

The vampire lords, meanwhile, commanded flesh and blood. They oversaw the armies, the feeding networks, the slave dormitories. Their courts were drenched in decadence: velvet halls where blood trickled as freely as wine, salons where emissaries from Skullport and Thay parleyed under charm-laced veils. They managed the “living stock,” ensuring raids brought in fresh captives, regulating who fed and when, and directing the black-market trade of bodies, bloodlines, and half-spent souls. If the liches provided innovation, the vampires provided stability—military strength, commerce, and the appearance of life.

Though equal in might, neither caste dared overstep. Rivalries were common, but rebellion would be suicide. The Crypt was a careful balance of predator and scholar, hunger and order, each powerful enough to tear the other apart but equally aware that Larloch alone held the leash.

The economy reflected this grotesque union. Coin was useless here; the true currencies were spells, secrets, and living flesh. A name whispered at the right time, a bloodline exchanged, a relic passed hand to hand—these transactions carried weight beyond gold. Necromancer cults on the surface funnelled sacrifices and knowledge into the Crypt, while Red Wizards, bound in equal parts by fascination and fear, traded forbidden lore in exchange for power and protection. Livestock settlements, kept in perpetual dread, were bred not only for sustenance but for commerce—catalogued like breeding stock, sorted by lineage, talent, and magical potential.

Daily life pulsed with a parody of vitality. Skeletons swept corridors in endless cycles of maintenance. Wights patrolled with mechanical vigilance. Vampires held courts dripping with theatrical elegance, debating not politics but philosophy: the ethics of suffering, the poetics of blood, the meaning of eternity. Liches gathered in sterile chambers to dissect Weave-theory, their salons buzzing not with laughter but with the hum of spell-engines and muttered incantations.

Even the smallest act served the greater purpose: to feed undeath, to obey Larloch, to expand the dominion of the dead. The Crypt was not merely a fortress. It was a civilization. A dark mirror of Faerûn’s kingdoms, more efficient, more ruthless, and infinitely more patient.

And what made it unbearable was how ordinary it all seemed. No chaos. No screams. Just the endless thrum of a city that worked.

A city that had never stopped growing.

---

The Barterum of Secrets—colloquially known as the Barterum or the Ledger Markets—is the true arcane engine at the heart of Warlock’s Crypt’s intellectual and economic vitality. Nestled in the mid-circle near the Scarlet Enclave, this eerie network of halls serves as the primary exchange hub for spell components, forbidden rituals, and metaphysical insights. Here, there is no gold—only barter, pacts, and precise negotiations overseen by skeletal scribes who record every deal with unerring detail. Break a pact, and the punishment is swift, brutal, and always arcane. The market draws lich apprentices, vampire seneschals, Thayan necromancers, and even bound fiends, all seeking breakthroughs or leverage. Booths offer everything from soul-binding secrets to viral necromancy, and the price is paid in cattle of specific bloodlines, bound souls, or dangerous truths. As a neutral ground where prestige is bought with invention and audacity, the Barterum is both the brain and bloodstream of the Crypt’s undead society—advancing research, channeling rivalries into commerce, and binding the Crypt more deeply into Thayan ambition and infernal trade.

I did not like it.

Because it felt familiar.

Cold air. No scent. The press of too many minds whispering without lips, without lungs. I recognized it instantly—the feeling of something looking through you. Parsing. Cataloguing. Marking.

Gods. This place had Menzoberranzan’s stink all over it.

Not literally, of course. The Barterum was no city of spiders. But it bore the same obsession with secrets. The same hunger to know, to trap, to own.

Only here, it wasn’t dominance that bound them.

It was the truth.

They traded secrets.

And in a city of death, secrets were the only thing still ripening.

Astarion walked beside her, features relaxed but posture razor-sharp. She, meanwhile, wore her stolen face with ease—high cheekbones, pale olive skin, the faintest trace of noble bearing in her shoulders. Just enough Thayan coldness to pass. Just enough arrogance to sell it.

I wondered, not for the first time, whether she liked being someone else.

Not who I made her.
Not empty.

Or maybe it was the only way she could breathe in places like this.

We passed rows of shadow-bound whisperers—servants of the Barterum who neither moved nor blinked, suspended in quiet agony behind translucent veils. One turned its head as we passed. Just once. Just enough for me to see its mouth sewn shut with magic.

No one else could see it. But I did. Cursed souls bound in service.

And I also saw Curse Eater.

It was feeding, that much was certain. The blade had been siphoning magic since the moment we stepped here. Discreetly—an aerial dispel, almost imperceptible even to detect magic. What it stole, it folded back into itself, reinforcing its own enchantment.

What in the Nine Hells was this blade?

She said nothing. Astarion didn’t look.

We reminded ourselves to avoid the inner ring for now. Even if word spread that she was invisible to creatures with Truesight, better not to risk it. Better to keep to the mid-ring, among the Thayans, the barterers, and the vampire courts.

Instead, we turned toward the Copper Quill—a central library known for its esoteric holdings.

Inside, we were not greeted but faced by a mummy scribe.

We explained we sought wide access, many subjects, and asked if a catalogue existed.

“The catalogue of the Quill lies above,” it intoned. “Do you have a more specific query?”

The Wraith Scribes were not men.

Not even undead in the usual sense.

They were echoes, pressed flat and permanent like insects in amber—souls too obsessed with record-keeping to dissolve. They hovered in tight spirals beneath the banner of their master: Archlich Iscavel, Senior Warden of the Archives Malevolent in the inner ring. An archlich with too many ears and too few eyes. Obsessed with knowledge. Reputed to spy on the entire Crypt.

When it spoke, it wasn’t to us. Not directly.

Payment was demanded for consultation. She offered fragments from the dead Thayan’s ledgers—carefully redacted. Names that no longer mattered. Promises long broken. Threads cut, bled dry, worthless on the surface—but valuable here. Valuable to scribes.

The first session gave little of note. Until they gave us the name of a text—obscure, half-legendary:

Codex Tenebris: Anatomia Umbrae

An old treatise on vampiric bindings and biological necromantic matrices.

“The original,” the scribe rasped, “is held in the library of Lich Lord Iscavel.”

Elenya pounced on the copy and paid with knowledge of naga magic. She buried herself in a corner of the library, surrounded by her own tomes and the codex, scratching notes for hours. At last, she pressed a summary into Astarion’s hand.

On the Necrobiological Mechanics of Vampirism: Curse, Infection, Weaknesses, and Spawn Ontology

I. Introduction

Vampires are complex entities, defined as much by symbolic resonance as by biological or magical constraints. Their anatomy is rarely mechanical in nature; rather, it is encoded in collective mythos, cultural archetypes, and the spiritual paradigms from which their curse originates.

Vampirism is not a singular condition, but a multi-phase necroparasitic transformation, blending elements of disease, curse, and soul-bonding. Though often broadly categorized under the undead taxon, vampirism diverges significantly from classical undeath (e.g., lichdom or revenancy), due to its partial preservation of bodily vitality—manifested as a weak pulse and minimal physiological functions—and its dependence on external metaphysical anchors and sources of positive energy (i.e., living blood).

It is best understood not as true undeath, but as a prolonged state of dying, sustained by the extraction of vitality from living hosts. This treatise explores the distinct phases of vampiric transformation, the metaphysics of the vampiric curse, its infectious properties, and the ontological structure that separates spawn from true vampires.

---

II. Infection and Dormancy

Vampirism is a multicompartmental condition, both pathological and arcane. The disease is transmissible through blood, venom, and bodily fluids—most commonly via feeding or injury during combat. However, infection alone does not produce vampirism. In the majority of cases, the vampiric agent remains dormant, functioning akin to a magical plague—a passive necrotic construct bound within a latent curse lattice.

Absent activation, the infection is ultimately overpowered and purged by the host’s innate positive energy, typically within a few weeks.

This necromantic matrix does not self-activate under ordinary conditions. The progression to active transformation requires the fulfillment of three distinct conditions:

1. The host dies.

2. The source vampire (the “sire”) fully drains the host of its innate positive life energy—the metaphysical essence sustaining sentient life.

3. The host is properly buried, fulfilling the symbolic and necromantic threshold of interment.

If even one of these conditions is unmet, the matrix decays harmlessly post-mortem, and no transformation occurs.

---

III. Curse Activation and First-Stage Vampirism (Spawnhood)

When all conditions are met, the dormant curse lattice is catalyzed by death. The transformation is not instantaneous, but rather unfolds through staged necromantic activation, wherein the victim's soul is partially retained and altered. The body is reanimated not by autonomous negative energy—as in lichdom—but by the borrowed necromantic signature of the sire.

This intermediary state produces what is commonly referred to as a vampire spawn.

At this stage:

• The subject acquires many physical attributes of vampirism: enhanced strength, speed, and bloodlust.

• However, they lack true autonomy, regenerative capabilities, and, critically, a personal curse lattice.

Instead, they are animated by a necromantic tether—a siphon linking the spawn to the sire’s matrix. The spawn is thus a remote projection of the sire’s undeath, sustained by negative energy funneled from master to minion. The spawn’s will is often subservient to the sire, bound both metaphysically and mentally. True independence is impossible until the curse fully completes its transformation.

---

IV. The Maker’s Blood and the Lattice Consumption Phase

The final transition from vampire spawn to true vampire requires the consumption of the sire’s blood, which completes the curse’s second stage. This act allows the spawn to consume and internalize the original necromantic lattice, severing the tether and establishing a self-sustaining curse matrix.

Until this process is completed, the subject remains a pseudo-vampire, their undeath a derivative of another’s. The rarity of this completion accounts for the low incidence of “rogue” spawn and the difficulty of propagating vampirism en masse.

Vampiric mass conversion fails not due to resistance, but due to the curse’s inherent dependency structure. The matrix must be anchored and triggered by a sire. Once a true vampire is established, however, their lattice can theoretically support an unlimited number of spawns without degradation.

The sirelink tether is a potent construct and, outside of full transformation, can only be severed through rare and poorly documented phenomena. Known or suspected methods include:

• The sire’s death, collapsing the dependency structure;

• Divine intervention;

• Demonic pacts;

• Arcane rituals capable of implanting a substitute matrix (many of which are forbidden or theoretical).

Most accounts of such events are anecdotal, inconsistent, or unreplicable.

---

V. Halfbreeds and Outliers

There exist anomalous individuals—referred to as halfbreeds, hybrid cases, or cursed anomalies—who exhibit partial vampiric traits without full transformation or tethering. These include:

• Dhampirs: Partially transformed individuals, often created by interrupted rituals or incomplete feeding events.

• Cursed Lineages: Descendants of necromantically afflicted bloodlines, inheriting diluted traits across generations.

• Experimental Failures: Subjects of arcane tampering, necro-alchemical grafting, or failed attempts to replicate vampirism artificially.

These outliers blur the line between undead and living. While they may possess certain abilities (e.g., night vision, minor regeneration, hematophagy), they lack the complete curse lattice and cannot transmit vampirism without substantial magical assistance.

---

Ethical and Metaphysical Implications

The implications of vampirism's dependency lattice are not solely academic. They present philosophical and ethical challenges regarding identity, autonomy, and the boundaries of personhood. If a spawn's will is metaphysically subordinate, to what extent can they be held accountable for their actions? If their curse is tethered, what rights—if any—do they possess as individuals?

These questions are especially urgent in cases of liberated spawn—those who sever their bonds without becoming full vampires. Such entities remain in an ontological limbo: neither fully free nor fully bound, often hunted by both vampires and vampire-slayers alike.

Moreover, the necroparasitic structure of the curse invites questions about the nature of the soul itself. Is the retained soul fragment in a spawn still the original, or merely an echo trapped in necromantic mimicry as undead often posses? Can such a soul be absolved? Harnessed ? held? Reincarnated in case of elves?

While this treatise cannot provide definitive answers, it recognizes that the curse of vampirism is not merely a biological affliction nor a curse—it is a spiritual, metaphysical rewriting. Next teratise will address behavioural patterns amongst vampire in order to ascertain differences between nature and environnement.

The study of vampirism, therefore, must include the study of the vampiric culture of suffering.

---

VII. Conclusion

Vampirism is a curse of dependency; its transmission is governed not just by contagion but by the metaphysical dominance of the sire and their incessant need for blood to maintain the most vitality-filled state of undeath. Future research should explore: Variations in curse matrices across planar strains of vampirism (e.g., Shadowfell-born, Ravenloft-strain) Cross-infection anomalies Potential artificial induction of curse independence for liberative purposes (see: forbidden rites of Kiaransalee)

He didn’t speak for a long time.

So she kept writing, quietly beginning the next segment—Weaknesses and Limiting Factors of Vampiric Entities. The scratch of parchment and the low ambient hum of the library filled the silence between them. A ghost-scribe drifted past, oblivious to the gravity pooling at their table.

She tried to focus on the next page of the Codex, but her eyes kept drifting back to him.

Astarion sat like a statue carved from something too delicate to touch—shoulders taut, fingers curled just a little too tightly around the parchment. He was halfway through the second section when she realized he hadn’t blinked in minutes.

She turned instead to the other tomes they’d acquired—through bartering, seduction, and no small amount of convincing.

Hollow Mirrors: On the Nature of the Vampyr, by Hazlik.
Sunward Prayers for the Night’s Children, author unknown.

Both had been on her bibliography list for weeks. She felt a flicker of satisfaction as she crossed them off, a quiet thrill of progress. But it didn’t last.

Her gaze drifted back to him.

He still hadn’t moved.

She had meant the treatise clinically. As a scholar. As objective truth. But she hoped—hoped—he didn’t find it dehumanizing. Watching him read it now felt indecent, like she had peeled him open with tweezers and pinned the pieces down for study.

His eyes slowed when he reached the section on the tether—the necromantic siphon from sire to spawn. His jaw worked, ever so slightly, as if chewing something unspoken. And when he came to the paragraph on pseudo-vampirism, she saw his throat tighten.

Then he reached the final footnote. The ethical implications. Her notes.

She watched him freeze.

He read it once. Twice. Then exhaled sharply—too sharply, like the breath had been trapped in his chest for years. He placed the last page down with a gentleness that made her chest ache, as though the paper might bruise if he held it any harder.

And then, finally, he looked at her.

No smirk. No clever line. Just his eyes—red, unreadable—and something fragile swimming beneath them. Not gratitude. Not anger.

Just understanding.

“I see,” he said quietly, voice rough. “So that’s what I am.”

“No,” she replied. “That’s what happened to you.”

The silence that followed was heavier. Not hollow—dense with all the things neither of them could say.

He reached back toward the treatise and tapped one finger against a margin note.

No evolution possible without a new curse matrix, then—either through ascension by blood, or by spell?

“That’s not what the treatise is saying, Astarion,” she murmured.

His voice came back bitter.

“This is what Cazador always knew. Why he never worried. Why he never feared our rebellion. Because the leash wasn’t in the throat—it was in the soul.”

“Astarion, stop.”

Her words came sharper than intended, but she softened them quickly.

“Despair is premature. The research shows attempts—some failed, some unreplicated—but attempts. And now we understand the structure. That’s more than anyone else ever gave you. Nothing here says the sirelink is unbreakable. These were only first findings.”

She leaned forward, catching his eyes.

“You forget,” she whispered, “that killing him is very much on the table.”

He didn’t answer.

His hand lingered near the page, hovering as if to pick it up again. But he didn’t. His eyes dropped to the table, fixed somewhere between parchment and dust. When he spoke again, it wasn’t to argue.

It was quieter than that.

“You say that like it’s easy,” he murmured. “Like you could really do it. We both know I’d be useless against him, and you’re not a killer.”

He didn’t mean it cruelly. It wasn’t mockery.

It was disbelief. Wounded. Honest.

He didn’t see it in her. Didn’t want to.

And that, more than anything, made her laugh.

Not loudly. Not harshly. Just a low sound, curling out like smoke.

“If only you knew,” she said, still smiling, though it didn’t reach her eyes.

He blinked at her. The look she gave him was not soft. Not gentle. Not cruel either—just true.

“I remember killing for you. Didn’t I?” she asked.

“It was not the same, Elenya. It was survival. The Gur were attacking you.”

“How about the ghouls? The caravan? The boneclaw?”

“Those were monsters!”

“And Cazador isn’t?” she asked. “I don’t like killing, Astarion, that much is true. But I’ve done it for far less noble causes than freeing you from him. I did it for less than you. For people I didn’t even know. For children I couldn’t save. And yes—for revenge too.”

Her voice didn’t waver. Her hands didn’t shake.

“I’ve killed because sometimes you have to, and because I wanted to. I’ve told you—I’m no saint. And if Cazador stands between you and freedom, then he’ll die, Astarion. Not for justice. Not for mercy. But because I promised you freedom. I promised to keep you from that monster. I’ll cry for every life I take—even the worst of them. But that’s my burden, not a weakness. Don’t mistake it for doubt.”

He stared at her, as if seeing her for the first time.

Finally seeing the weight she carried—not the books, not the spells, not the gods—but the grave silence of someone who had already buried too many pieces of herself to flinch from one more.

She let him look.

She didn’t flinch.

“That is very kind of you to think,” he said at last, “but even you can’t take a vampire lord on your own.”

“How about you let me worry about that?”

Then she reached forward, slow and steady, and tapped her knuckle once against the table—just beside his hand. She didn’t take it. Not yet. But made it clear she could.

“We don’t need to believe in hope,” she said. “We just need a plan. It doesn’t have to be killing him. But don’t get discouraged so quickly. These things take time.”

His lips twitched—not quite a smile. But something.

And when he finally nodded, it wasn’t in defeat.

It was in decision.

---

As the morning started to come to a close, she had just finished the second section of the vampiric treatise, focusing on weaknesses.  

On the Weaknesses and Limiting Factors of Vampiric Entities
Compiled and Abstracted from Arcane, Ecclesiastical, and Observational Sources

---

I. Introduction

This document offers a comprehensive analysis of the traditional, arcane, and theological vulnerabilities associated with vampiric beings. It draws upon data compiled across multiple planes—primarily the Prime Material, Ravenloft, and Toril—and is applicable to standard undead variants categorized as “vampires.” Certain extrapolations may apply to higher-level aberrations (e.g., vampire lords, cursed primogenitors, and variant bloodlines).

Vampirism, as a necroparasitic condition, is governed by both metaphysical and symbolic laws. Accordingly, its limitations are not purely physiological, but tied to deep magical systems, cultural narratives, and divine jurisprudence. These weaknesses are best viewed not as flaws in an organism, but as anchor points for containment and resistance.

---

II. Symbols of Divine Power

A holy symbol is any material object imbued with the spiritual resonance of a deity. It may be:

• Abstract (glyphs, emblems, ceremonial patterns)

• Figural (icons, statues, engraved relics)

• Consecrated items (e.g., a book of prayer, sanctified relic, or even an article of vestment)

The symbol's efficacy is contingent on the wielder’s spiritual conviction. Mere possession is inert; defiant invocation is required. When presented with active will:

• Vampires cannot approach within a 5-foot radius.

• Concentration-based effects may falter.

• Contact inflicts radiant damage, comparable to holy water.

• Marks left by such contact may resist regeneration, forming visible stigmas symbolic of divine judgment.

Clerics should note: misuse of a symbol as a blunt weapon may diminish its spiritual potency, especially when the deity is one of peace, beauty, or contemplation.

---

III. Reflective Surfaces and Mirrors

Mirrors present a non-magical deterrent due to the metaphysical absence of the vampire’s reflection. This absence is not illusory but a byproduct of their alignment to the Negative Energy Plane.

After the Spellplague and the restructuring of the cosmology, this energy now partially resides in the Shadowfell. Vampires, as negative-energy anchored entities, fail to interact with light in conventional ways—casting no reflections, no shadows, and often lacking auras detectable by divination.

The psychological impact of this is profound. Vampires confronted with a mirror experience momentary cognitive dissonance and recoil instinctively. Effects include:

• Brief hesitation (1–6 seconds)

• Minor focus disruption

• A tendency to destroy the object

While not harmful per se, mirrors are accessible to the average civilian and serve as excellent emergency tools.

---

IV. Allium Sativum (Common Garlic)

Garlic’s impact on vampires has long been observed. While it does not cause direct damage, it provokes:

• Aversion, rash-like responses, dermal irritation

• Nausea or blood aversion when ingested by a potential victim

• Interference with mistform ability for up to 10 minutes

If consumed by a victim, garlic taints their blood, rendering it foul-tasting and mildly toxic to vampires for up to 12 hours. This can be amplified in compounds like bloodwine, which incorporate garlic to mask its taste. In such cases:

• A vampire feeding on tainted blood may suffer magical poisoning

• Symptoms include disorientation, reduced strength, and inability to shift form

Bloodwine is strictly outlawed in most vampiric societies.

---

V. Running Water

Contrary to folklore, vampires may cross running water—by bridge, by boat, by magic. Harm is only inflicted by full submersion in naturally flowing water (rivers, streams, tidal estuaries).

Conditions:

• The heart and torso must be submerged

• The water must be moving and natural

• Partial contact or splashing has no effect

Effects vary by age and power, but even fledgling vampires may survive brief exposure. Mistform, however, cannot cross running water wider than 3 feet. This serves as a natural containment barrier.

Furthermore, burial earth tainted by running water loses its connection to the vampire and becomes unsuitable for restorative slumber.

---

VI. Sanctified and Hallowed Grounds

Two categories exist:

1. Sanctified Residences
Vampires cannot enter a private dwelling uninvited if the residence is:

• Occupied by a living being recognized as a lawful resident

• Owned, symbolically or legally, by a mortal

Invitation must be vocal and explicit. Open doors or gestures do not suffice. Once invited, the vampire may return indefinitely unless the property changes hands.

2. Hallowed Sites
These include:

• Temples

• Shrines

• Battlefields of divine importance

• Ancestral tombs

• Naturally sacred spaces

Such locations reject undeath at a metaphysical level. Not even invitation permits entry. Desecration (often involving blood rituals or destruction of relics) is required to breach such wards.

---

VII. Wooden Stakes

A wooden stake driven into the heart induces metaphysical stasis, binding the animating necromantic matrix and forcing dormancy. The vampire “dies” in mortal fashion—its soul tethered but suspended.

To ensure permanent death, one must:

1. Stake the vampire

2. Decapitate the corpse

3. Fill the mouth with sanctified material (e.g., holy wafers)

4. Burn the heart or inter it under hallowed soil

Omission of any step risks the reactivation of the tether.

---

VIII. Solar Exposure

Sunlight remains the most universally lethal substance to the cursed condition of vampirism. Its properties include:

• Radiant energy aligned with positive forces

• Symbolism of renewal, purity, and divine judgment

Effects of direct exposure:

• Severe radiant damage

• Loss of all regenerative and magical abilities

• Visible stigmata (burned skin, cracking veins, ocular bleeding)

Survival times vary by age and power:

Vampire Type	Estimated Survival
Fledgling (<100 yrs)	Instant death
Mature (100–1,000 yrs)	~1 minute
Patriarch (>1,000 yrs)	Resistant

Ancient vampires may not burn, but remain highly uncomfortable in sunlight. Their powers are still diminished, and solar exposure remains a deterrent.

Progressive Immunity:

Vampires gradually grow resistant to their weaknesses as they age:

1. Mirrors and garlic become ineffective first

2. Resistance to divine symbols follows

3. Running water becomes survivable

4. Sunlight is the last weakness to fall—only patriarchs and cursed primogenitors are immune

These transitions occur over centuries and are not guaranteed. Each vampire’s bloodline, tether, and curse matrix affect the evolution of their resistances.

---

IX. Conclusion

The weaknesses of vampires are not merely folkloric relics, but reflections of their unnatural place within the cycle of life and death. They are reminders—structural flaws built into the curse—that even immortality has limits, and that undeath remains a condition held together by myth, magic, and meaning.

Future investigations may include:

• The influence of planar origin on specific vulnerabilities (e.g., Shadowfell vs. Negative Plane variants)

• Arcane vs. divine anchoring of weaknesses

• Theoretical immunization through necromantic ritual or pact-based immunity forging

She set down the quill.

Not with relief. Not with pride. But with a kind of exhausted reverence—like she’d just finished transcribing someone’s last words.

Her fingers ached. The ink on the parchment had long since dried, but something colder lingered beneath it. A residue of truth. The taste of edges no one was meant to touch too closely.

So much of it hadn’t matched what he had told her.
So much had gone further than even he seemed to realize.

She glanced at Astarion—deeply engrossed in his recovery journal and the beginnings of the research dossier, or pretending to be. He had asked her a thousand questions, and she saw how some lines wounded him. Nothing she had written was a lie. Not to her knowledge, at least.

The world was what was hurting him. She tried to convince herself.

And yet—guilt crept in. For what she was planning.

He could never learn about the tunnels. Not the way she intended to use them. He wouldn’t allow it. But she had to. Because that was who she was.

He would hate her for it. Eventually.

She returned to the task. Every word she had inscribed in this section felt like a quiet dissection—not just of vampires, but of him. His condition. His pain. His limits. The things he refused to call fear.

This wasn’t just knowledge. It was weaponry.
The same kind others had used against him.
The same kind he might one day wield against his kin.

And she had catalogued it all with surgical precision.

She should have felt victorious. This was progress—everything she had been trained for. But the silence afterward pressed in like a tomb lid. Final. Weighted. Full of implication.

She closed the folio slowly.

Maybe it was empathy. Maybe guilt. Maybe something darker still.

But for the first time since she began this work, she wondered if knowledge would ever be enough.

Or if what might truly save him…
was not what she wrote—
but what she chose not to.

And yet—that, too, was not who she was.

So she kept reading. Searching.

Another lead emerged. A third tome she had long hunted:

The Necrologium.

Elusive. Cursed. Half-denied by archivists, half-remembered by the dead.

A record of the strongest necromancy practiced since Mystryl’s fall. Said to contain rituals too complex even for lich-lords. A book that didn’t just tell you what was lost—it taught you how to lose it again.

The scribes gave her only a scrap:

“Seek in Silverymoon. Or Myth Drannor.”

No page number. No author. Just a muttered direction, spoken in unison, as though reciting something they no longer dared to read.

Astarion watched her carefully as she copied it down.

And then—they spoke another name.

“Ilyn Toth,” they whispered.

The name rang hollow.

They offered a single piece of information:

“He fled east.”

That was all. No title. No warning. No price.

She didn’t ask who Ilyn was. Only how far east he could have gone—and what he had taken with him.

Because she knew. Deep in her marrow, she knew.

Whatever fragment of the Necrologium survived wasn’t meant to be found.
Not by the living.
Not by the dead.
Not by them.

But Elenya wasn’t searching for safety.

She was searching for answers.

And sometimes, the only way to find them—
was to follow the trail of someone who ran.

---

When they left for the city records, neither of them spoke.

There was nothing to say—not yet. The air between them was too dense with theories, too thick with the weight of possibility.

The records office—quietly attached to the Arcanum’s lesser library—was rumored to hold genealogies of ancient vampire lineages. It wasn’t urgent intelligence, not technically. But if Cazador’s bloodline carried buried secrets—ties, rivalries, pacts—if someone had broken free before Astarion ever dared to dream of it—then it was worth every risk they had taken just to read a name.

And now here they were, chasing ghosts through brittle pages.

A bloodline.
A name.

They found it in a genealogy ledger filed under The Archive Malevolent, though only a redacted copy survived in the Copper Quill. The book itself was forgettable—dry leather binding, cracked spine, pages that whispered dust when turned. Nothing about it felt remarkable. Just another relic from a world that hadn’t thought anyone would still be reading it.

But deep in its pages, among the bloodlines of Larloch’s earliest servitors, a thread appeared. Fraying, but intact.

A name.
Therys Valtun.

Sired not by Cazador, but by his sire. A true vampire. Still active. Freed in 1275 DR—one year before Cazador seized power through regicide.

Astarion stared at the parchment, his fingers pressed flat against the page as if to hold it in place, as if the ink might vanish.

“Sired by the Martinet. Freed by blood rite. Released from spawnhood in 1275 DR.”

The next line, scrawled in harsher ink and uneven script, looked almost reluctant to exist.

“Cazador Szarr, 1276 DR. Regicide, successor.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered, low and tight.

Elenya looked up from her notes, quill still hovering. “What doesn’t?”

“This.” He tapped the page. “The Martinet—Cazador’s sire—let Therys Valtun drink from him. Made him a true vampire. And then, a year later, Cazador kills him. Takes everything.”

She rose, moving behind him, brow furrowed. “Why would he do that? Let one of his spawn go free? Give him power?”

“Exactly.” His voice was sharp. “It’s nonsense. Vampires don’t do that. A true vampire is competition.”

“Unless…” her voice softened into speculation, “he didn’t let him. Maybe Valtun forced it.”

He shook his head. “To become a true vampire, you must drink from the sire. It isn’t something you steal. You have to be allowed.”

“I read that, too,” she said, thoughtful, “but maybe there was a bargain. Or maybe the sire needed someone unbound. To carry a message. An artifact. A curse.”

Astarion scoffed. “If he needed something passed on, he could have just commanded him.”

“Could he always?” she asked quietly.

He blinked. “What?”

“I mean it. This idea of absolute control—it stinks. It’s too neat. Too convenient. If lords never let go, how do any spawns ever become true vampires? You said it yourself—there’s no incentive.”

“That’s exactly my point,” he said, wary now.

“Then how are there so many true vampires?” she pressed. “Not just the ones made through ritual. The ones who turned. Did they all ask politely? Did every sire agree?”

He hesitated.

“You’re saying… there must be loopholes.”

“I’m saying control isn’t as airtight as you think,” she replied, voice sharpening. “What if it isn’t about permission, but proximity? Access. The assumption is you can’t drink your sire’s blood without consent because you’re bound. But what if that’s the illusion?”

He frowned, furrowing deeper. “You’re suggesting all it takes… is drinking?”

“Yes. The codices hint at it, if you read carefully. The essence, consumed by the right vessel, completes the matrix. No mention of permission. The rest might just be smoke—tradition, fear, obfuscation.”

He went still.

She pushed further. “And look at his rules. Cazador’s rules. Second rule: ‘Thou shalt obey me in all things.’ If obedience is already guaranteed, why waste a rule on it?”

He frowned harder. “Because he liked control?”

“Then the fourth rule: ‘Thou shalt know that thou art mine.’ That’s not control—that’s insecurity. That’s reinforcement. If the leash were absolute, he wouldn’t need to carve it into you like a prayer.”

“…You think he was compensating.”

“I think he was afraid. Afraid of failure. Afraid the leash could snap. Afraid you’d find a way. Maybe the way he once did. And should I remind you—you already broke one of his compulsions.”

The silence between them thickened.

After a long beat, his voice was quiet. “Then how did I never find it? Never see it?”

Her expression softened. “Maybe you weren’t strong enough then. Astarion, you were starved, brutalized. You can’t think clearly when all you know is hunger. And maybe… maybe you weren’t meant to. His first rule—it wasn’t humiliation. It was strategy. By forcing you to feed only on rats, on vermin—on pioneer species—he kept you weak.”

He blinked. “Pioneer species?”

She nodded. “The first organisms to colonize barren ground. The lowest rung of positive energy. Vermin, rats, creatures that resist negative energy best. He fed you scraps of life—enough to keep you breathing, never enough to let you rise.”

His jaw tightened, but not in anger. He looked back down at the name.

Therys Valtun.

A broken link. A survivor. A question mark.

“Do you think he fought it?” he whispered. “Do you think he tore it out of himself?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I think he’s the closest we’ll come to someone who knows.”

The problem was, they had no face for the name.

Only a whisper.

The Crimson Parlour.

A sin-soaked haunt tucked in a crumbling tower of the Mid-Circle. Reserved for vampires. Wine served in veins, not glasses. Breaths taken only by food.

The attendant they asked had been clear:

“Not even other undead enter. Not the Thayans. You want the Parlour? You go unbreathing. Or not at all.”

They left the Archive without another word. The brittle page was copied and sealed, silence clinging to them both. The streets outside the Copper Quill burned with late-morning light, but Elenya barely noticed.

Her mind circled the name again.

Something didn’t add up.

They needed to talk to him.

---

By the time the necropolis’s sunless light had reached its dullest, bone-bleached peak, Elenya had mapped the breadth of Vaelrith’s influence. It wasn’t vast, but it was layered—vines of obligation twisting through the city in old debts, buried grudges, and subtle pacts cloaked in mundane contracts. She catalogued them with cold efficiency. Contacts were divided into assets, threats, observers. Partnerships were reinforced with carefully worded letters—some enchanted, some not—all tailored to weakness: vanity, ambition, fear. For the rest, she left fragments. Just enough to buy time. Just enough to redirect trouble.

Especially within the Scarlet Enclave—where the Thayan elite cloistered themselves in corridors of crimson marble and incense-thick air. The enclave stood as a grim monument to Warlock’s Crypt’s evolving diplomacy: a walled district where Red Wizards and foreign necromancers maintained permanent embassies and research outposts under Larloch’s watchful tolerance. Strategically placed between vampire estates and lich towers, it served as fulcrum—collaboration and espionage braided together. Slaves, artifacts, and forbidden knowledge flowed in; ritual access and constructs flowed out. Though nominally self-governed, every breath was taxed by the Crypt. Teleportation was planar-locked, limited to the privileged few; the rest paid dearly to use the liches’ hub. Magic was recorded. All power borrowed.

It was strength. It was danger. A source of resentment among vampire lords, suspicion among liches, and naked ambition for Yalthera Voruun. A crucible of rivalry simmering just shy of catastrophe.

After locating the site of the upcoming council, they returned home. Elenya buried herself in Vaelrith’s journals and correspondence, combing for references to the council members, sketching the shape of their dynamics. Anything to distract her.

So much pain in the city.
So little clarity.

The tunnels whispered.
She forced her thoughts away.
One soul at a time.

She focused instead on the tidbit about Cazador. Not a typical vampire. The circumstances of his turning were stranger than they seemed. Perhaps it was time to look again. The familiar would have found him by now.

She had already decided as much earlier in the day. 

And she wanted to see the man. 
See the monster that had tortured Astarion for sixteen decades 

Through eight silent eyes, Elenya watched.

Elenya’s mind reeled. The heat of the chandeliers did nothing to thaw the chill crawling along her spine. The grandeur of the hall—gleaming floors, gold-darkened filigree, the warm glow—felt like mockery. Death dressed up in silk and gold, laughing at the world.

Her eyes were fixed on him. The vampire feeding with such violence, such disregard. Kara-Turian features, yes, long black hair, pale skin—but all the elegance in the world couldn’t hide what she already knew: the cruelty behind the beauty. His red eyes gleamed as if they were carved from the very suffering he consumed.

And yet… compared to Astarion, he seemed hollow. Unremarkable. Even if terrifying, his aura of power and menace was nothing next to the sharp, lethal presence Astarion carried, honed by centuries of survival and suffering.

His victim—a young man with dark hair and one torn sleeve—thrashed in a carved, throne-like chair. Screaming now. Or trying to. The sound was wet and warbled, like someone gargling glass.

Cazador crouched before him, slow and graceful as a panther, fangs deep in the man’s throat. He drank deeply. Not quickly. There was no hunger here.

And in the corner—Dalaria.

This is Cazador Szarr? Her mind questioned. The face felt wrong, too small for the monster before her. This was the one who had forged Astarion into what he was, who had stripped him of freedom, of innocence, of everything. The violence he had endured—the rules imposed, the chains of obedience, the cruelty that had been daily life—were born here, in this hall of blood and gold. 

Under this cowering worm?

Not a predator. No, this was a rotten being. Undeserving of his own kill. A parasite. Feeding not from hunger but from power stolen. A coward masquerading as sovereign. Hiding and leeching by enslaving his betters. 

The Familiar's mandibles clicked in rage, gnashing at the air as though it could chew through his throat.

Elenya steadied herself. Her mind raced: how many nights had Astarion hungered and starved without choice? How many moments had he stared into darkness, wishing for a release that would never come?

She counted on her mind, at least 58,765 nights enduring. And this—this rot in silk—was the cause.

And now, this man, this monster, sat at the center of it all, revelling in violence he did not even work for. Feasting with no hunger, with no need all on someone else's hunt. Being mouthfed, using his spawn as playthings.

Elenya swallowed hard, forcing herself to observe. She needed to remember everything. Every detail, every shadow, every cruel flourish. This was the source. This was the beginning. And somewhere deep in her chest, the ember of anger that had smouldered quietly since the moment she opened the tomb lid began to ignite. 

Astarion’s past had a name. A face. And now, finally, she could see it.

Even the fog struggled to contain her Rage that kept rising. Furthered by Dalaria's state. When she looked at her in detail, Elenya's stomach turned. This image will haunt her, she was sure

She curled on stone like a punished hound, eyes distant, skirts dishevelled, reeking of sex and violence and foul blood. Bloodied lips—not fresh. A dead rat stiff with rot at her mouth, ribs cracked, hanging limp in her hands. She drank it in silence. Not once meeting Cazador’s gaze.

Elenya, in her real body far away, flinched. Not from horror.

From confusion as a realization hit her.

Cazador had forbidden his spawn from leaving the palace. 

And yet—

This boy was here, and Dalaria had ... How?

Did the vampire rescind his orders to remain within the estate so soon? 

She tried to focus her mind and communicate with the familiar.

" Yuba, what is going on ?"

Nothing, she was too far. She was too weak.

" Yuba, can you hear me? Tell me what is going on?."

The familiar voice couldn't reach, but her intent as the spider started skittering on the rafters toward the left side of the hall, where Elenya noticed a little alcove entrance obscured by red curtains. Soon enough, the familiar went behind, and she saw them. 

A dead body, and before him, another. And another. They just kept piling.

All fresh, all reeking of sex to the spider sense.

How?

What was going on? 

The spider went back into the main room as Cazador hissed in satisfaction, eyes fluttering closed as he drained the man to the last trembling beat of his heart. The body spasmed, still alive, still aware. He let it drop to the floor like meat off the bone.

Dalaria stood, not meeting his gaze, and slipped away like smoke.

The victim was no longer screaming.

A few minutes passed in stillness.

Then the great doors creaked open.

Gody entered—the skeletal servant in half-rotted armour. Jaw slack, eyes empty. He moved like memory more than function, waiting in silence until Cazador finished wiping blood from his mouth with a monogrammed cloth.

“Take it,” Cazador said coolly. “ put it with the rest and once i am done with violet's. process them as usual. And could you find better arrangements for the vintage? The last two were absolutely vile. I know we are in a hurry due to the wretch's disappearance, but must I suffer to this extent?”

Gody bowed, creaking. " Yes, master! I will speak the the chamberlain."

Dragged the still-breathing body by one arm to the alcove, then started cleaning the blood that smeared the marble behind them. 

Ten minutes later, another one came.

Victoria. Sharp heels. Painted mouth. Her dress slit high. She led a girl into the room—barefoot, blinking, clearly drugged or enchanted.

Cazador didn’t even look surprised.

He just smiled.

And Elenya, from the rafters through the spider’s borrowed eyes, went still.

How?

The spawn were in house arrest. Neither had left.

But they were bringing prey. marks they just finished entertaining.

She scanned the hall, the wards, the doors. The prey was walking in. Willingly.

Like they’d been told, it was safe.

Like they’d been invited.

And then it clicked.

Not a spell.

A network.

Someone was sending them. Outside the palace.

A human servant? A hired hand? A puppet in the city streets feeding the palace in secret?

Worse than all. She’d been wrong.

About the seduction. About the control.

It wasn’t glamour. It wasn’t magic. Not even the spawn seemed fully rehearsed—no invisible cues, no glazed-over eyes, no enforced movements.

The girl Victoria brought in now sat at the edge of the velvet chair, brushing the sleeve of her dress from dust. Her lips were still wet from Dalaria’s mouth. Her hair mussed. Her breath shallow—but not with fear.

With excitement.

Through the spider’s eyes, Elenya studied her face.

Alert. Eager.

Alive.

Too alive.

Then came the moment that twisted everything sideways.

The girl looked up at Cazador—not trembling, not pleading, but smiling.

“Thank you for the entertainment,” she said brightly. “It was even better than promised.”

Elenya’s pulse stopped.

Then the girl added:
“Shall we start talking business?”

Cazador paused.

And for the briefest instant, Elenya thought he was surprised.

Then—he smiled.

Broad. Beautiful.

Wrong. 

He threw another dead rat to Violet and sank his fangs into the girl’s neck with such force that her body arched back like a snapped bowstring. She didn’t scream at first. Just a single, choked gasp.

Then he tore.

It was violence.

The spider trembled in excitement in its perch. Elenya jerked in her own body, nausea burning up her throat.

The girl writhed beneath him, eyes wide in sudden, dawning confusion. She tried to say something—why?—but her throat filled with blood. Her hands clawed at the air, seeking meaning.

Cazador drank until her spine went limp.

Then he dropped her body like trash beside the chair and dabbed the corners of his mouth with the same handkerchief he used for guests.

Business.
Elenya’s thoughts spun.
What business? With whom?
How many had come to him like this?

Willing. Hopeful. Thinking they were being invited into something—

And then fed to the fire the moment they believed themselves safe.

It was a con.
No. A cult.

The sex was a lure, yes, but it wasn't required. Why go through with it? If the marks walked in on their own, what need was there for the spawn to go through that?

Intimacy was a ritual. That much became clear, but to what end? The feeling of power or ownership? No, it doesn't make sense. 

Something is not making sense. 

Manipulation.

And he was feeding so much.

They were lining up.

But somehow needed to be entertained by the spawn. 

Something definitely did not make sense. 

Five prey a night. That ought to be too much blood. 

Something was off. 

He fed so much. That should be too much blood.

Something was very wrong.

Her spiral got interrupted once again by a gentle knock on the door. 

"Darling, the council is starting in two hours; you should prepare." 

---

The Red Keep lived up to its name.

Not in the way stone earns its hue from iron deposits or rust. No—this red was deeper. It was the red of fresh blood before air finds it. The red of wounds that haven’t finished bleeding. It clung to the vaulted ceilings and shadowed corners like a stain that refused to be washed clean, no matter how many centuries passed or how many torches they lit.

Elenya, wearing Vaelrith Enmas’s face, crossed the threshold with the practiced grace of a man long used to being watched. The mask did not flicker. The performance did not falter. She had spent hours perfecting his imagined persona. She studied his journal obsessively and repeatedly

And yet.

Under the robes, beneath the high collar and the silver-threaded cloak, her anxiety thudded like war drums in her ears.

Knowing the man's inner thoughts told her nothing about his mannerisms. About his indolent gait, the way his fingers curled when bored or the way his eyes lingered just a little too long when amused. Every movement was a gamble, and she knew it.

The reception hall was made of finely chiselled stone soaked in candlelight and incense, the air heavy with the perfume of myrrh, dust, and something coppery that never quite faded. Shadows loitered in the corners like gossiping servants. Even the mage-lights flickered in odd rhythms, filtered and subdued, as though the torches themselves feared to burn too brightly in this place.

She did not look toward Astarion, though she could sense him at her side. Close. Watchful. They were not touching, not here, but his presence curled around her like a second cloak.

They had studied the people in this room for hours as well. Every figure that moved across its polished floor. Every member of the Scarlet Enclave delegation who would be in attendance and had a relationship with Vaelrith. And now, one by one, they slithered into place in the waiting antechamber. 

Two vampire red wizards approached first—smirking, lacquered nobles with fangs like jewelry and hunger masked as charm. They greeted “Vaelrith” with coiled pleasantries, their words veiled in innuendo and old rivalries. Elenya quickly recognized them and Ulvar Eldurik and Pralvos Willeth. Two well-established and well-connected members of the Tam faction are responsible for much of the Thayan diplomatic activities. She met each barb with silken precision, replying in Vaelrith’s voice with the same aloof cruelty she suspected he had reserved for rival minds. Her lips curled just enough to imply amusement. Her eyes didn’t blink.

They both brought with them a small retinue mainly composed of spawns.

The conversation has been very informative as the two welcomed her and declared themselves happy to hear about Vaelrith’s return to the crypt. 

The mummy lord arrived later. Rothee Kos was a stern and standoffish individual. Representing the temple's interests in the necropolis. His wrappings were stiff with age and gold, his eyes burning with green fire. The smell of embalming oils clung to him like a curse. He moved like a priest and stared like a predator. His praise dripped with condescension, but Elenya bowed with just the right angle—diplomatic deference, not subservience. It was enough to appease him. Barely.

The mortal necromancer came next. Jhaa Koraz was the only one who kept regular and evolved correspondence with Vaelrith. He was young. Eager. The kind of man who wore cruelty like a borrowed coat, too large and not yet broken in. He hung on every word she offered him, nodding with wild-eyed reverence, desperate to believe proximity to him could make him great, too. Much of his admiration came from the fact that Jhaa was a wizard first and foremost. He saw Vaelrith as a pioneer above anything else. Most of their correspondence consisted of Jhaa reaching out for clarification or questions about one of the spells or magical theory Vaelrith authored. 

It was working. All of it. Every step, every phrase, every borrowed quirk. Elenya could feel the council folding around her, their suspicion dulled by familiarity and performance. Each of them saw what they wanted: rivals to needle, idols to worship, a god to flatter. Her mask fed their delusions, and in their hunger, they welcomed it. But then the air changed, and everything pretended collapsed beneath the weight of something that could not be deceived.

They were waiting on the final member, a Thayan warlord named Althan Zught. Vaerlith had had a stern relationship with the man and thought him an oaf. Elenya was glad for that; oafs were easy to deceive. She let her body sink into the role, her tongue weaving silk and snares across the council chamber.

Until the air changed.

The chamber doors—carved bone and bloodwood—opened without sound. Cold drifted in with something terrible on its breath.

She knew before she saw it. I felt the crackle along her spine, the convulsion of fear in her lungs. And then her eyes confirmed it.

A demilich.

It hovered above the ground, a skull crowned in ghost-light, jaw forever locked in its hideous grin. Its sockets held not eyes but distant constellations, moving, watching, devouring. It saw — everything. It drifted in as though the air carried it, not walking, not floating — simply there, unmoored from space. The chamber bent around it, sound dulling, heat bleeding from the walls. Its sockets burned with stars too far and too near all at once, a night sky staring back. It looked, and the world looked with it.

Her breath snagged. Her thoughts scattered. Shit shit shit. She knew what those star-holes meant. Truesight. No lies, no veils, no masks. They were cooked.

I rose at once. Fog coiled from me, around her, through her. She can’t die here. Not this body, not this bodyself I have been given. She is all I have. Fuck that. I pulled on every thread of power not already lashed to the realm, pouring it into her skin, her bones, her outline. I smothered her panic. I swallowed her fear. I ate her emotions before they could betray her face.

The fog thickened until she was muffled even from herself.

But she was brilliant, even in the haze. Even stripped of panic, her mind sprinted forward, sketching impossible exits. A smoke bomb—then Astarion—Dimension Door through the high window—run to the house, grab the children, leave for Daggerford. Her hand was already sliding under her robe, brushing the satchel. She summoned the first weapon her instincts demanded.

I held her steady. She planned; I concealed.

We weren’t ready. No records. No warnings. No mention of this horror. No time.

The others bowed. Even the vampires bent their heads, shadows of pride dissolving before that floating skull. Claws scraped against stone, robes whispered against the floor. The silence of their submission pressed against the chamber walls.

Rothee Kos, the mummy lord, spoke first, "Lord Salthir, welcome. I hope the city agrees with you. Now that we are all gathered, shall we move to the council chamber? There is much to discuss. Unless you require some time to mingle beforehand."

Who the fuck was Salthir?  Where was Althan Zught? 

Vaelrich, this idiot didn't even keep updated council member lists. 

FUCK! 

I pressed harder around her, willing the bodyself not to shatter.

You got this. Speak the word. The fog is yours. I am with you, the friend is with you. Call down Bodyself. 

The demilich looked around the room, glancing past her. Her grasp on the smoke bomb tightened as she discreetly retrieved it.

After a moment of tense silence, the bejewelled floating skull spoke. In resonance. The voice of dry tombs and broken time. Its question fractured the room.

“ What do you mean, we can start? Where is Vaelrith? I thought we were supposed to have full attendance tonight. he is the only one i haven't met yet? ”

Elenya froze. A single heartbeat stretched too far. Too sharp an inhale. Her silence was a wound in the air, and everyone smelled the blood. Jhaa’s smile faltered. The vampires went still. Even the mummy lord tilted his head, the way hounds do when they hear something breaking. She started reading herself, locking eyes with a stiff Astarion. 

The silence was falling toward her like a blade.

One of the vampires turned to her and, with the faintest tilt of amusement, said, “ What do you mean, my lord? Mage Enmas is right here. Maybe you haven't recognized him, it can be a surprising meeting, one of your calibre, still breathing Vaelirth ?”

The demilich replied, cold and final:

“What are you talking about, Ulvar? I see nothing. There is nothing where you point.”

The words landed like a coffin lid slamming shut. Not a question. Not confusion. Judgment. And in that instant, Elenya felt the most terrible thing of all: she was nothing. The truesight had unmade her mask, and the demilich’s voice pronounced it aloud. 

They all saw it.
How the demilich looked through her.
And now their eyes pressed in, a cage of silence and teeth, waiting for her to bleed.

Elenya’s pulse drummed in her skull. Every second stretched, brittle and merciless. She had nowhere to hide—only the fogself clutching her edges together, forcing her lungs to move, forcing her face to remain carved in stillness.

The vampire who had spoken, Ulvar, drew back a fraction, his amusement sharpening into something hungrier. “Strange, isn’t it?” he purred, eyes flicking between the demilich and her borrowed form. “I could have sworn he is standing right in front of me right now… someone care to confirm if I haven't lost my mind?”

The mummy lord’s head tilted further, a dry crack of bone. Dust whispered from its wrappings as it leaned forward, nostrils flaring for a scent. " I see  and smell him as well him as well"

The words wrapped around her throat like wire. The fogself howled, surging tight, feeding every shred of strength it had into smothering the bodyself’s panic. Don’t break. Don’t breathe too loud. Don’t let them see more.

But the council could already smell it. The weakness. The unravelling.

Ulvar’s grin widened, fangs glinting like knives dipped in wine. “Well then,” he said softly, as though savouring the taste of her dread, “Care to explain, dear Vaelrith ?”

The silence cracked open.

And Astarion—gods, he looked carved from marble, every muscle locked as his eyes met hers. He was telling her without words: run. Her mind worked faster than her mouth. Panic rose—but she swallowed it whole, ground it beneath the heel of discipline. Elenya drew herself up. " I have no idea what he is talking about. I am right here. I don't know what I am supposed to explain."  

The words sounded off tune even to her, but she steeled herself. Put on the mask of rightful indignation.

Jhaa’s painted smile was gone now, his lips thinning to nothing. He had gone perfectly still, like a spider about to strike, then his eyes shimmered.  Something in him appeared to relax before he added, " Well, whatever it is, it is not an illusion. I detect no active magic on Mage Enmas."

The demilich spoke angrily at that, declaring, "What is happening here? Is this some sort of prank? How could he be here and still escape my gaze? Shall I remind you all that I have truesight?"

The demilich’s words rattled the chamber like iron bars struck with a hammer. The lich-fire in its eyes guttered and flared, casting fractured light across the council table.

Elenya forced her breath even, though every instinct screamed at her to shatter—flee, fight, anything but stand. “Truesight is not infallible,” she said, voice carefully measured. “Perhaps he should question his own gaze before you all question my existence.”

The gamble left the words hanging in the air like poisoned daggers.

For an instant, silence. Then the vampires stirred—shifts of cloaks, the subtle scrape of chairs. Ulvar laughed, soft and sharp, as though the tension were a wine he had been waiting to drink.

“Careful,” Ulvar murmured, eyes fixed on her. “It takes a bold soul to accuse a demilich of blindness.”

Jhaa did not laugh. He leaned forward, fingers steepled beneath his chin. His eyes, painted with lacquered shadow, glittered with an uncanny stillness. “And yet…” His voice was silk dragged across broken glass. “I see him. I hear him. Whatever else is happening, he is Mage Enmas. If there is a discrepancy, it lies not with his words, but in the contradiction between the lord’s sight and ours.”

Ulvar, ever the provocateur, prowled closer. The scent of spice and ash clung to him, his fangs flashing as he reached out and brushed the air where Elenya stood. His fingers touched her shoulder with deliberate insolence. “There is certainly a body here, my lord,” he drawled, “shaped exactly like Mage Enmas, smelling of his obnoxious cologne. No offence.”

“None taken,” Elenya answered smoothly, hand still coiled like a viper around the smoke bomb hidden in her satchel. Her smile was small, precise. “I am not a fan of yours either.”

A ripple of amusement broke the tension, but Rothee Kos smothered it. The mummy lord shifted, his stiff wrappings rasping like sandpaper, green fire smouldering in his hollow gaze. “Contradiction breeds doubt,” he croaked. “Doubt breeds openings. I would know which of you lies.”

The skull spun lazily, but its voice cracked the silence like a whip. “How dare you, Kos! Do not test me. Nothing escapes my gaze. Nothing. If this is some kind of jest, I will strip the marrow from all of your bones.”

Pralvos Willeth leaned forward, his sardonic smile taut as a garrote. “I assure you, Lord Salthir, this is no jest. We all see Vaelrith’s mage quite clearly. He sees us, speaks to us, and bleeds like the rest of us. He is no phantom.”

Kos rasped, “Or a shapeshifter. Wearing another’s skin.”

The demilich hissed, star-fires flaring. “Then I would see the truth beneath. But there is nothing. Worse. This one has found a way to cloak himself from truesight.”

The air contracted. The chamber felt smaller, the torches guttering in unseen wind. The vampires’ eyes gleamed with the kind of hunger that had nothing to do with blood. Ulvar’s smile sharpened, fangs catching the light.

Astarion hadn’t moved. His stillness was a storm’s silence before the break, every line of him coiled, waiting.

Elenya felt the line draw taut around her throat. One word too soft, one mask too slow, and she was undone.

Here goes nothing.

“Wait!” she snapped, Vaelrith’s haughty voice slicing through the silence. “He cannot hear me, either?”

Ulvar repeated the question aloud. The demilich’s reply came swift, cold, final: “No.”

“Bloody hells,” Elenya muttered, exasperation laced with cutting scorn. She threw her hands up in performative disbelief. “Of course. I should have expected this. Truesight always was cursed with a… unique perspective. My apologies, colleagues. Our lord simply cannot perceive me.”

The silence deepened, suspicion thick as smoke. But she didn’t let it curdle. With a sharp pivot, she turned to Pralvos, arching one brow. “Ask him if he can see my clothes.”

Pralvos’s smile stretched wider, enjoying the theatre. He posed the question in mocking velvet tones.

The answer came hissing: “No. Nothing.”

Perfect.

With the deliberate slowness of a man too important to be hurried, Elenya unclasped her cloak and let it fall. Embroidered silk whispered against itself as it dropped, landing in a glimmering heap at her feet. And the moment it left her fingers—visible.

Every head turned. Even Rothee Kos creaked forward, green fire flaring, as if sniffing for truth in the sight of empty cloth.

The demilich drifted nearer, sockets blazing. “How…? This fabric did not exist a heartbeat ago. It appeared from nowhere.”

Murmurs rippled like cracks in stone. Jhaa gasped aloud, half-jumping on the spot. “By the gods—you did it. You actually did it. I thought you still needed the Nectolith diagrams!”

Thank every devil, god, and demon for this insufferable fanboy.

But Ulvar’s amusement curdled, fangs bared in suspicion. His voice dropped to a hiss as he stalked nearer. “What is he talking about, Enmas? Answer. Now.”

The air went razor-thin.

Every gaze fixed on her.

And in that instant, she knew: her next words would decide whether she walked out of this chamber at all.

Elenya arched one brow, wearing the mask of lofty irritation as if this interrogation were beneath her. “Well, there you have it. I’m not here. Not really. Or not entirely.” Her voice carried that deliberate note of disdain Vaelrith always had when forced to explain himself. “Most of you know I was pursuing… what’s the word… more esoteric sources of immortality, yes? Something sustainable. Less dependent on dwindling resources.”

She let the pause stretch, savouring the hook before she cast the line. “One of my paths was siphoning from the outer planes directly. Another—Outer Planar entities. That’s where the Nectolith diagrams came in. But—” she dipped her hand into the satchel, casual as though drawing out an after-dinner mint, and produced the folio sketch.

A ripple of unease moved through the chamber as she set the parchment flat on the table. Three overlapping circles formed a gate: mortal, astral, and something unlabeled. At the center, not a sigil, not a rune—only a spiral of eyes, all screaming.

Pralvos’s sneer faltered. His voice cracked sharply. “Surely you haven’t—”

Kos’s brow furrowed, wrappings creaking. “Hasn’t what? What is this?”

It was Jhaa, of course, who burst first, the eager student unable to stop himself. His voice carried the tremor of both terror and awe. “A planar gate to the Far Realm. You— you’re siphoning the Far Realm to maintain immortality?”

Gasps. Whispers. Hunger.

Ulvar, ever sharp, cut in coldly. “Impossible. The Far Realm is chaos incarnate. Wild magic that devours form and mind alike. Even if he had access, that doesn’t explain why truesight cannot see him.”

Elenya tilted her head, and for a moment, she almost smiled. “Thank you for the enthusiasm. But if you’ll allow me to finish—” She tapped the parchment once, talon-sharp, then leaned back with effortless disdain.

“I could not siphon Far Realm energy here. Believe me, I tried. No. I did the opposite. Transference. One of my more ambitious experiments.” She said it like she was discussing wine pairings. “I fused with the Far Realm itself. My essence—lodged there. What you see is a projection, not a body. Much like Abeloth, much like the aberrations born there. In that timeless place, my essence remains untouched, eternal. This projection?” She gestured lazily to her form. “It can be destroyed. And in a few days, Iwill  simply send another. As long as my true self remains there… I am immortal.”

A quiet shudder rolled through the chamber.

She sighed, as though bored by their ignorance. “The ritual left me in liminal stasis. Between. Thus, True Sight perceives nothing. Not illusion. Not disguise. Absence.” She let her gaze sweep across the gathered council. “What you see is an echo. A tether. A shadow cast from eternity itself.”

It was a lie. A wild, unhinged lie.

But she said it with such unshaken, aristocratic boredom—such dripping irritation at being questioned—that the silence bent beneath it.

They wanted to believe.

But wanting was not enough.

Kos leaned forward, his voice a rasp like sand through a tomb. “This makes no sense. Why would True Sight not pierce a psionic echo?”

Before she could frame an answer, Jhaa nearly stumbled over his own eagerness to reply, desperate to prove himself useful.

“With respect, lord Kos—aberrations here wield psionics, yes, but nothing in the texts says the Far Realm itself is bound to psionics. Its resonance is… undefined. It bends perception at its root. Sight, thought, time—none of it applies.”

Elenya inclined her head, letting the boy’s frenzy bolster her lie. “Just so.”

Then Pralvos spoke—cold, sudden, precise. His voice cut through the chamber like the edge of a scalpel. “That is not what surprises me. What surprises me is how your mind survived the plane of madness. How you returned with form and will intact. The Far Realm does not let mortals sip from its rivers without… changing them. How did you maintain your sanity in the madness? How are you not already some gruesome monsters?”

The air thickened. This was it. The moment that would make or break the mask. Her eyes flicked to Astarion. He hadn’t moved, not an inch—but gods, that smile. Wicked, feral, sharp as a blade freshly honed. His scarlet eyes glittered like ruby garnets in a mask, and she could almost hear the purr in her mind, curling through her thoughts like silk.

Do your worst, darling. Show me the performance of a lifetime.

Elenya drew in a slow breath. Straightened. Her lips curled into a cold, alien smile, too wide, a grin stretched on the edge of snapping.

Dangerous insanity. 

She had a mask for that. 

She remembered all of Ethos' tirades about the truth of the multiverse. 

She remembered his endless monologues. 

I summoned the memory fragment from the Fogrealm and started.

We fused. 

Because dread needed a soul to land it.  

“Maintain my sanity?” we whispered, voice thin and trembling—before erupting into a jagged, choking cackle that clawed up the walls. “Why in all the Hells would I want to do that?”

The chamber froze.

Our laughter bent upward, high and piercing, before collapsing into a guttural rasp, our two voices grinding through the same throat. We slammed our hand flat against the diagram, nails dragging across parchment until the spiral of eyes seemed to hum.

“Sanity is a cage! Rails to your thoughts, dear Pavlos,” we hissed, words crackling with manic joy. “Rules. Chains. A locked door that keeps you small, keeps you ignorant, keeps you blind. But the moment you step outside—.” We snapped her head upward, eyes blazing, pupils blown wide. “—Oh, the things that see you. The things that teach you.”

The fog bled from our robes in long, shivering tendrils. They didn’t drift like smoke; they twitched, coiled, reached. One wrapped the leg of a chair and pulled tight until the wood groaned. Another traced the air, curling toward the diagram as if answering our touch.

We leaned forward, smile feral, voice rising to a manic crescendo. Scarifications in the form of eyes started to ripple across her skin and move in a hypnotic pattern.  

“You call it madness?” Her laughter cracked, shrill enough to make ears ache. “ I call it True enlightenment. A gruesome monster, oh, how funny and quaint.  We are every monster. The eye that watches itself. The thought that thinks you. I am the crack in the mirror that keeps reflecting when the mirror’s already gone.”

Our Gaze darted to Kos, unblinking, pupils vibrating in their sockets. “Do you know what they whisper in the dark between the black hand wards? They whisper the names no sane tongue can hold since he ascended. They whisper of the rot in your god past, the hunger contained in the Weave, the thin skin of the spells stretched over an abyss of unsatiated magic. One that wants only to eat you alive.”

The tendrils of fog thickened, writhing now like veins under skin, like something alive was pressing against our form from the inside. our voice dropped low, intimate, intimate enough to crawl down the spine:

“I didn’t survive the Far Realm, Pavlos. I did not try to. I drowned in it. I let it drink me, tear me, break me into pieces until each shard grew teeth. I came back not sane. But that word does not mean the same to my kind as it does to yours. Being insane is to be, not whole, but infinite.”

our laughter came again—high, shuddering, cracking into sobs halfway before snapping back into a grin. We slammed our palm flat on the diagram, and the spiral of eyes seemed to shiver as if it had always been waiting for our touch.

“But worry not, dear colleagues,” we hissed, words overlapping like a chorus. “In breaking, In dying—”

Our head tilted, neck twisting too far. The fog curled tighter, hungry.

“—I saw.”

The silence that followed was unbearable. No one breathed. Jhaa trembled, wide-eyed, pupils dilated as if staring into revelation. Kos’s green flames guttered low, faltering for the first time. Ulvar grinned like a beast at blood, but his fingers twitched at his side, as if ready to tear.

"Now is the interrogation over, or do you all wish to see as well?" 

The necromancer stepped closer, hands fluttering with questions. The mummy lord didn’t challenge her—only watched with new, wary respect. Not entirely deceived. But wary.

Ulvar explained the whole ordeal to the demilich, who stood confused throughout the whole thing. The skull drifted and attempted to study the area where it thought Vaelrith was standing. 

Maniacal laughter escaped us. The whole situation was ridiculous.

She thanked me as we were unfusing, and when I stepped back into the Fogrealm, I found it almost in shambles. I took too much magic with me. 

Worth it. 

Her laugh stopped abruptly. And she saw the masked terror on some faces. 

And that was that.

The spell held.

By sheer... she didn't know what. 

That was close. 

Way too close. 

She looked at Astarion and saw something that looked like absolute delight. And something else, something akin to ... hunger? 

Nonetheless, the council did not eject her. No one unsheathed a blade or spell slung. Except for the occasional divination spell. And the continued complaints of the hovering skull about the impracticality of the whole situation. And Elenya—beneath Vaelrith’s skin—stood straighter than she ever had, the lie resting easy on her shoulders.

She had just met a demilich.

And survived.

Elenya gestured toward Astarion—who had said nothing, done nothing, but whose presence burned like a brand at her side.

“He will interpret for any of you who need me voiced. You’ll find his memory impeccable.”

"You said he was from the boneyard. How do you expect us to trust your associate with Thayan affairs?"  Pavlos answered. 

" I don't really care whether he comes in or not. It's up to you all, really. I just figured none of you would want to spend the evening repeating what I am saying to facilitate the meeting. Maybe you can assign the task to one of your retinue." She glanced around toward the other spawns. "None of what is going to be said would be a surprise to him either way."  

The mummy lord’s voice broke across the chamber like sand tearing against stone. “How does a mere spawn from the Underdark know of Thay’s business?”

The words weren’t a question. They were a hex.

Elenya—cloaked in Vaelrith’s skin, spine straight, face carved from noble disdain—did not turn. Did not blink. Did not betray the sharp twist that coiled low in her gut at the word spawn, flung like spittle.

But she felt Astarion flinch beside her, just barely. Just enough. Every eye in the council chamber turned toward him.

Curious. Measuring.

Predatory.

For one breathless moment, the air felt brittle with tension—like a mirror stretched too tight, threatening to shatter. The vampires leaned in, the necromancer froze mid-note, and the demilich’s deathlight gaze burned in their direction, hollow and ancient.

Elenya did not hesitate.

Her voice slid into the stillness like a blade through silk—sharp, dismissive, just amused enough to wound.

“That you would need to ask the lord's apprentice. From my understanding, many forces are interested in the ring's completion,” she said, lazily, like it should have been obvious. “This one remains close to the lord’s apprentice. Surely you remember the boy—before his regency, before his taste for ceremony dulled his curiosity. My companion accompanied him in the Mausoleum City more than once. He has heard what others were not meant to. At least that's what I have been told when he was assigned to me.”

She let the pause linger, gaze sweeping across the table. Cool. Indifferent.

Then Palvos, still draped in tattered velvet and boredom, tilted his head, a smile tugging at lips far too red to be natural.

“Mmm. True enough,” he purred. “The apprentice did love to wander before he was muzzled by power. I recall whispers that he haunted the Boneyard often before your master decided to close the gates spawn.” His eyes flicked toward Astarion with calculated malice, lips twitching wider. " Maybe this gesture may showcase to you the benefit of collaboration."

Ulvar spoke decisively, “Let the spawn in. We are not discussing any knowledge that anyone wouldn't be able to purchase in the city with mere soulcoin. And I am not spending the evening parroting Vaelrith. ” A beat. “Better to let handsome here speak his words than force one of us to play courier.”

Jhaa, eyes still shining with admiration, bobbed his head like an eager puppet.

Only the mummy lord remained still.

Unyielding.

But here, numbers mattered. And Elenya could feel it—subtle, but decisive. The tide had turned.

“Then it’s settled,” she said simply. “My associate will stay.”

---

Astarion said nothing. Smart. The performance didn’t need embellishment. His silence was part of it—part of her illusion, part of the structure she’d built around them both.

But beneath the effortless exterior, Elenya’s thoughts roiled.

She had watched the mummy’s eyes. Had measured the intent behind it, the weight it carried in this place.

He was not convinced. 

This one was dangerous. 

Too insightful.

She saw him cast something twice ,and she recognized the spell. 

Divination. 

They moved on.

But they were onto them.

Affairs of the Enclave unfolded like an autopsy—ritual inventories, caravan interceptions, which settlements had been stripped for their arcane potential, which failed experiments could be repurposed. The mummy spoke of delaying ceremorphosis through Netherese weaving. A vampire raised a languid hand and inquired about cross-breeding. Disappointment. Collapse. Flesh resisted alteration.

Always flesh.

Always collapse.

Always spawn.

Elenya kept her posture elegant, voice precise. She responded to questions with clipped, strategic efficiency—discussing soul-funnelling, schematics, power displacement rituals for the Dread Ring—all while feeding Astarion just enough phrasing to carry to the demilich.

Because, of course, the demilich would not speak to her. Could not see her.

She had prepared for that. Scripted contingencies. Invented spells that didn’t exist. Crafted a lie about partial transference so absurd it sounded true.

And she’d done it all without blinking.

But now, as she leaned into the next silence, she watched him.

Astarion. Perched beside the floating skull, too still, too quiet, too poised.

His role here was an insult disguised as utility.

The spawn. The interpreter. The shade beside the voice.

He bore it.

Because she had asked him to.

And that knowledge settled heavily against her heart.

Gods help her—he bore it so well.

She glanced at the parchment near her elbow, covered in the necromancer’s frantic notes.

Then let her gaze slide back to Astarion.

And underneath the illusion, the lies, the mask of a dead man long erased from history—something sharp and tender bloomed in her chest.

Not pity.

Not guilt.

But something dangerous.

Something she could not afford—not here, not now—but which whispered nonetheless, soft and persistent:

If I can convince them… how easily could I convince him?

And if he ever realized what she was truly capable of—

Would he still choose to follow?

Or would he run?

Each improvisation sharpened into authority. Each bluff was woven so tightly that it became indistinguishable from the truth. And the others—vampire, mummy, mortal—listened. They believed.

For now.

The council started,

The council chamber of the Red Keep was full for the first time in decades. Every seat at the long obsidian table was occupied. Vampires draped in finery that had outlived dynasties. A mummy lord stiff in ancient linens, its jewelled headdress glowing faintly with infernal glyphs. The necromancer—still mortal, still sweating—sitting a little too upright as though posture could hurry his ascent to lichdom. And, of course, the skull beside me, radiating disdain.

Elenya, bearing the flawless mask of Vaelrith Enmas, sat at the center of that dread congregation as though she’d always belonged. Her posture was regal, one gloved hand resting idly on the lacquered arm of her chair, the other poised just beside a stack of carefully prepared arcane scrolls. She didn't speak often—yet when she did, the room bent to listen.

Across from her, Astarion stood beside the demilich’s levitating skull, acting as her translator. A calculated choice—half honour, half insult. The skull clicked and turned in slow, ponderous rotations, its eyes aglow with sickly embers. The rest of the chamber had grown used to his presence, but Elenya caught the sideways glances—the careful distaste disguised as protocol.

The first hour was devoted to the kind of politicking most would loathe: schedules, rotations, and availability. Who would be present for which rituals, who would travel to Thay for summons, who would provide proxies when their corpses grew inconveniently fragile. Elenya—wearing Vaelrith’s face with unflappable composure—sat through it all with practiced ease, feigning the proper blend of arrogance and disinterest.

Then the true business began.

“Orders from Thay,” rasped the Kos, his voice like a desert storm. “The priority is unchanged. Accelerate all acquisition of arcana related to soul funnelling. The experiments continue with promise. The Inner Ring’s cooperation has been… valuable.”

The necromancer perked up, hungry. “Progress?”

“Specimens prove more pliable under Netherese magical affluence,” the mummy intoned. “Two survived initial trials with remarkable adaptation. We have managed to delay ceremorphosis to nearly a month.”

A ripple of satisfaction passed among the council, though Pavlos raised a languid hand. “What about the large-scale cross-breeding? That was what we were promised, wasn't it?”

The mummy lord’s wrappings crackled as his shoulders shifted. “Disappointing. Less viable than predicted. Flesh resists alteration. The halfbreed collapses too quickly. It seems the Vampiric illithids from the shadowfell were the only viable option for now. ”

“Vaelrith,” purred Ulvar, turning to Elenya. “Your spells for the Dread Ring. We expected updates.”

Elenya inclined her head slightly, cool as moonlight. “They are in progress. But without full structural schematics of the rings, precise calibration is… time-consuming. That said, I have had several breakthroughs that may soon bear fruit.”

The vampire’s brow arched. “Schematics? The detailed plans of the fortress were sent to your Tower last fortnight.” 

Elenya didn’t blink. “And I was not there at that time. If they were delivered in my absence, then indeed, it will not be long now.”

They moved on. Affairs of the Enclave unfolded in their grotesque splendour. Ritual inventories. Which villages had been harvested for test subjects? Which caravans had been intercepted? A question of how best to hide their growing resource demands from the Watchers beyond the Keep.

She said nothing, but watched the Jhaa's eyes glint with hunger. He was the only mortal at the table, his youth and ambition pressed uncomfortably between lichdom's looming promise and its brutal cost. He leaned forward, eager.

And through it all, Astarion leaned just enough toward the demilich to murmur Elenya’s every word. 

And while they preened and plotted, she was listening. Calculating. 

But her eye kept going back to Astarion. Because she saw the way he watched her—saw the flicker in his eyes every time she bent the conversation, every time she walked the blade's edge and made them believe. It was not fear. It was awe. And it perplexed her more than any of the liches could.

By the time the council adjourned, Elenya had accepted two new ritual assignments, redirected three artifact acquisitions, and arranged a quiet delay in the soul-weaving trials—just enough to cover her real agenda.

---

They left the council room and decided to mingle a bit at the informal reception.

The Thayan elite cloistered themselves in corridors of crimson marble and incense-thick air. The whole enclave stands as a grim testament to Warlock’s Crypt’s evolving diplomacy—a walled district where Thayan Red Wizards and foreign necromancers maintain permanent embassies and research outposts under Larloch’s watchful tolerance. Strategically located between vampire estates and lich towers, it facilitates uneasy collaboration, monitored trade, and sanctioned arcane experiments. The enclave fuels the city's undead economy, bringing in many slaves, artifacts, and dark knowledge in exchange for access to forbidden rituals and constructs. Though nominally self-governed, its every breath is taxed by Warlock’s Crypt—teleportation is planar-locked, limited to only a few, the rest needing to pay to use the lich's own teleportation hub. Magic is recorded, and all power is borrowed. It is a double-edged presence: a source of strength and a growing concern. Some vampire lords resent Thayan arrogance, liches whisper of espionage, and Yalthera Voruun, ever ambitious, sees it as a fulcrum for power. In short, the enclave is a volatile crucible where diplomacy, rivalry, and necromancy simmer just shy of catastrophe.

The mages and thayan there moved like gliding knives, draped in silk, smugness, and secrets, their smiles brittle as bone dust. They tilted their heads at her with veiled suspicion, heads cocked like carrion birds. They had barely survived the council, and the rumour of Vaelrith's ascension to an immortal life and Far Realm ties rippled through the circle. Elenya could feel it in the way their gazes lingered too long. The shift in demeanour didn’t go unnoticed by everyone. She was softer now, where Vaelrith had been sharp enough to cut for sport. More decisive—where he had been circuitous, a man who delighted in arcane tangents and intellectual indulgences. She’d tightened him. Polished the shell. Refined him into something leaner.

It unsettled them.

So she met their stares with clipped, clinical explanations and a tinge of derranged madness. Spoke of sudden breakthroughs. Of Profound existential and cognitive changes, due to the recent experimentation. Some truth appeared to him, expanding his understanding. She said it all with the detached reverence of a scholar who had glimpsed something just beyond mortal comprehension—enough brilliance to excuse the tremor in personality. Enough madness to excuse the change in cadence.

They bought it. Or chose to. 

Truth was, no one really knew Vaelrith Enmas. Not well. Not enough to know what he sounded like when excited—or afraid or ascended from mortality. He had burned every bridge and bartered every allegiance, until only myths clung to his name like mould on tomb walls.

The talks spread like wildfire. Rumours of his new immortality. Of turning himself into a Far Realm Magic-eating construct bound to a now unkillable flesh cloaked from true sight, travelled to the confines of the keep. Talks of rituals so volatile they seared his mind, turning him to a magical aberration and erasing him from the weave reach multiplied. Aided mainly by Jhaa's fervour. All this added to his mystic and increased exponentially his demand amongst the Thayan. Immortality unbound to undeath was something particularly interesting to the necromancers, who all saw what Larloch had made of some of the most powerful undead in the land. 

Puppets. 

Furthermore, a certain type of respect, inconsistent with what Vaelrith reported in his journals, appeared in most interactions. It seems no one wanted to provoke whatever he had become.

Too unpredictable. Too messy.

And if some suspicion lingered behind narrowed eyes or failing scryings, it didn’t dare take root. Paranoia was common currency among the Red Wizards. A little madness was expected. A little secrecy was required. All she had to do was be stranger than the truth—and quieter than the danger.

She was good.

Not perfect—but close. Fast, surgical, and terrifyingly precise.

She has always been crawling between monsters. 

She was even better at becoming someone else. She wielded identity like a knife, knowing exactly where to cut and where to conceal the scar. She deflected scrutiny with just enough arrogance to feel authentic—an academic too deep in his own brilliance to care for the eyes of lesser minds. A newly anointed monster who rose beyond the herd. She leaned into aloofness when needed, let irritation bubble up in the right rooms. And when all else failed, she drowned them in psychotic abstraction and magical workings that her perfect memory supplied from his notes—threads of theory knotted in obscure runes and constructs that left even veteran necromancers blinking.

Vaelrith has been a frontiere mage through and through.

That's why he was allowed to climb so high in the Thayan hierarchy while refusing to join the undead. Not because he was liked or powerful. But, because he was an innovative genius. Many could have done his research, but few would have bothered. She had that in common with him. And the reaction of his peers reminded her of those of the remaining Avowed.

She could play that role. The outlier arrogant genius. 

She played it good.

Not flawless.

But close enough to pass.

Close enough to keep the doors open.

Close enough to make this place theirs.

For now.

They kept gathering intel. Banking favours carefully. Surgically. Never more than the moment would allow.

She even procured what she could—anatomical models of vampire physiology, brittle old notes on blood-curse variances, several banite ritual diagrams annotated in crabbed, ink-bled margins. Also, particular details on an old banite spell rumoured to be able to create a vampire called undeath after death. Not usable since the spellplague, but could give her some insight into the nature of true vampirism itself. She also gathered more details, treatises, the sort of things necromancers shared when they thought they were being generous—or showing off.

Nothing truly groundbreaking. But a start. 

The real work—the dangerous work—was kept behind locked grimoires and soul-sealed wards. She knew better than to ask.

Still, she planted seeds.

Questions laced with professional curiosity. Praise wrapped in mild critique. She referenced names that didn’t exist and theories that hadn’t yet been disproved, weaving just enough possibility into her inquiries to spark interest. Make them want to impress her. She asked more questions about other information she required. Mainly regarding those blasted dread rings. Tam's ascension and the illithids' experiments. 

When they offered to follow up by sending, she declined smoothly.

Cited a “mindblank effect” granted to Vaelrith “after the rite, for security purposes,” then insisted, with an almost bored cadence, that all future correspondence be delivered via physical missive to the Red Wizard’s tower. She even offered to check the box herself—periodically.

They nodded. Approved. Admired her caution.

Paranoia, after all, was the common dialect in here. And she spoke it fluently.

Astarion helped greatly in this endeavour. For how transparent he had seemed when targeting her. She could see now the deadliness of his charm when wielded against others. His magnetism appeared to be almost otherworldly. He knew what to say, how, and when to open just about any door and distract just about any eyes.

" I am everyone's preference," he had said not but one week ago. 

She had rolled her eyes then thinking him arrogant. But now she could see it for herself, no one seemed able to really resist him. Or more accurately, no one seemed interested in trying. Quickly enough, he had ingratiated himself with half the damn thayan they met. And the rest had just yet to talk to him. 

It was a good thing she didn’t want. If she did, he would have played her strings like a puppet.

Like he didn’t already, I supplied.

By the end of the night, she and Astarion had moved through the Warlock’s Crypt with surgical precision. They cancelled or completed every obligation of Vaelrith Enmas still lingering in the Enclave ledgers. Left only the matter of the Nectolith trade. The corpse she wore now cast no shadow. No one would look for him. No one would question her.

Or so they thought.

Notes:

…so, they survived. Barely. Writing this felt like holding my breath the entire time — I hope you were holding yours too. Thank you all again for your comments, kudos, and bookmarks; they mean the world and keep me going. Let me know what you thought of this dance of masks and lies.

Chapter 38: The Devils in the Mirrors

Summary:

Masks slip, mirrors whisper, and bargains twist in the shadows. Between infernal reflections and dangerous performances, the line between truth and deception thins to breaking.

Notes:

Here we go — this chapter is where everything gets a little more infernal

Astarion’s POV

---

We returned to the house with about three hours left before sunrise.

The moment we crossed the threshold of the borrowed sanctuary, she shed Vaelrith’s face like a snake sloughing its skin. Shoulders slackened. Features softened. And for the first time that night, I saw her again—not the necromancer lord who had owned the council chamber, not the liar wrapped in robes and arcane theories, but Elenya. She wore the vampire’s face.

Gods, she was magnificent.
Every word, every lie she spun, dripped with conviction sharp enough to cut. The whole room had hung on her madness, trembling at the edges, and she had stood there unflinching—mask, lie, and predator all at once.

She had been breathtaking.

When the door closed behind us, I wanted nothing more than to pin her to it. Slam her into the wood hard enough to rattle the frame, feel her gasp against my mouth, tear away the careful poise she’d worn like armour.

Because she was dangerous. Deliciously dangerous. And it lit a hunger in me far beyond blood.
I wanted to bite, to bruise, to drag the truth of her out with my hands and my teeth until there was nothing left of Vaelrith’s mask—only her: only Elenya, the woman who had just lied to a council of monsters and made them believe.

I almost believed it myself.
That’s what unsettled me most, what drove my lust sharper, hungrier. Her words had curled around me too, wrapped me in the illusion until I could nearly see it: her standing there as something unseeable, untouchable, immortal.

And gods, I wanted to worship that.
And destroy it.
Both at once.

What is happening to me?

I burned with it, standing a breath away from her in the house's silence—wanting her, needing her, in the way a starving man needs fire: not to live, but to be consumed.

She didn’t speak. Just moved to the study desk in silence. Candlelight clung to her cheekbone as she wrote, that maddeningly precise hand recording everything—each exchange, phrase, and glance at the council table—pinned to parchment like butterflies on a scholar’s wall.

“For Candlekeep,” she murmured, eyes not lifting.

I leaned against the wall, watching her, always watching.

After a moment, I said, lightly, “So. Why could a lich’s true sight not see you in the Hells?”

Her quill stuttered mid-stroke.

“I’m no wizard, darling,” I continued, pushing off the wall and drifting toward her, “but even I know Nondetection doesn’t do that. He saw me. He saw the room. But you?” I let the pause settle. “Nothing.”

She let out a slow breath through her nose, shaking her head. “I’m not certain. But…” Her voice dipped. “I suspected something like this. After the devil in the basement.”

That tone. The evasive one. The one that meant she was already lying before the sentence ended.

I circled the chair, lightly resting one hand on the back. “Elenya. No riddles. No delicate half-answers. Not tonight.” My voice dropped. “I want the truth. All of it. Don’t deflect.”

Her hand went still.

She looked up at me then, and there was something fragile beneath the calm, beneath the calculation. Something rare.

Guilt.

Gods. What the fuck is going on?

“I’m not sure,” she said softly. “But I have theories. And if I’m right…” Her gaze dropped. “I’m bound. I swore to someone I wouldn’t speak of it. Not yet.”

I arched a brow. “Bound? To whom?”

Her mouth thinned. She shook her head, just barely. “I can’t tell you. Not here. But I promise you—when we’re safe and reach the House of Mercy, I will tell you everything. No veils. No omissions.”

I stared at her in silence. Candlelight flickered across her face, and I searched for the lie. Another mask. Another performance. But her eyes—gods, her eyes—were bare. Uncertain. Almost pleading.

She looked… sheepish. Ashamed.

And my mind spiralled. What was she hiding from me? Since when? Why?

My jaw was clenched so tight I barely registered her moving. She stood slowly and stepped toward me. Stopped. Her hands curled into her sides.

Then, barely above a whisper:
“Can I hug you, Astarion?”

She was trembling.

I nodded once.

She stepped in carefully, her face pressing into my chest as she exhaled like she’d been drowning. I felt the tension drain out of her body—slowly, thoroughly.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“For what?”

“For not being able to tell you.”

“Then tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“Why? Because of some vow? Elenya—fuck your promise. You’re scaring me.”

“It’s not just that.”

“Then what is it?”

She hesitated. And then, so quietly I almost missed it:

“I don’t know how you’ll react.”

I blinked. “I won’t hurt you.”

“No, it’s not about that,” she said, voice trembling. “It’s… you might not take it well. And I don’t want to force you to choose between your safety and how you feel about it. Right now, you need me, and if I told you while you were still dependent on me… it wouldn’t be a real choice. I want to tell you when you’re free—when you can walk away if necessary.”

What was this idiot talking about?

“What could you possibly say that would make me—”

She flinched. I pulled her tighter.

Resigned, I murmured near her ear, “Very well. But you’d best keep that promise, little dove. I don’t enjoy being kept in the dark.”

Her voice came back—quiet, broken, real.
“Neither did I.”

" Great, now that it's settled. Come now. Time for some beauty sleep." 

" I need to-"

" Not a word you are coming and that's final" 

She smiled and simply said, "Yes, Sir!"

That evening, feeding was more complicated than I expected.

Not for lack of blood. Not for lack of need.

But because every time I closed my eyes, images surfaced.
Not memories. Not exactly. Just flashes—
Her hands were trembling against me.
Her voice was small and unsure, and she asked if she could hold me.
That look in her eyes—the one I still couldn’t name.

Other images followed. Those weren’t memories either.
They were worse.
Imaginings. Intrusions.
Flickers of things that hadn’t happened—yet.

I pushed them down. Refused to entertain them. Not now.

But the feeling remained. Heavy beneath the skin.
Unease.

Knowing she was keeping something from me—withholding, deliberately—left a taste more bitter than blood.
Not quite betrayal. But something sharp.
Something close.

Resentment.

Why? Gods, I’ve withheld more than my share.
But… was I still?
She knew almost everything now. Every dark corner, every broken piece.
And maybe that was what left me raw.

That imbalance.

Displeasure curled low in my chest, old and familiar.
Like pressing on a bruise that never healed.

It wasn’t the lie.
It was the choice to keep me in the dark.

And no matter how softly she’d spoken…
It stirred something I thought I’d buried with the Beastlord’s call.

Something possessive.
Something cold.

I fed. Slowly. Mechanically. Going through the motions.
But the hunger didn’t leave.

Not for blood.
Not for flesh.
For answers.

That idiot was afraid I’d walk away from her.

She had no idea, did she?

I don’t know what her secret is.
But if she’s guilty—hiding something dark or monstrous—it won’t drive me off.

No. I’ll use it.

Twist it.
Leash her with it.

So she’ll never leave. 

Later, I lay in bed, the taste of her blood still clinging to my tongue—warm, metallic, intoxicating. Trance refused me, as it so often did, but this time it was not hunger that kept me awake. My mind circled like a starving wolf, gnawing on itself, replaying the night in jagged fragments: the arguments, the bargains, the growing unease.

She was afraid of me leaving. 

That led her to hide something from me.

The thought festered, gnawed at me, filled his chest with a pressure I had no name for. I had wanted nothing more than to retreat to the safety of walls, to close myself off, curl into silence, and let dread consume me where no one could see.

Let the suspicion and paranoia win. 

But she hadn’t allowed it.

She had pulled me into an embrace instead.

And there, against all expectation, something impossible happened.

I don't care what she is hiding. 

I sincerely don't. 

I only care that she is hiding it. I care that she is refusing me something. 

But whatever her big dark secret is. It won't change a thing. 

Not after all they went through together. 

She had saved me.

I turned my thoughts over and over, unable to stop myself from tracing the path of everything that had happened since she had unearthed me from the grave. In the span of three fortnights, I had honestly forgotten, forgotten the leash around my neck, the constant hunger, paranoia, the cold weight of centuries in chains, the pain. This journey has been the happiest and safest moment of my unlife, filled with chaos, discovery, wonder, pleasures, and strange laughter. It all had wrapped me in an illusion I had almost believed: that I was free. I was simply a man, moving through the world at her side.

I had laughed. Gods, I had laughed so much, and the sound had felt foreign and new in my throat all along.

Now, in the room's silence, it all came flooding back.

No, nothing she has to say would make me want to let go. 

Images surged in my mind again. I shoved them down. They clawed their way back up. Always back up.

My gaze betrayed me.

It drifted to her.

She slept soundly beside me, returned to that uncanny form—vampiric mimicry. It should have unsettled me. It should have turned my stomach. Instead, the sight carved the hollow in my chest even deeper.

I didn’t know why, but I wanted to reach for her. To pull her close, to feel her weight against me, solid and real. The desire was maddening in its simplicity. I knew hunger, knew lust, knew the sweet, manipulative pull of charm. But this… this was different. This was pure need, raw and unnameable, and it terrified me more than any scheme or blade she may be hiding from me.

Gods, I didn’t want it to end.

But it would. Everything ended. In safety or blood, it would vanish as all things did, leaving me again in the silence of my cage. That was the truth I knew, the truth that had always held.

And yet—I had already admitted it to myself, hadn’t I? I wanted to keep her.

I didn’t know why. Or perhaps I did, and feared to put words to it. But the truth lived in my bones, undeniable: I thought of her as mine. My what—partner, saviour, ruin—remained unclear. But mine, nonetheless.

What to do with that?

I had tried the old ways. Lies, traps, and manipulation woven with practiced ease. And she had unravelled them like a loose thread. She had seen through me, laughed at all my attempts, and called me out without cruelty or mercy.

It should have infuriated and broken me with shame.  And it did in the beginning, but with time, it simply had freed me.

For the first time in centuries, I felt the faint pulse of something real.

I wanted that. Needed it.

But I will settle for fake if it keeps her. 

I would settle for anything if it keeps her. 

Even the endless masquerade. The gilded prison of false smiles and sharpened charm.

But what I wanted right now was just her. A person I could exist beside without pretense. Without claws. Without the endless performance.

Someone I trusted.

The realization struck like a knife to the ribs. My breath caught.
I trusted her.
Gods.
I trusted her.

Not a calculated gamble. Not a performance. Not leverage.
Trust.

The word itself burned.
Too raw. Too dangerous. Too real.

Panic surged, clawing hot and wild up my throat. My hands shook. My chest locked.
I couldn’t breathe.
I trusted her.

I forced it down, strangled it, but it left my hands shaking in the sheets. Fine. Fine. I trusted her. I wanted to keep her. Not as a pawn, not as another mask—but truly.

Now what?

The question writhed in my chest, restless, venomous. What did a man do with something genuine? With someone who saw him as more than the monster, more than the pretty cage Cazador had built?

I had no frame of reference. No script, no role to rehearse before. This was new. This was raw.

And still my mind betrayed me. Reckless. Dreaming.

What if they really killed Cazador? What if the leash were gone?

I imagined the two of us travelling, saving every broken little soul she could not leave behind. I imagined teaching her to rest, stop, breathe, and let go. I imagined drawing her into a dance, a proper volta, and hearing her laugh at my dramatics.

I imagined a cabin, tucked away from the world—just the two of us.
I imagined her curled in my arms, soft and lazy, her lips brushing mine.

And then—I tried to stop. Gods, I tried. But the images didn’t break. They only deepened, unspooling faster than I could strangle them.

Her hand on my cheek, soft and warm.
The taste of her tongue as I kissed her silly.
Her weight draped across me, face contorted with pleasure.

I dragged a breath in, sharp and unsteady. What in the Nine Hells was happening to me?

The images I kept repressing for the last week came flooding back. 

Her face as she let go. 

What was happening to me?

Her sleep broke the way it always did—sudden, sharp, as though some unseen hand had reached into her dreams and torn her back into the waking world. Her breath caught, a stifled gasp, her body stiffening before she began to tremble.

And just like that, the fantasy broke, shattered like glass. 

I recognized it immediately. The nightmares. They came often, stealing into her rest like thieves. I’d heard the words once, half-whispered in her thrashing. She also told me about some spiders in the dark. I hadn’t asked, not since then. I hadn’t cared to. Back then, her weakness had been nothing more than a possible lever to pull, a pressure point to use if ever the time came.

But now—

Now it struck differently.

She shifted beside me, caught in some shadowed terror, her features twisted in silent fear. I had seen her face enemies without blinking and stood before horrors that would make most men crumple. But here, in the quiet of her dreams, she was defenceless. The thought scraped something raw inside me.

Without quite meaning to, I reached for her. Drew her closer against me. My arm curved around her waist, the other finding her shoulder, pressing her against my chest as though my embrace alone might banish the dark that pursued her.

She resisted at first—small, unconscious struggles, her body flinching against the phantom webs only she could see. But little by little, she softened. The tremors slowed. Her breathing steadied.

I held her through all of it, my grip tightening whenever she shivered, as though I could tether her here, keep her anchored in the present instead of the past that clawed at her.

And when at last the trembling stopped, when her body went slack again in uneasy sleep, something unexpected bloomed in my chest.

Satisfaction.

Bone-deep satisfaction.

A dark, dangerous sort. Not the kind he felt when manipulating a mark, nor the cold thrill of surviving another night under Cazador's leash. This was warmer. Deeper.

She had needed me.

And I had answered.

The realization curled through me, heady and consuming. For once, I wasn’t just surviving, I wasn’t simply enduring and leeching off her like a parasite. I was giving her something she hadn’t requested, but had taken all the same comfort. Security.

And gods help me, it felt incredible.

I held her tighter, my eyes fixed on the ceiling above. Whatever haunted her, I would learn it in time. Whatever shadows whispered in the dark, I would drag them into the light. Not for leverage. Not for survival.

But because I wanted to free her as well.

Because she was mine.

That idiot thought I’d walk away. She had no idea. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.
She was mine.

---

The children whined as we were about to leave the house for the day’s business.

Sael, in particular.

The little vexen was getting bold in his manipulative clinging.

She felt guilty about leaving them shut away all day, so she compensated—more food, trinkets, and distractions.

Almost funny, really. Even a feebleminded teen could play her like a fiddle while I was still fumbling.

And yet, the acrid taste that lingered in my mouth wasn’t only resentment. It was hunger—memory—seared raw on my tongue.

That morning, when she bared her throat to me, I’d meant nothing more than the ritual. A drink. A necessity.

But the instant her scent hit me, the divine bloom of her blood flooded my tongue, and every ounce of careful distance collapsed. Sweet and maddening, laced with something that had nothing to do with blood. It wasn’t sustenance I craved then—it was her. The warmth of her skin. The tremor of her pulse beneath my lips. The way the taste unfurled into something perilously close to desire.

I wanted to ravage her. To hear her break on a moan.

Gods, I nearly lost it. Almost unleashed something primal that had nothing to do with survival and everything to do with possession.

And now, the children clung to her with their whining hands and pitiful voices, tugging at her as though they had any right. She gave it freely, guilt softening her, and they drank it down like greedy little beasts.

While I burned.

All I could taste was her. All I could smell was her.

Mine.

Not theirs.

Never theirs.

The acrid taste followed me still as we left the Enclave.

The streets were quieter now, though silent in this part of the city was never a comfort. Elenya walked beside me in Vaelrith’s skin, her posture measured, gait as deliberate as a man who knew every shadow hid a rival. I was content to keep up the charade, eyes forward, smile light… until she murmured, low enough that it might have been the air itself speaking.

“We’re being followed.”

My smile didn’t falter. “How charming.”

It wasn’t unusual to be watched in this city. Eyes hid in every archway, every slit of curtain. But followed? That was different. A shadow dogging your steps meant intent. I let my gaze slide toward the corner, casual as a yawn.

Gleaming red eyes.

Spawn.

By the look of it, not one of ours—though “ours” was a flexible word in this city. Not Thayan. Lean, hungry, trying hard to look like it belonged among the market stalls. My lips almost curled. Amateur.

Why tail Vaelrith? Debt? Grudge? Some petty intrigue between Houses? Or was it an errand from one of the lords, sending their whelp to sniff after us? I first thought they were tracking her—or rather, the mask she wore. Vaelrith had no shortage of enemies, and that face drew knives like honey drew flies.

Still, the tail kept its distance, shadowing us until we reached the Barterum.

The air inside was thick with vellum and spell-ink, the press of wards prickling along my skin. Elenya peeled off toward the House Noctelith representative, her illusion as seamless as the arrogance in her tone. I drifted elsewhere, hands skimming the spines of books, eyes hooded. To the casual glance, I was a bored consort killing time.

But my senses stretched thin, catching shadows at the edge of my vision, listening for the scrape of a shoe, the pause of breath.

That was when it shifted.

The spawn wasn’t watching her anymore.

They were watching me.

I let the surprise ripple through me, then smothered it flat. My face didn’t change. Never let it change.

But inside—questions, jagged and immediate.

Why me?

Recognition? Orders? A mistake?

I was nobody here. A visiting Spawn, tolerated under the red wizard’s hospitality—a pet of some faraway lord playing dress-up in borrowed finery. I hadn’t crossed or spoken to anyone worth a dagger in the back. Not openly.

So why the interest?

Unless…

My mind itched with old names, old ties. Cazador’s endless string of dealings. His contacts, his rivals. Was this one of them? Had his reach travelled this far, even here? A spawn who’d slipped the leash. A spawn who hadn’t been buried where he belonged.

Or maybe it was simpler. Perhaps they hadn’t recognized me at all. Maybe I’d just slipped. Looked too long, moved too sharply, let something feral flicker through the mask. Predators notice predators. Hunger recognizes itself.

Still, the possibility of recognition lodged like a thorn.

If they knew what I was… who I was…

The thought left my jaw tight, my teeth aching.

I kept my body loose, though, posture easy as a cat stretching in the sun. A careful, practiced slouch. The kind that said: harmless, disinterested, forgettable.

But their gaze didn’t move.

I kept my place, half-hidden behind a shelf, and listened in on her negotiation. She opened with the agreed terms — smooth, precise — then began to raise them. Gently at first, almost conversational, then with the deliberate escalation only a master manipulator can pull off without seeming frantic.

The Noctelith man leaned forward, smug in his own cleverness. He thought he’d scented desperation and could press his advantage until the deal snapped. I saw it in his eyes when he pulled the rug — the little flash of triumph, sure he’d made Vaelrith stumble.

But it wasn’t Vaelrith at all.

And Elenya didn’t stumble. She never stumbled.

After the Red Wizard’s study and the hints we’d gleaned about the Netherese grimoires, she would never hand them over. Not really. This was theatre—a performance with only one ending.

Her dismissal landed cold and clean as polished steel.

“Suit yourself. If this is how you conduct business, I am better off trying my luck elsewhere. I will not stay here and be further disrespected after months of negotiation. If you have no use for the tomes, I am sure I can find a use for them.”

The words cut. Simple, measured — and devastating.

The representative flinched. Only a fraction, but enough. Enough to tell me he’d just realized he’d been maneuvered, and too late to recover without looking weak.

She turned, the folds of Vaelrith’s robes whispering like silk knives against the floor. And there it was again — the faint shadow in the corner—our tail. Still watching. Still locked on me.

I almost missed it, distracted as I was by her.

Gods. She was a bard through and through. Not the kind who strummed a lute or sang pretty lies for coins in a tavern. No. She was the most dangerous kind of liar — the kind you didn’t notice until you were already undone.

Watching her work left something raw in my chest. A flicker of awe, tangled with unease. The same uneasy hunger I felt whenever she put her clever little hands on me, peeling me apart without ever seeming to try.

And if she could dismantle a Noctelith representative in three sentences, what in the Hells could she do to me?

The tail’s gaze prickled at my back through the glass, a reminder I wasn’t the only predator circling here. But for a moment, I wasn’t sure which unnerved me more — the spawn in the shadows, or the woman walking away with victory stitched into every step.

I smiled then, slow and deliberate. Let them follow. I’d decide later whether to let them keep breathing.

The Copper Quill smelled the same as before — that dry-paper musk, layered with mildew in the cracks of the stone and the greasy residue of candles that had burned too long—a place where knowledge rotted as much as it preserved.

Elenya — still cloaked in Vaelrith’s face — cut through the stale air like she belonged there. She handled the requests with that precision I’d expected, speaking in clipped tones that carried just enough entitlement to make the zombie clerk scramble as if his second death depended on it. Every gesture and every inflection was calculated and designed to give the impression that delay was an insult and service was an inevitability.

We combed the shelves for a dozen threads of information. Each one led to disappointment. Manuscripts so heavily redacted that whole pages were nothing but neat black blocks of ink, as though someone had deliberately gutted the meaning and left a corpse behind. The fragments that survived were couched in such abstract language they could have been about anything — the theory of a magical bond, the echo of a forgotten pact, or some obscure ritual tied to bloodlines better left unnamed. Academic scraps. Starvation fare.

Still, she didn’t leave empty-handed. She never did. With a bit of bartering — a sliver of the soulforged iron we’d taken from less fortunate hands — she pried a few more treatises loose. Thin, brittle things that might prove valuable later in the proper context. She weighed them in her hands with a scholar’s indifference, but I could see it — that subtle gleam of satisfaction she never let show too openly.

From there, we made a deliberate detour to the city records hall. On the surface, we were asking after the most banal issues — old land disputes, guild disagreements, tax alterations. Nothing that had anything to do with us. But that was the point. Camouflage. A paper trail thick enough to bury the truth under layers of mundanity. Anyone keeping tabs would see a trail of petty inquiries, nothing that hinted at Netherese tomes or soulforged iron.

The spawn was still there. I caught him in every corner — a shape near the window, the faint presence next to a polished column, always just far enough not to draw notice from the common eye. He was careful, but not clever enough to fool me. At this point, there was no mistaking it: whatever we purchased, whatever we whispered over counters, was being recorded, catalogued, and ferried back to someone else.

I slowed my stride, let the air between us stretch into something casual, even lazy. To anyone watching, we were simply wandering, two bored figures lost in bureaucratic errands. And while Elenya filled the quiet with idle conversation, my hand slipped inside my coat. Fingers closed on glass.

One sip. Sharp, coppery, electric as blood. The potion of mind-reading settled behind my eyes like a second set of senses unfurling.

I brushed against his surface thoughts as we rounded a corner.

Jumbled, fractured impressions hit me first: the taste of stone dust, the damp air of caverns, the hollow shuffle of chained feet in the dark. The sour tang of suspicion. That much was clear. His mind wasn’t ordered the way a surface mine was. It spiralled in broken loops, fragments of commands etched into him like scars. Starvation and commands. Whoever his master was, they weren't kinder to their spawn than Cazador.

But under it all, the clearer strand: curiosity. Master is curious. Watching. Testing. Why is another Underdark spawn here? The drow are not here. No meeting or apparent contact. Timing is wrong—collaboration or coincidence. 

Not enough to give me a name. Not enough to tell me which hand yanked his leash. But enough to know he was spinning a narrative about us. About me. That my presence had raised questions I hadn’t intended to ask.

Interesting.

I let the connection fade before he could sense the brush of it. A mind that fractured is still capable of feeling intrusion, and I wanted no ripples in the water. Better to leave him confident of his own advantage, believing himself the hunter while his leash dragged him closer to me.

Let him watch. Let him build his little report. Sooner or later, the string would lead back to whoever thought they had a claim on me. And when it did, I’d decide whether to cut it clean — or pull until the whole web came tumbling down.

When we returned to the house for lunch and to check on the children, the air felt taut—like a string pulled too tight. Even before we opened the door, I could sense something unsaid clinging to the walls, her posture, and the space between us. The morning's weight still hung heavy on our shoulders, a residue of tension we hadn’t quite scraped off.

The children filled the rooms with noise, but it didn’t cut through the heaviness. Their voices only seemed to underline it, like paint layered over cracks in the wall. Sael pestered for sweets, the younger ones tugged at her sleeves, and though she smiled and soothed, her shoulders stayed stiff. My own answers to them were clipped, distracted. We were still circling the same unspoken argument, and even the presence of small bodies wasn’t enough to disguise it.

We sat at the table. Ate a little. Talked.

It wasn’t a clean conversation—it never was with us. Words snapped short. Tones sharpened, then dulled into forced calm. Twice we teetered on the edge of open argument. Once we let silence do the work instead, heavy and cold, stretched between us like a blade drawn across the wood. But eventually, through attrition rather than agreement, we reached an understanding.

She would keep the credentials.

But she would change her face.

It was, of course, the only logical choice. This city—built on bones and secrets—was a place that tolerated the strange, so long as the peculiar fit within a sanctioned shape. Necromancers were no rarity here. They were not celebrated, not honoured, but tolerated. They were licensed, leashed, and permitted so long as they did not cause trouble, their robes did not stink of raw ambition, and their paperwork was clean and stamped.

Vaelrith’s face was too dangerous, storied, and full of history. To wear it too long was to invite a knife in the back, a whisper at the wrong table, a “chance” encounter that ended in blood.

So we built another.

A living necromancer. Not a master, not a name anyone would know, but something lesser. An assistant. An apprentice. A servant with access. The kind of face no one stared at too long, but everyone accepted.

The mask took shape slowly: a human woman with dark skin, sharp cheekbones, gray eyes that carried none of the fire of her honest gaze. Plausible. Forgettable. A face you might swear you’d passed once in a hall or on a staircase, but could not place if asked. Familiar without being specific. That was the point.

With the credentials of Vaelrith’s household, the identity could be filed under the enclave as his subordinate. A seal-bearer. A whisperer behind the door. Not someone to question. Not someone to name.

And it worked.

People are always more comfortable ignoring a servant than confronting a master. A figure behind the curtain invites less suspicion than one sitting at the table. She would be tolerated. Overlooked. Allowed to move, so long as she carried the correct seals.

Anonymity became armour. A shadow’s safety. Better to be mistaken for someone else, dismissed as unimportant, than remembered and marked.

But as I watched her adjust the robes in the mirror, aligning the fabric to a borrowed body, something twisted in me. The reflection wasn’t hers, but how she held it—the ease, the seamlessness—made my stomach knot. It looked too natural. Too practiced.

I hated how necessary it was.

I hated how well she wore it.

Still, I said nothing. She didn’t need me to tell her the risks; she already knew them. This was the way forward, the only one left to us in a city that demanded mask after mask.

Better to be useful than known.

Safer. Or so we told ourselves.

Because there was a danger, too, in wearing too many masks. A price in forgetting which voice was yours. And for once, I could finally see the danger too—the cracks forming beneath the surface of all those seamless performances. I had envied her powers, envied the ease with which she could slip into another skin, become someone else with nothing but will and craft. I thought it was a freedom. A strength. But watching her now struck me with a clarity I could no longer ignore.

She did not know her own face. No anchor to return to.

And every new face hollowed her further. 

I caught it sometimes in her silence—the way her gaze lingered on mirrors as though she was waiting for the reflection to shift, to betray something she could not name. The way her words caught halfway through a thought, faltered, as though she wasn’t sure which self should finish speaking. And at night, when the house had gone quiet, she would lie beside me, back turned, body still, her breathing too deliberate to be anything but an imitation of sleep.

It finally hit me what that meant. What did it cost her? How empty must that feel? How profoundly alone.

Safer, yes. Masks gave her cover, allowed her to move unchallenged through the dangerous corridors of this blasted world. But not safe. Not from within.

No wonder she kept erasing herself. 

She keeps wearing other faces. 

And as I watched her now, adjusting the robes until the borrowed lines of another life draped over her with uncanny ease, the thought struck like a blade sliding between my ribs.

I wished I could see her true face—if such a thing even remained. Almost as much as I wished I could see mine.

---

During the following days, the rhythm of our false lives settled into something almost unnervingly smooth. We moved like a pair of careful thieves through the city's marrow, amassing a respectable collection of tomes, scraps of lore, names tucked into ledger margins, whispered favours half-promised in smoky alcoves. Piece by piece, we were building me a network out of nothing—threading together the power I’d once thought forever out of reach.

And at the center of it was her.

Her anonymity served us better than either of us could have anticipated. She was no one in the streets—just another gray face swallowed by the crowd. In the halls, she was Vaelrith’s shadow, the subordinate who carried seals and messages, the unremarkable figure who slipped in and out of guarded rooms unnoticed. And behind closed doors, when the illusions fell away, she was the mind stitching everything together—our ledger, our weaver of secrets, the one who always seemed to anticipate the next move.

She still donned Vaelrith’s skin when needed. A flicker of authority drifting through the Enclave like a phantom noble, offering curt nods and fewer words. But even that was measured. She excused her absences with whispers of complex ritual work—esoteric, consuming spellcraft too important to interrupt. The Ring of Tongues made the disguise flawless; her words flowed in perfect cadence, whether her lips shaped Common or Drow. The illusion was seamless, unquestioned.

The children, too, were stabilizing. More than stabilizing—they were beginning to grow into themselves. The gnawing edge of panic that had clung to them when we first gathered them under our roof was dulling. Their laughter—still rare—came more easily. Their silences were less brittle.

Veylith, especially.

She remained strange, still vanishing for hours into the bowels of the enclave, curling herself into impossible crawlspaces like some phantom wraith. But the fear had ebbed. She no longer emerged bristling, her eyes wild and searching for danger. She sat with us more often, watching, listening. Sometimes she even spoke, her voice quiet but steady.

And when she did, she did not flinch.

That, more than anything, told me we were making progress. The haunted feralness was softening. Not gone—never gone—but shifting into something sharper. Something that might, in time, become strength instead of a wound.

Progress.

The feeding schedule was kept religiously.

She made it so.

Not as a whim, not even as kindness—it was order. Routine. A discipline she imposed on both of us. I was allowed indulgence to her blood, but not neglect. Never neglect. If I delayed, she pressed me. If I tried to feign restraint, she called me on it. And so I fed, and fed again—so much it bordered on excess.

And that was the truth of it: it wasn’t a sip here and there, a stolen draught to keep me from collapsing. It was cups. Mouthfuls. Rivers. Night after night, I drank her to the point where, by any sane measure, she should have been white and faint on the floor, her veins wrung dry. But she never allowed it. Her restoration magic sealed the wound before it began to throb, coaxing her blood back into her body as though she were drawing from some endless well. She never wavered. Never faltered.

The hunger dulled. Quieted. Not gone, never gone, but pushed so far down it was almost imperceptible. I had never been so full. So sated. For centuries, I had lived in a state of gnawing want, every thought and gesture shaped around the ache of absence. Now I could drink until my tongue was stained and my throat slick with warmth, and still she would steady me after, lips whispering some spell that left her flush returned as though nothing had passed between us.

It was obscene.

And I had to admit—reluctantly, and only to myself—that it worked—more than worked.

I had never been better. Clearer. The haze I’d carried for centuries was gone, stripped clean from my mind. I was sharper, stronger, steadier. Changing.

Cuts sealed near-instantly now. Bruises vanished before I even registered the ache. My strength thrummed in my veins like a second heartbeat. My senses—already sharp—were heightening into something otherworldly. I could hear the drip of water across stone, feel the vibrations of a rat scurrying through a wall, taste the crackle of wards in the air. This was no ordinary feeding. This was acceleration. Deep. Dangerous, perhaps.

And yet the greater danger was not in the strength, but in the desire that came with it.

Because the more I drank, the more I wanted. Her blood was a furnace that stoked something I had long since believed dead. Not just hunger for sustenance, but for her—her skin, her nearness, the unguarded warmth she offered when she pressed her wrist, her throat, her pulse against my mouth. The taste no longer sated me. It tempted. It invited. It demanded.

Something else was evolving, too—something I refused to name.

Because it wasn’t just the edge taken off my hunger anymore—it was the sheer quantity. Gods, I drank so much. More blood than I had ever dared take in all my years beneath Cazador’s leash. More than I had ever believed possible. Cup after cup, vein after vein, night after night, until my fangs slid in with the same ease as breath. Until her warmth flooded me, a torrent, a river I thought I’d drown in. Enough to sate not just survival, but desire. Enough to make me feel… whole.

Each feeding left me heavier, sharper, fuller, and still—it was never enough. The more she gave, the more I wanted. The taste became a lodestone, pulling at every thought, every restraint. I was drinking oceans compared to the trickles of rats’ blood I’d once been thrown. It was a glut of life that should have made me sicken, but it remade me.

And if I closed my eyes, I could still taste it, clinging to the back of my throat—thick, metallic sweetness, coating my tongue until even air tasted red. I drank enough that sometimes I felt it pool in my gut like wine, heavy, sloshing when I moved. Enough that my lips stayed stained, the faint stick of it drying on the corners of my mouth if I didn’t bother to wipe it clean.

It was a grotesque parody of feasting—what nobles did with banquets, what mortals did with roasted meats and silver cups, I did with her veins. I wasn’t sipping. I wasn’t surviving. I was glutting myself to the edge of collapse, and still she restored, still she offered, still she endured.

The more I swallowed, the more I knew I should feel sick. I should gag, should drown, should recoil. But I didn’t. Instead, it sharpened me. Every swallow another stitch, mending something I hadn’t realized was torn. Every mouthful, another spark lighting some cold chamber I had long since abandoned.

And with that fullness came something more dangerous than hunger: want.

Her blood was not just life but heat, closeness, and hers. The pulse against my teeth was not only sustenance but a rhythm I began to crave. The curve of her wrist in my hand, the warmth of her throat pressed against my mouth—those moments undid me in ways I didn’t want to admit. It was no longer enough to drink. I wanted to linger, hold, taste the tremor in her breath, and see how far I could push that heat between us.

I told myself it was a strategy. Routine. Discipline.

But the truth bled through every time her hand steadied on my shoulder and her skin brushed mine as if by accident. My hunger could no longer be bound to the mouth and vein. It was spilling outward, dangerous, ravenous, demanding more than I dared name.

And yet—stranger still—it left me feeling human.

Not despite the blood, but because of it. Because she gave it freely, because I took it and did not kill her, because there was ritual, care, a rhythm that felt almost… intimate. For the first time in centuries, I wasn’t merely a beast gnawing at scraps, a monster chained and starved to obedience. I was something closer to a man—aching, conflicted, rotten, yes—but alive.

And with it, the desire grew. Not only for her blood, though that remained an ever-present hunger coiled at the base of my spine—but for her. For the way her hand lingered when she steadied me, the brush of her skin against mine when she leaned too close, and the sound of her breath when she exhaled beneath my teeth. Every drop I drank was another tether pulling me closer, another reminder that I was not only surviving her, but bound to her.

And gods help me, that was worse than the hunger.

Because the blood didn’t just rebuild my strength, it rebuilt me.

It made me feel.

For the first time in centuries, I began to feel like a person again. A rotten one, yes—damaged, venomous, fractured beyond repair—but a person nonetheless. No longer just a beast gnawing at scraps, no longer the weapon Cazador had honed and discarded. The blood gave me more than strength. It gave me the illusion of humanity, the warmth of memory, the echo of what it meant to be alive.

I told myself it was just the blood. The routine. The strategy. The order she’d forced on me. I told myself it was nothing more than the careful scaffolding of survival.

But when she stood too close—when the brush of her hand against mine lingered half a heartbeat too long, when she smiled without meaning to—I knew better.

I knew what I was ignoring.

I knew this heat, even if I’d spent centuries burying it beneath disgust, replacing it with performance, masks, and control.

I knew an urge when I saw one.

And gods help me, I knew exactly where it led. 

So I ignored it. Or tried to. But the more I denied it, the sharper it became, until obsession was the only word that fit—raw, bitter, undeniable.

Obsessed.

It stung to think it, let alone name it, but gods, how accurate it had become.

I was hyper-focused on her at all times. Every flicker of movement, every shift of breath, every passing glance. My awareness hooked itself into her without permission, a tether I could not cut, no matter how I clawed at it. I craved her presence like a starving man craves warmth. And the longer I watched, the more I noticed.

Some things I adored. Little fragments of humanity, she thought, slipped by unnoticed, but never did. The way her eyes found mine first when she entered a room—not obvious, not brazen, but a subtle sweep, quick and practiced, like she was confirming I still existed. The way she sometimes inhaled softly, deliberately, when close enough to catch my scent, closing her eyes just for a breath as though it steadied her. And the smile—barely there, a curve of her lip she thought she’d hidden. I devoured these details, each proof that I was not the only one bound by this invisible tether.

But other things filled me with dread.

The extent of her self-erasure. The violence she did to herself daily, quietly, methodically, in the name of endurance. How poorly she fed, treating meals as obligations rather than sustenance, her plate a battlefield where she always surrendered first. Her body stretched thinner and thinner under the weight of her endless routines. It forced my hand into cooking more often—feeding her when she refused to feed herself. At first, it was duty. Then defiance. And then… something else. I found I enjoyed it, almost savoured it: the quiet victory of slipping past her iron guard, the way she yielded without realizing it. It felt like rebellion, reminding her she was still flesh and blood, not just discipline and devotion.

Then there was the fog in her eyes. That ever-present haze, a film dulling the light behind them, as if she lived half in shadow. It lifted only rarely—moments of clarity so startling they left me breathless. I began to wait for those moments, hoard them, even as I wondered what they cost her.

And the secrets. Gods, the secrets.

She hid them with precision, like an artist. A master at cloaking truth in plain sight, weaving it into her silence, routines, and careful omissions. She didn’t need lies—she simply withheld, and it was enough to make me ache with suspicion.

At night, when she thought me lost in trance, she would slip away. At first, I dismissed it. Then I followed. Once, I caught her bent over scrolls, her face lit by sigils I didn’t recognize, glyphs whispering with quiet menace. Another time, I trailed her farther and found what she had hidden.

A narrow passage, concealed with stone and spell, leading deep beneath the Enclave.

Catacombs.

She was mapping them. Line after line on parchment, runes and markers precise to the inch. It was careful, meticulous work, the kind one does not share lightly.

Nothing more, at least on the surface.

But why keep it from me? Why move like a shadow when the path could have been shared? Why let me follow like a thief, when a single word could have invited me to her side?

She only looked at me with that infuriating calm when I confronted her, as though I had asked the most trivial questions. She told me I was free to come if I wished. Nothing more. As if it meant nothing. As if all the secrecy, the sleepless nights, the gnawing weight she carried did not matter.

But I could feel it. The air around her had changed—colder, heavier, thick with something unspoken.

She was being strange. Distant in a way that unsettled me more than I cared to admit.

And I did not care for it.

I did not care for it one bit at all.

 

So, I focused instead on the work. On gathering information. On watching the strings tugging at Cazador’s empire unravel.

And unravel they did.

We were still trying to locate his prior siblings—a fellow spawn of that twisted crypt, long since vanished into the Crimson Parlour. But the degenerate never left. And every attempt to approach was met with silence or deflection.

Everything was teetering. Everything was close.

It all started from a single conversation.

“Astarion?”

I arched a brow. “Yes, little dove?”

“Something is fishy.” She said hesitantly with her brows in that adorable pondering frown.

I sighed. “About what, exactly?”

“Cazador. Something’s wrong with him. I don’t even know how to put it into words. It’s been gnawing at me all day. Will you… humor me? Spitball with me? Even if it’s hard for you?”

My jaw tightened. I hated when she said things like that—as if I were fragile and expected me to run. But I nodded. “Go on.”

She leaned forward, eyes glinting. “I spied on him yesterday, right before the council. He was feeding. Not just a little—five victims, in one night. Entertained by the spawn first. But the spawn are still under house arrest, so they didn’t hunt them. Someone else is sending them, or they all willingly brought themselves to the palace.”

I frowned. “That’s certainly… unusual.”

“Not just unusual. He hated it. Yet kept forcing himself to feed. He complained to the skeleton about the vintage but kept drinking. He was forcing it down like medicine. No pleasure at all. It can’t be hunger—not after draining three victims before that one.”

I blinked. “Cazador is not in the habit of doing something he doesn’t enjoy.”

“Exactly. He drained them dry anyway. Five bodies in one night, Astarion. That’s not hunger, it can't be just that—that’s purpose, an obligation.”

Unease prickled at the edges of my thoughts." Where is he getting the ..." I caught myself right before saying it, "the victims from?"

"That I find strange, one of the victims wanted to talk about some business with him before he attacked her. Five victims a night ought to attract attention. He should be paranoid right now, not reckless. One missing spawn with all his secrets… you’d think he’d be tightening his grip, not drawing attention.”

“Right. And there’s more.” She hesitated, then lowered her voice. “He didn’t feel like a vampire lord to me. I’ve seen others in the Underdark—strong ones. He seemed closer to a very powerful true vampire, but not… elevated. Not lordly.”

I sat up straighter. “You what?”

Her mouth curved. “I’ve seen other vampire lords.”

“Yes. Several. The Underdark crawls with them. It’s vampire paradise.”

“And you’re alive?” I scoffed. “How?”

“Philosopher’s question.” She waved a hand. “But listen. If Cazador is just a true vampire, how has he kept his throne this long? Any stronger lord should’ve crushed him by now. Does he have allies?”

“Not that I ever saw. He rarely left the estate. Visitors were nobles, clients, and sycophants. No covens. No fellow lords.”

“Did he ever use magic? I mean his own—not through trinkets or scrolls?”

I shook my head slowly. “Always Woe. That damned staff.”

She leaned closer, her gaze sharp enough to cut. “Then how did he kill his sire? A vampire lord, Astarion. That’s more than compulsion—it’s raw power. Spawn don’t simply… overthrow a lord on their own.”

I swallowed, suddenly cold.

“What’s the real difference?” I asked quietly. “Between a true vampire and a vampire lord?”

Her expression turned solemn. “Negative energy. Lords are saturated with it—body and soul. Some channel it into magic, like liches or mummy lords do. Others pour it into their flesh, making themselves stronger, faster, harder to kill. Either way, the positive energy recoils from them much more visibly than from spawn. You can feel it—it stains the air around them.”

“And Cazador?”

Her eyes narrowed. “Too clean. Some recoil, yes, but no darkness clinging like it should. He’s powerful, yes—but not like that. Still, he is too powerful just to be a true vampire. Something is missing, Astarion. And if it doesn’t make sense, we’re not seeing the whole picture.”

I didn’t like it.
Not what she said, not what it meant.

Gods, how little I knew about my damnation had never occurred to me. Sixteen decades in chains and I still couldn’t tell you why my veins burned the way they did, why the leash sat so deep in my soul, why even the thought of freedom always ended in blood. I’d mouthed the words, of course — vampirism, curse, spawnhood. But what did they mean? Only what Cazador let us believe. Only what he whispered into our ears when the hunger gnawed too loud to think.

And I’d swallowed it whole like all of us.

Her research was eye-opening. 

The document about vampire weaknesses was even more so. I had no idea about the intricacies of my weaknesses for almost two centuries. 

And now...

She spoke of vampire lords and true vampires, of power clinging like rot to the Weave — things I had felt without the words. All the nights I thought myself clever for surviving, all the centuries I thought endurance was victory… I had been a dog chasing its own tail on a leash. My master had known. He had always known. That’s why he never feared rebellion. Why did he never waste breath explaining what we were? Knowledge was freedom, and freedom was the one thing he couldn’t risk.

He kept us starved. He kept us ignorant. And he was right to be afraid, because knowing even this much — scraps, conjecture, fragments Elenya pried from dusty tomes and dangerous whispers — lit something in me I hadn’t felt since the coffin opened.

Possibility.

If there are rules, there are loopholes. If there is a curse, there is a counter-curse. If there is a leash, there must be a knife sharp enough to sever it.

And I want that knife in my hand.

I am done being a passenger in my own unlife, waiting for scraps, mercy, and luck to tilt in my favour. If I am to be free, it will not be because the world grows kind or because some god takes pity on me. It will be because I take it. Because I rip apart every lie my master fed me and stitch the truth together myself.

Cazador wanted me ignorant. Fine. Let him choke on the irony when knowledge becomes my weapon. Let him see how little his leash holds once I stop obeying.

For the first time in decades, I felt the shape of something like power — not in my claws or fangs, but in the very act of asking questions. In daring to imagine there’s more to me than what he allowed.

Maybe that’s all freedom is at first. A thought. A seed. A refusal to keep playing the role written for you.

And by the hells, I intend to grow it into something sharp enough to cut him open.

We were still circling the same questions and half-answers when my gaze dropped to her hand. Her nails were tapping idly against the table—restless, like she was holding something back.

“The spider,” I said, voice low. “How often can you warg into it?”

She gave a little shrug, candlelight glinting off her lashes. “No more than five minutes a day. The longer I stay away, the longer I can hold the thread when I return.”

“And if you push it?”

Her lips thinned. “Then it pushes back.”

I tilted my head, leaning closer until she had no choice but to meet my gaze. “Can you use it to check on Cazador again?”

Her eyes flickered up, unreadable. “Yes. But not for long.”

I should have told her to leave it. To let him rot behind silk and shadows where he belonged. But the hunger in me—the gnawing need for answers, for leverage—was louder.

“Do it.”

She didn’t argue. Didn’t protest. Just closed her eyes, exhaled slowly and steadily, and let the tether slip between us like a thread tugged taut.

Then, unexpectedly, she asked, “Do you want to see as well?”

I blinked. “You can do that?”

“I think so. But I’d need help.”

Suspicion curled through me. “What kind of help?”

Her skin rippled as though something alive moved beneath it, muscles twitching against their shape. The first thing to change was the colour—her pale tone darkening, bleeding into an uncanny shade of green that looked almost luminous in the candlelight. Her face shortened, jaw snapping back with an audible click, her nose flattened, and her cheekbones seemed to melt away. The shift was grotesque in its swiftness, but stranger still was what followed: her ears lengthened and widened until they curved upward like sails, twitching faintly as though straining to catch sounds I could not hear.

Her eyes expanded, pushing against their sockets, swallowing up the whites until only dark, liquid black remained—huge and unblinking, like a deep pool you could fall into and never touch bottom. Astarion had seen all manner of horrors, masks, and monsters in his time, but there was something other about this—something neither elf, nor goblin, nor any of the half-breed oddities that stalked Faerûn’s shadows.

Her limbs compressed, frame shrinking just enough to unsettle, proportions bending into a childlike and alien form. Fingers thinned and stretched, nails curving sharper at the tips as if made for climbing or scratching. By the time the transformation finished, she stood—or somewhat hunched—before me as a small, green-skinned creature, ears fanned wide, eyes too large for her narrow face.

I stepped back instinctively, caught between disgust and fascination. I had never seen such a thing before—not among goblins, drow experiments, or even whispered in the cruel stories that passed through Cazador’s court.

“Okay, now—I know you hate when I comment, but what in the Nine Hells is that?”

Her new mouth stretched into a grin far too wide for comfort. When she spoke, her voice came out the same as ever, calm and practical, which only deepened the uncanny wrongness of it.

“A verdan,” she said matter-of-factly, adjusting her jaw with another faint pop as if she were testing a new instrument.

“Now stop staring and focus. I’ll need you to cast the detect thoughts scroll—and drink the mind-reading potion—as soon as I start warging.”

I arched a brow. “That seems… redundant.”

“Yes, I know. Not on their own. But together?” Her strange new smile curled at the corners. “It should be enough to bridge the tether. To let you… share what the spider sees.”

A thrill of unease prickled up my spine. Gods, she was serious.

“Fine,” I finally said, drawing the scroll from my satchel. “But if this ends with me twitching on the floor while you rummage through my skull, I will be very cross.”

Her eyes—now too large, too luminous in this verdan guise—gleamed with something like amusement. “Noted. I’ll let you know when to start.”

Her eyes turned black.

“Now.”

I did. The words of the scroll slipped from my tongue, the potion burning like acid down my throat. And she didn’t resist me.

The moment stretched, taut as a bowstring. Her face tightened as though she were listening to something impossibly far away. Her breath hitched. Knuckles whitened where she gripped the edge of the desk.

Then—blood. Just a thin crimson line slipping from one nostril, tracing the curve of her upper lip. She didn’t wipe it away.

And then it hit me.

Not words. Not thoughts. Images. Feelings.

The spider’s vision cracked open inside my skull—eight disjointed eyes painting the world in alien symmetry. Web-light shimmered in impossible angles. Every detail sharpened until it cut: candleflame bending through dust, the faint tremor of footsteps somewhere too far away to hear, the tang of death woven thick into the air like perfume.

Her emotions tangled with it—sharp, cold, threaded with a scholar’s ruthless focus. Yet beneath that? Fear. A coil of dread she tried to bury.

And under it all… I felt her tether.

A pulling, stretching sensation, like she was a thread woven too tightly into cloth that didn’t want her. Something resisting her intrusion, pressing back with silent malice.

The chamber is a study-bedchamber hybrid, austere yet indulgent in its darkness. Every detail speaks of control, vanity, and cruelty. One i have never seen.

The floor is polished stone, veined with cold blue-gray hues and broken by golden inlays that mark geometric paths across the room. At its heart rests a broad table—almost an altar—on which a glass goblet, a scroll of names, and other grim objects sit in quiet prominence. These are not idle trinkets, but instruments of power, ritual, and dominion.

To the left, a high-backed chair of carved wood waits before a writing desk, its surface littered with tomes and records. The volumes are not casual reading but obsessive collections: “The Mortal View: Eyewitness Accounts of the Bhaalspawn Crisis,” “Eternal Cruelty,” “Machinations of a Vampire Lord.” Each book a reflection of Cazador’s hunger for control, lore, and the echo of tyrants before him.

Candles burn throughout the space, their golden light unable to soften the cold precision of the chamber. Against the far wall, a simple bed draped in red and gray linens rests beneath tall shelves of bottled spirits and alchemical flasks, hints of indulgence amid the cruelty. A partition screen stands nearby, painted and gilded, its elegance a reminder of how Cazador cloaks brutality in refinement.

The atmosphere here is stifling—a theater of cruelty dressed as sophistication. It is a place where immortality feels claustrophobic, every shadow whispering of obsessions, every polished surface reflecting centuries of control. This is not a sanctuary but a gilded coffin, a room that mirrors the master himself: cold, cunning, and endlessly consuming.

The spider crept through a seam in the stone, crawling along a fracture slick with old ichor and powdered bone. Its body hummed faintly with the heat of a summoning, the stink of sulfur, the pulse of infernal presence.

The chamber’s oppressive quiet was broken only by the soft flicker of candlelight and the faint scrape of fabric as Cazador shifted on the bed. Draped in dark, flowing robes, he sat poised like a king in exile, one hand lazily resting against his knee while his eyes lingered on the tall mirror across from him. The glass shimmered strangely—not with reflection, but with a faint haze, as though something pressed against it from the other side.

The spider’s many eyes caught the truth at once. The smell hit like a lash—sulphur, acrid and unmistakable, heavy in the air behind the mirror. Infernal runes, subtle to a mortal gaze but starkly obvious to her vision, pulsed faintly along the mirror’s frame. Each sigil burned with a sullen, reddish glow, their lines carved like veins of fire feeding into the glass.

Cazador didn’t recoil from the scent, nor from the glow. He leaned forward slightly, his face sharp in the candlelight, studying his own reflection—or perhaps the thing watching him through it. A predator savoring his secrets. A master playing with the leash of something older, hungrier, and infinitely dangerous.

The spider clung higher in the shadows, legs drawn tight against the wall. The reek of brimstone made her limbs twitch, and still the runes pulsed, steady and patient. Whatever bargain was bound here had teeth.

When the light setteled down. Cazador stood and started walking. Not still. Not poised.

He was pacing.

Fast. Sharp. a voice erupted from the mirror.

" Hello there dearest. Appologies for the delay. I am rather busy and your calls as appreciated as they are are getting a bit numerous."

" Do not mock me Devil. This is serious buisness. Any news about the missing wretch?"

The devil on the other side of the mirror laughed heartadly before answering "As priviously stated, the little vampling is cloaked from sight. My bet is on nontetection but what do I know."

" Something is strange i am telling you. Astarion failed to return, the boy should have showed himself by now. He would know better than to run for me again. You sure he is not dead? "

" Positive" 

"Still missing then. I ought not to be surprised - the boy has always been troublesome. But to disappear now, when we are almost ready? It is unconscionable, even for him. where did this worm hide his wretched self. WHY CAN I NOT FEEL HIM? I have dispatched the brood to find him and bring him home. But they all came back with nothing. No amount of pain has motivated his brothers and sisters to find him.  It has been weeks and he is still missing.  It seems Baldur's Gate has swallowed him whole." 

" Any news from the gurs? "

" The little wretch seemed to think he left North. To either Daggerford or Waterdeep but i havn't received a single update in a tenday. I am searching further afield, but my reach outside the city is limited. " 

" I already called in some favors but that will cost you Szarr. Helping you find your runaway spawn was not part of the deal"

" Can it prceed without him ? " 

" Abselutely not" 

“I’ve sent them to you,” he hissed. “Fed your rites. Strengthened the link. What does one wretch matter?”

The devil’s tone sharpened, amusement thinning to frost.

“Because the stray was your biggest contributor.”

" What does it matter, He is Mine !" 

" Well if he is why don't you have him then. Do not pester me about your failings. If you hadn’t taken your sweet time, Szarr,” the devil purred, “none of this would’ve happened. Truly." 

" I am remedying that now" 

" it doesn't solve the issue now does it.  Nor does it absolve you from your faults. To think you would be fool enough to just burry him. If you hadn’t left your pet unattended—hadn’t let him slip off his leash—"

“He was contained!” Cazador barked, spinning. “Buried. Broken. He tried to run, to defy me. he had to be punished.”

“So let me get this straight. Your spawn attempt to escape you oh so merciful and fatherly care, and to remedy that you just leave him unatteded. outside of you sight and control"

the vision started to flicker. 

" No, keep looking" Astarion voice reverberated in her mind and he could hear it as if it was in his own" 
he felt some pain bloom inside elenya's mind followed by a fog like feeling wrapping around it and the vision came back. 

Cazador was frozen. anger barely contained 

“You’ve already gotten the best of him. He did more than his share. If only you allows it to go through. I will be able to find him and when I do, I will make him scream for this and it won't make any difference.“

“You don’t understand, Szarr. This isn’t a buffet. This is a contract. Those were the terms.”

“Then change it!” Cazador snapped, pacing again. “Rewrite the terms. You’re a devil, not a scribe. You negotiate.”

The devil leaned forward, and the mirror flared bright red.

“ And Why would I do that. I warned you, Szarr.”

“He’s out there. If you’d simply let me—”

“No.”

The room stilled.

“It is all. Or nothing. You are not as special as you might think. many would take the deal. the only reson i am entertaining this is because I would loath to wait for some other baffon to start over.”

Cazador trembled. 

He turned away, muttering to himself.

“Ungrateful all of you lots. All of them. Rotten little parasites. I gave them eternity. I gave him a home, pleasure, status—”

His voice splintered.

Silence.

Then the devil spoke once more.

“You've already wasted enough of my time.”

The mirror dimmed.

And Cazador was left alone in the dark.

Shaking.

He wasn’t just desperate. He looked frantic 

He was losing. Somethung.

And somewhere out there…

Astarion was the reason everything was coming undone.

Pain invaded Elenya's mind and the vision cut short 

Back into the study, I was faced with Elenya's verdan form bleeding from all visible orifices.

“Elenya—”

“Don’t.” Her voice was tight, strangled. She clung to it until at last she gasped and severed the thread. Her body jerked, shoulders slumping as she braced against the desk. A handkerchief came away red when she wiped her nose.

What the hell was I doing?

Gods, I’d told her to do it. Pressed her. Watched her nose bleed and still asked for more. I forced her hand and body past its limits, just because I wanted to know what Cazador was hiding.

" Stop that. I told you, fussing and worrying is my thing. You are going after my brand."

" Elenya" 

" Astarion, Stop. Just fucking stop. Would you? Can you not self-flagellate yourself over every little mishap? It's cute and all, seeing you worrying about me. But the pull's backlash when you do that self-blaming thing is exhausting. What happened to the Devil May Care Rogue I travelled with? How about a joke about my lack of stamina? I would even take any, if not all, of you horrible innuendos rather than having to feel you over and over again, torturing yourself with guilt about something so trivial: Getting guilty about things that are not your fault. "

I blinked at her, stunned by the bite in her tone. She dabbed at her nose with the handkerchief like it was nothing more than spilled wine at supper.

“Not my fault?” I said carefully. “I did rather insist you continue for me, darling. That feels a touch like fault.”

She shot me a look, all sharp cheekbones and sharper patience. “Oh, spare me. You asked, I chose—end of story. I would have done exactly the same if you had not been here. You’re not some sinister puppet master pulling my strings, Astarion. I made the call. Me. And I’ll do it all over again. That was extremely vital. Cazador have an active infernal deal, and somehow you are part of it.”

Her voice softened then, almost too quiet. “You don’t get to steal that from me, even with guilt. Bring back my prick, the one who kept mocking me and making fun of me. ”

For a moment, I had nothing clever to say. Her eyes pinned me, unflinching, steady in a way mine never were.

“Well,” I murmured, tilting my head, “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the sight of you bleeding for me just a little. Suits you, in a rather decadent sort of way.”

Her brow arched, unimpressed. “Decadent? That’s your word choice?”

I leaned closer, eyes on the faint red smear against her handkerchief. “Oh, you look decadent indeed, pomgranate of temptation. Don’t BE coy with,e. You’re practically begging me to lean in and…” I mimed a slow and deliberate lick before flashing fangs in a grin. “Wouldn’t even need to ask nicely.”

She rolled her eyes." I can't even complain. I did just say I'd take your innuendos gladly. But wow, that was quick. And what did we say about the pomegranate thing?" 

" I am pretty sure there are more of my things you would gladly take if you ever indulged. And I promise that won't be quick." 

She pinched the bridge of her nose, still blotched faintly red. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I? Well, knock yourself out, I'm sure you will eventually run out of innuendos.”

“Oh, darling, you didn’t just walk—you positively strolled. Jumped and threw yourself into it. And now we are here, and I will make sure you stay there,” I let my grin sharpen.“ And I would rather knock something else, if it’s all the same to you.”

She sighed, pinching the bridge of her nose again. “I may have overestimated how much of this I can bear.”

I let my grin spread, slow and wicked. “Mmm, I hear that often. Usually, when they’ve already had three rounds and are begging me for mercy, you’ll forgive me if I don’t take it as discouragement."

 

"Gods above.  How can you turn every single thing I say into something sexual?"

Oh, this was fun. This was so much fun. I couldn't stop. This was her. 

The real her.

" I told you I never run out of material. But, honestly, it's something else I would rather be turning if you catch my meaning."

She gave a short laugh, exasperated. “Lords above, do you even listen? You… you are relentless.”

“Relentless, tireless, shameless,” I ticked them off on my fingers. “All exceptional qualities in a lover. You really should take advantage before someone else does. And for the record, I did listen, my dear, to every word,” I purred. “I just choose to imagine them spoken while you’re gasping against a wall, or whispering them into my ear while you ride me into the mattress.”

Her hand smacked flat against her forehead, not in anger but sheer disbelief, before she dropped the bloodied handkerchief onto the desk with a sigh that was half exasperation, half amusement. “Saints, please, preserve me. I give up! Can we get back to the matter at hand?"

"Oh, I was rather hoping to be the matter under your hand. Instead of begging long-dead husks, why not turn some of this energy toward yours and truly? Gods only know how I would adore hearing you begging for me." I leaned closer, close enough to tease. “I would have you on your knees in no time, lips parted, looking up at me with those clever eyes. Gods, the thought of you begging for me—” I inhaled sharply, qcting like I was savouring the thought. 

Her lips parted, the faintest inhale betraying her. "Wait! What did you just say?"

I smiled, sharp as my fangs. “Careful, little dove. Keep feeding me openings, and one of these nights, you might actually ....” When she said those simple, devastating little words, it all came crashing down.

"Stop, you idiot, that's not what I mean. I meant that's it. That's how I can go with you,” she said excitedly.

"What?"

"To the parlour"

"What! No, we already talked about this. You are not drinking that bloody death potion again. End of discussion."

"No, not that. I could go as your mage, your pet.”

I blinked. “Excuse me?”

“As your pet mage.” She stepped closer, arms folded loosely. “They said only vampires are allowed in. No other undead. No mortals.”

“Yes?”

“But they said nothing about cattle, something owned.”

I stared at her. “have you lost your mind.… not exactly better.”

“It’s perfect,” she said. “You’re cover is an old-blooded spawn of a famous pedigree, Astarion. Your supposed maker is a fellow leader of another necropolis known for necromantic cults. You supposedly came here with Thayan backing. It would make sense for you to have your own arcane plaything.”

“Elenya—”

“I can wear that mask easily enough,” she said. “I speak only when you let me. I display your bite mark—” her fingers brushed her neck, where the faint ghost of a healed bite still lingered “—and I stay quiet. Glowing robes. Leashed pride. All for show. They’ll eat it up. What do we have to lose? If they don't buy it, we will not be admitted at the door?”

“And what, exactly, happens when they ask you to prove you’re mine?”

" I doubt they would ask you to fuck me right there. You can just bite me; that's fine. I don't know why you are acting like it's a stupid idea; it's way more believable than us just being buddies."

"That is insane!"

"I thought you would revel in the idea of bossing me around. You just say as much yourself. Already chickening out, 'darling'? Who would have figured"

Is this lunatic goading me?

" Oh, it's on. You will regret this."

" Do your worst. " She said, laughing. " But in all seriousness, how about this? We can continue exploring this afternoon, playing that role, so we can set up the cover, and come tonight, we'll attempt it if you feel comfortable."

I said yes.
I had no choice but to say yes.
Hoping not to get lost in the fantasy.

But I wanted to uncover this.
To uncover him.

He had secrets, my master. Many—I’d always known. But some were buried deeper than I imagined.

An active infernal contract. A long-standing one.

We thought again about his name, bound through the Ledger of the Unredeemed—the hell-forged book of those who owed too much and lived too long.

A contract with Cania, the Eighth Layer of Hell, was no small feat. The Book of Whispers allowed further investigation. We traced it further—Cazador had an active pact with Mephistopheles himself.

All signs pointed to one truth:
Cazador was tangled in hellish strings of the highest calibre.

I never knew.

Cazador had always been figuratively hellish—but I’d never known him to literally consort with an archdevil.

What else had I never known?

One thing was certain: he was frantic. And perhaps—just perhaps—he was more afraid than he ever let on.

I thought again about the devil in the basement, sealed in the mirror.

I never liked basements.

Not before Cazador. Certainly not after.

But this one—it felt different. Less like a dungeon, more like a forgotten altar. The air hummed faintly with held breath and old magic, thick with alchemical stink and dust that refused to settle. I hated how familiar it felt. How easy it was to remember.

Elenya was already at the mirror, moving with deliberate silence, her cloak trailing behind her like fog. She muttered an incantation under her breath, fingers splayed over the cold glass. The glyphs flickered back to life. She had already identified her through Vaelrith’s notes.

The surface shimmered—then roared.

There she was.

Nyphithys.

The same erinyes from before. She had once served the lich Arklem Greeth, Archmage Arcane of the Arcane Brotherhood of Luskan, in the mid-to-late 14th century. After the Brotherhood’s fall, her master retreated to the graveyards of Luskan, aided by mysterious allies—where his beloved Valindra Shadowmantle had been returned to undeath as a lich. The pair traded Nyphithys’s contract to Ilyn Toth, for whom she brokered deals and favours.

Though technically a lesser devil, she reported directly to the Dark Eight—a coven of pit fiend generals from Nessus, the Ninth Hell, who plotted Hell’s wars and movements.

Her pact with Ilyn was later broken. She no longer had a master summoner.

Her wings stretched behind her—shadowy, pinned like obscene heraldry. Black armour clung to her like a second skin, shifting with each breath. Her eyes sparked molten gold as the binding circle flared, holding her fast within the frame.

And gods—the smile she wore—

Sickeningly sweet. Terribly sharp.

“Oh,” she sang, voice curling like smoke, “back so soon? You must have missed me.”

She didn’t see Elenya. Not even a flicker. A useful trick, that of invisibility. One, I was increasingly glad she could maintain.

“She can’t see you,” I sent through Elenya’s verdan telepathic form.

“I know,” came her voice, soft in my mind through the bond. She still thinks you’re alone. Let’s keep it that way.

“I wanted to see you—just me this time,” I said aloud, stepping forward, careful not to cross the chalked ward. “No wizard. Just a curious little vampire.”

Nyphithys laughed—low, musical, obscene.
“So the cattle sent a chattel. Is that progress? I can’t tell anymore. Your kind always come looking for bargains. So… what is it, little bloodsucker? If you care not for Ilyn, what do you want? Power? A kingdom of corpses and gold?
I’m afraid I find myself somewhat indisposed at the moment.”

I swallowed my disdain.
“I came to ask for information about an individual. Would you know who Cazador Szarr is?”

Nyphithys paused.

It was subtle—barely a hitch in her breath, a tightening at the corners of her cruel, amused smile.
But I saw it.
Felt it in the air like a taut bowstring.

The name landed.

Her fingers, which had been idly tracing sigils into the glass, stilled.

“Cazador Szarr…” she echoed slowly, her voice curling like smoke from a sacrificial fire. “Now that’s a name I haven’t tasted in some time.”

“She is lying,” Elenya’s voice rang in my head.

“Are you sure?” I asked silently. “She seems to recognize the name.”

“No. She recognized the opportunity. Be careful with your wording, Astarion. Don’t make a single promise or anything that could be construed as such. If you ask her to tell you what she knows, and she knows nothing, she could still say something vague and bind you.”

“How are you so certain?”

“I don’t know. But she seems more eager to learn your motives. If she did know Szarr, she’d be surprised to hear his name. And she wasn’t. Not even a flicker.”

“So why not tell me what you know about Szarr?”

Nyphithys’s eyes shimmered. Lashes swept low. Her lips parted in a mock sigh.

“Oh, Szarr,” she drawled, as if tasting the name like wine. “The name alone drips with... mmm, pretension. One of the old bloods, yes? I recall whispers in the Nine—thin strings tied to prettier monsters. But what of him? What would you have me say, little vampire?”

“I would have you answer the question,” I said flatly. “Do you know him?”

A tilt of her head. That damnable smile sharpened.

“Do you know how many mortals wander into hellish contracts they barely understand? He may have once begged at our gates… or sent some desperate little soul in his place. I see thousands, darling. Millions. Some become footnotes. Others… well. They rise.”

“And which was he?”

She chuckled—a dark, honeyed sound.

“Now, why would I give that away without a price?”

A pulse of alarm echoed through the bond.

Don’t ask for clarification. Don’t take the bait.
Elenya’s voice cracked through my mind like a whip. She’s shifting. Not a single concrete answer. If she knew anything, she’d be bragging. She’s stalling.

“I’m not interested in bargaining,” I said, crossing my arms. “Just a simple confirmation.”

“Oh, but darling,” Nyphithys cooed, pressing her fingers to the mirror like she wanted to trace my face, “everything is a bargain down here. Even silence.”

I clenched my jaw. “Then you don’t know him.”

She blinked—too slow.

Then smiled again, more sharply.

“I didn’t say that.”

“No,” I replied, “but you haven’t said anything else.”

Nyphithys twirled a strand of inky hair around a clawed finger. Her tone turned mockingly thoughtful.

“Let me guess… You think you’re clever. Testing the devil. Thinking you can outmaneuver us with those pretty little dead-boy eyes. But tell me something, vampire—what do you want?”

She leaned in. Her wings flared behind her like a god’s shadow.

“If the answer isn’t ‘nothing’… then we can talk.”

“Let her keep going,” Elenya whispered. “She’s cornering herself.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t need to.

“I don’t want anything,” I lied smoothly. “This was curiosity. That’s all.”

Nyphithys paused, lips curving up like a cat watching a cornered bird.

“No one comes to me for curiosity, sweet thing. Curiosity is a spark. And I can make it burn.”

Still no answers.

Still not a single truth.

“You’ve told me nothing,” I said finally.

Nyphithys laughed again—light, cruel. “And yet, you’re still here.”

“She’s waiting for you to ask,” Elenya warned. “Anything. A plea, a demand. She wants to answer something—so she can twist it into a pact.”

I drew in a breath and stepped back.
“I’ve heard enough.”

Nyphithys’s smile flickered.

Just for a moment.

Then returned.

“You’ll be back,” she said softly, voice molten sugar. “They always come back when the desperation starts to itch. You’ll feel it soon—gnawing under your ribs. The craving for answers. For power. For something real.”

She leaned forward, breath fogging the mirror.

“And when you do, I’ll be waiting. And we’ll make such beautiful music together, you and I.”

“I don’t know about that,” I murmured. “I’m not against a tango, but you’re not a very enticing partner so far. You’re overplaying an empty hand, trying to trap me in a pact I don’t need. I asked about Szarr as a test. To see if you had any use. I’d take information about many—but I’m not crossing a gaudy Thayan upstairs for a sleezy viper with no value.”

Her expression soured.

“You offered nothing of value, little vampire.”

“And neither did you, little friend. The difference is—I have nothing to lose. And you have everything to gain. My coming down was a gift. A chance to prove you are worth the trouble of buying off that mirror from him. From what he told me, you are of little use now. So, how about this? Think about something true that would interest me next time. Don't resist the spell and tell me, and if it proves interesting, I guarantee you will find my company much more enjoyable than his. ”

Elenya stepped forward, cutting the spell with a single, firm arcene word. The mirror flared before the light snapped out, and the glass turned black.

We were alone again.

I exhaled, turned to her. “You were right.”

Elenya nodded, already re-sealing the circle with practiced care. “She didn’t know a thing about Cazador. But that doesn’t mean she knows nothing about Cania or Mephistopheles. But you ought to be more careful about your wording.”

“I’ll keep her waiting.”

Elenya looked up, about to say something—then stopped herself. What was that? She never censured herself before? She was still looking at the mirror with a sorry expression. What was...

She couldn’t be serious. ‘You cannot be serious,’ I snapped.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You feel bad for her? She’s a literal devil.”

“She’s still being tortured, Astarion. Pain is pain. Her wings are pinned, like some dead bug in a naturalist display. That’s not the circle doing it. That’s cruelty. For no reason.”

“You’re absolutely insane.”

“That’s why I didn’t say anything,” she muttered.

---

That afternoon, we went out for research again, but this time it was different; she played the role of my mage-pet.

A willing illusion, doubled with the stolen Red Wizard runestone. It made information gathering almost laughably easy.

Eyes were everywhere in Warlock’s Crypt—some flesh, some shadow, some pure thought tethered to forgotten phylacteries—but they all turned toward me—an unclaimed spawn, silver-haired, scarlet-eyed, clad in arrogance and old Underdark lineage. Ancient blood, they whispered—and Thayan backing.

Still a spawn. Still bound.

But important enough, apparently, to have my own mage.

A bloodbag, they thought.

My personal arcane asset.

And Gods, how that suited her.

It gave her room to breathe. To shift. To move like a working bee through the mid-ring, avoiding the inner sanctum where the truly powerful liches wore truesight like a crown. Her face changed constantly—different skin, different cadence, different glimmer in the eye—but always beneath notice. Consistently, it is just low enough not to challenge, just high enough to follow.

She negotiated with assistants. She made arrangements with scribes. She gathered information like nectar—quiet, efficient, unassuming. 

And me? I dazzled. Threatened bluffed. 

I prowled through the halls in velvet and threat, all hungry charm and ancient mystique. And behind me—two steps behind, always—walked the delicate thing they thought was mine.

Her robes shimmered with restrained magic. Her deference was textbook, a perfect mimicry of obedience. She kept her gaze lowered—just enough to be read as subservient. But beneath every glance, behind every murmured “ Master,” there was wit. Quiet challenge. Mockery tucked behind reverence like a dagger in silk.

And she wore my bitemark.

Visible.

Prominent.

Right under the red collar. 

Gods, she chose to display it.

And I—

I loved it.

I shouldn’t have.

But I did.

Because they looked at her—all of them. The scribes, the necromancers, the spectral functionaries drifting through the halls—and saw nothing. An ornament. A bauble. A curiosity clinging to a predator’s side. Something to envy. Something to dismiss.

But I knew better.

She was not my pet.

She was the storm I had leashed and cloaked.

And she wore me— proudly.

The glint of the wound against her throat. The faint bruising, kissed purple by my hunger. She tilted her head slightly when their gazes caught it—not to hide it, but to show it.

Not submission.

Not a trophy.

Declaration.

I chose this.

I chose him.

And that knowledge— that illusion —was intoxicating.

It was power. It was a theatre. It was ours. 

The best were the eyes full of envy of the other spawns. 

Oh, I could get used to this.

I think I could have floated through that crypt on that alone. Powerless, still tethered, still hunted—but with her there, bearing my mark like it meant something—I felt untouchable. That's how we found ourselves bartering for entry to the Crimson parlour. 

I should have known better than to take her there. 

Notes:

So… that escalated quickly. — I love dancing on that line between temptation and dread. I’m curious what you all think of Astarion’s reaction in this one (equal parts possessive and shaken). As always, thank you for reading, commenting, and just being here.

Chapter 39: So Much Pain

Summary:

Drawn deeper into the Crimson Parlour, masks of obedience are tested against the weight of old scars.

Notes:

TW: This chapter dives into heavy psychological themes: dissociation, manipulation, compulsion, trauma recall, and the dynamics of power/ownership.
Also 69 Kudos !!!!
NICE

Elenya's POV

---

The catacombs of the Enclave had been… interesting.

Not in the way of marvel or wonder, but in the way of bruises that bloom beneath the skin—hidden, slow, aching.

Quiet in all the wrong ways. Loud in others.

The dead didn’t scream here. Not out loud.

She understood what it was: a secret weapon stashed away by the Thayans. Thousands of remains, marked by them and unclaimable by Larloch. If the Shadowking turned on the delegation, they’d have enough power buried here to secure retreat.

But to do so, the catacombs had to remain hidden.

And hidden they were.

If not for the secret entrance hidden in the vault’s back, tucked behind the shelves, she would never have found them. And once she did, the idea started bubbling in her head.

She knew it was unwise. But she could still hear them—everywhere. In the weight of the city. In the echo of iron restraints down forsaken corridors. In the hollow breathing of those still alive but long since broken.

She could not look away.

She did not want to.

She hadn’t told Astarion how deeply it clawed at her. How her soul ached every time they left the house. He wouldn’t have understood. Or worse—he would have tried to protect her from it.

But the cattle were not something she could ignore.

Nor something she wanted to ignore.

She didn’t enjoy withholding the truth. She didn’t enjoy withholding anything. But lies are like murders: the first one is always the hardest.

She started lying about the fog. That was the beginning. 

The original sin.

The first time she had lied to him deliberately. Lied about something she knew he had a right to know. And it clawed at her, poisoned her from the inside.

When he told her he didn’t appreciate being kept in the dark, it felt like a knife to her gut. 

Because that’s what it was.

It gutted her, whatever fragment of a soul remained in her. 

Left her unable to look at him without guilt and disgust bubbling over. Threatening to spill and flood her. 

Since then, it got easier. The second omission was easier.

Justifiable almost. 

He had already said he didn’t care.

Didn’t care about anyone but himself.

She was the opposite. She cared about everyone but herself.

She cared about pain. And there was so much pain in this city. Her mind wouldn’t let it go.

She couldn’t give up on them.

Couldn’t become like those who had watched her bleed and walked past.

Maybe she could save no one. But she could not ignore them.

So she fiddled with the idea.

A network could maybe work. 

It was foolish. Reckless. Suicidal. She knew that.

But logic never held much weight in the face of suffering. Not for her. Not after all she had lived.

And still—

She could not turn away.

She hoped it was foolish, reckless and suicidal enough to hit a blindspot. To slip throught the crack of the city security. 

Something so outrageously stupid that the multi-melenia old lich couldn't reasonably have acounted for it.

Few monsters acount for mercy in her experience.

But even if this plan succeeded, it would never be enough.

She knew what would happen to those in pain here. If one disappeared, another would take their place. A machine of silence and utility—face in, face out. She had seen it before, in other places. Repression wore many masks, but the rhythm was always the same: remove one, train another, no one asks questions.

Because of that, the only real way to help was to stay. To embed herself in the cracks of the system until her roots grew deep enough to fracture the stone. Fracture the machine.

She understood that.

But understanding didn’t shield her. Not when she passed wide, empty eyes. Not when she saw bruises tucked beneath perfectly wrapped robes. Not when someone flinched just because she made a sound.

She couldn’t ignore it.

The shifting map from the Zhentarim had been a gift once she found a way to bypass the city wards against abjuration. Many bribes to the scribes in the Barterum had been traded for scraps of knowledge. Some had cost her more than she was willing to give—information that could be dangerous in the wrong hands. But she hadn’t cared. It worked.

The map moved with the city’s pulse, adjusting to patrols, collapses, rituals. It mapped everything—from rot-zones to guard rotations near the eight exits—with eerie precision.

The real difficulty was keeping this away from Astarion. He had grown… dependent. He barely allowed her to leave the room. Eventually, she gave up and brought him along, though she never told him what the catacombs were really for. He had smirked when she asked, assuming it was just mapping. And even he could not deny the value of such a tool.

She studied it like a sacred text, each branching line committed to memory. It was alive now inside her—like veins under skin, like breath in lungs.

So she threw herself into task after task, mission after mission—anything to escape the rot of guilt spreading inside her.

He should know.

If she was caught, she was endangering him too.

She hated it.

Hated it.

It had been easier when no one depended on her.

Usually she never started a thread before finishing the last. But Astarion’s case would take time. And even if he left her at the House of Mercy, she doubted she could come back here easily.

No. This work needed to begin now.

So she kept exploring. Every tunnel held another story. Another question.

It was suicide. She knew that.

She couldn’t save them all. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

But if she and Astarion were caught before—

She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to. The answer already screamed in her gut.

People would still suffer.
Still disappear.
And he would be hurt.

But mercy never cared about whether you could afford its price. Nor whether it could succeed.

It could not be selective.

It could not only be given when easy.

Mercy, to be true, had to be absolute.

Even if it meant sparing a devil being tortured.

That was what he didn’t see.

That was why she hid this from him.

Every act of compassion met his snarls and anger. She understood why.

She was only one bard. One woman with no army, no miracles in her voice. Just a false name, a cracked soul, and a man beside her still trying to believe he could be more than what he had been made into.

But she couldn’t stop.

That was what he didn’t understand.

She could not look away.

Could not become the kind of person who walked past pain and called it someone else’s problem.

She had made a promise long ago—
to no one in particular,
to everyone who had ever needed help and been met with nothing.

She had become the kind of person who reached, even when it hurt. Who listened, even when it shattered her. Who acted, even when it cost her everything.

Maybe she was foolish.

Maybe she’d be next.

But if she didn’t try—who would?

She couldn’t change who she was any more than he could change who he was.

She hoped he could forgive her.

He would leave her soon anyway.

Like everyone else did.

She just needed to make sure he never got hurt from this.

That much she could do.

She was very good at hiding. Very good at cloaking.

Ilmater’s blessing was growing stronger too. Now, she could never be called back against her will—not even with a Speak with Dead spell.

She finished etching the symbol, pulled her borrowed robe tighter around her shoulders, and stepped deeper into the dark.

---

She was the one to propose the pet narrative to enter the parlour.

It was a mask she knew all too well—an old disguise pulled from the ashes of survival. The body remembered it in every joint, every flinch, every stifled word. She had worn it once in another life, when refusal had meant pain, when silence had meant safety, when obedience was the only armor left.

And now, willingly, she slid it back into place.

A costly mask, even if it was for Astarion. Especially for him.

He would never be cruel.

At least—not in the same way. Not with the same intent. That was the difference. He would never truly hurt her, not with the malice she remembered. But cruelty wasn’t only about intent. Cruelty was also about reenactment. About roles played too well. About submission demanded and delivered until it soured the air between them.

Every bow of her head, every whispered “Yes, Master,” scraped against her ribs like broken glass. Each gesture hollowed her a little further. It was as though every breath in that posture bled pieces of her into the floorboards.

And the deeper she leaned into the mask, the more the memories stirred.

The Fogrealm shuddered.

Her inner landscape, already fragile, rippled and shook beneath the weight of echoes—chains rattling in corridors that no longer existed, voices she had buried surfacing again with sharpened clarity. The pain was not just remembered; it was relived. It pressed against her bones until she thought she would collapse.

Nothing good had ever come from that role. Nothing but scars.

So I stepped in.

I, the Fogself, the guardian between her and oblivion, gathered the fragments before they could fracture further. I reinforced the veil around her, drew the fog tight like a cocoon. But this time she knew. This time she consented.

I did not smother her; I embraced her.

Her spirit sank into me, into the fog, and I wrapped us both in stillness. Together we fed the mists—bled emotions into them until the sharpness dulled, until sensation dimmed, until the ache blurred into something quieter.

Empty. Hollow. Numb.

That was the mask’s purpose. That was the survival it demanded: to become less than a person, to become nothing but a function. A tool. A puppet.

A thing to be used.

The body continued on autopilot. Muscles moved as they had been trained to—heel, follow, obey. Eyes lowered, posture curved. To the outside world, she was nothing but the obedient pet at Astarion’s side. The disguise was seamless.

But inside? Inside she was drifting.

Only flickers broke through: the gleam of glass, the low murmur of voices, the echo of steps too close. And through it all, the taste of iron, the memory of commands shouted long ago. I held her tighter when those came, drowning them before they could cut deeper.

Yet the dissociation was stronger than before.

She was not used to emptying herself so completely while awake, while aware of the performance. And so she began to dissolve into me—not just shielded, but absorbed. She became part of the fog, as much as I was. Her boundaries blurred, her presence scattered.

We were one.

And in that merging, she was safe. But safety had its cost: the more she relied on the fog, the less of herself remained in the moment. Her body moved, yes. It obeyed. It performed. But her mind drifted, caught in the spaces between memory and silence.

And I wondered, in the depths of that shrouded place: how long before the mask consumed her again?

How long before she forgot there was someone behind it?

---

The Crimson Parlour was a theatre of hunger—rich velvet curtains, candlelight filtered through blood-colored glass, incense cloying against the metallic tang of fresh feeding.

Our body knelt at Astarion’s feet, head bowed, every line of posture sculpted to imply devotion. The guise we wore was one of our finest travel suits: the moon elf dancer once glimpsed in Amn. A vision shaped from moonlight itself. Pale skin luminous with a faint, frostlike glow, high cheekbones sharp with elegance, lips flushed with a natural blush that suggested both fragility and temptation.

Her eyes—large, silver-violet, constellations swimming in their depths—were framed by lashes dark enough to turn every glance into spellwork. Her hair cascaded in waves of pale blue-white, catching the light like spun ocean threads. Her long ears curved into elegant points, softened by stray locks, and her neck—graceful, slender—bore a single vivid mark. A bite. A claim. The wound framed by the crimson collar fitted snug against her throat, a declaration as much as an adornment.

Her body was slim, statuesque, balanced perfectly between delicacy and strength. Kneeling at Astarion’s side, she seemed less like prey subdued and more like a jewel deliberately set in shadow: exquisite, untouchable, marked. A jewelled bodice clung to her, illusion concealing the utilitarian pack strapped beneath.

But the inside was empty.

Both Bodyself and I had withdrawn, floating at the edge of the Fogrealm. The form below moved as a husk—performing, obeying. Detached. Dissociated.

Only when Astarion’s gloved hand brushed a shoulder, a temple, the crown of our bowed head—brief, grounding touches—did the present cut through like a knife of clarity. And with it, the visions, the horrors that invaded our iris.

A collar tightening on a mortal throat.
A scream muffled behind velvet.
A breath shuddering, then stopping.
A boy drained beneath too many fangs.

So much pain. Pressed into walls. Woven into music.

It’s too early.

Endure with them.

Witness them.

So much pain.

The suffering kept gnawing at our mind. Even more so than the familiar role of the pet.

The Bodyself wanted to help. To not be like the others who ignore the pain.
But what if it endangered Astarion? 

He was keeping the attention off Us. Drawing gazes. Playing his part perfectly.
Maybe we could.

But a part of us disagreed. The Fogself knew it too early. What could we do in this situation after all? 
Surrounded, alone and in enemy territory.

Maybe we won’t get caught, supplied the Bodyself as she went back to herself.

The music throbbed in her bones.
It was so loud. 
Enough to cover any incantation, even from vampiric ears.

The tunnels aren’t ready yet. Maybe one. Maybe two.

If you get caught…

If you hurt him…

He has the Dimension door scroll. He can run. Maybe. 

But he needs us. We made a promise. 

If we die, we abandon him.

So much pain.

You can’t help them all.

You can’t help anyone.

One soul at the time 

She prayed he would forgive her. She can’t look away.

No. Stop. Breathe.

She’d grown stronger lately. The Red Wizard’s tools had cracked something open. Knowledge, raw and terrifying, now curled in her mind. Her ability to tap and coax the weave also increased. She can cast up to the fifth level now. Maybe sixth if she pushes it.

Still not enough to save all of the people here. NOT ENOUGH TO FIGHT ALL THE MONSTERS HERE.

But maybe enough for something.

WHAT IF YOU FAIL, what if you hurt him? Bodyself, PLEASE stop. 

This is my realm. Not is yours. 
I can't look away. 
We can’t look away.
There is so much pain. 

ILMATER PLEASE TELL HER.  Stop her please

leave him out of this. He won't talk me out of helping neither will you. And he certainly can't force us to do shit we are his warlock not his preists.

We have to wait... we can...

That's not us Fogself. Looking away is not what we do. 

I DON'T WANT TO HURT HIM. 

The fog is in him right ? 

... Yes.?

If we are captured, leave me. Cloak him. 

I CAN'T do that, if I do that the spidersong will start again. I may lose you forever. I don’t want to lose you either!

You didn't want me to begin with. Promise you will protect him?

I promise. But please don't make me do this. 

She didn’t answer.

Instead, she laid the groundwork in one breath. The weave tightened, condensed, and shimmered—Major Image. A flawless duplicate of herself remained kneeling at Astarion’s side, bowed head and moonlit hair painted in illusion so dense it would linger minutes even without her concentration. The mask of obedience would not falter, not immediately. Enough to cover her absence.

Then her body blurred. Misty Step curled through her bones like a sudden frost, pulling her form apart and stitching it back together in the space of a heartbeat. She reappeared in the back—what she thought would be a kitchen.

But the scent struck first.

Not herbs. Not food. Not wine.

People.

The air was heavy with sweat, stale breath, and the copper tang of drained blood. She froze, senses sharpening, then took it all in with a soldier’s precision.

It wasn’t a kitchen. It was a waiting room.

Dozens of mortals lined the chamber—collared, charmed, dazed. Eyes half-lidded, bodies still, breath shallow. The silence of enthrallment clung to them. Puppets dressed in silks or rags, all equally stripped of will. Enchanted obedience oozed from them like sweat.

Her gaze scanned, cataloguing at once:

—Gold-trimmed collars. High-value, marked “don’t kill.” Property, not play.
—Black-trimmed collars. Disposable. Inventory meant to be consumed.

Her heart twisted, but she forced her breath steady. She couldn’t save them all. Not here, not now. If she tried, it would mean their deaths as well as her own. But gods—they deserved at least a chance. A choice.

She whispered another spell, layering it over herself. Greater Invisibility cloaked her form, folding her out of sight. Then she smeared herself in undead scent putty—ghoul ichor slick against her skin, a stench so foul it would turn any stomach. Enough to fool a vampire’s nose. Enough to pass as one of the countless servants scurrying unseen.

And then, her true weapon.

Her gift.

The only chance she could give them.

She began to speak—not aloud, but through the weave itself. A countercharm she had dredged from old rites, rituals of the blind grimlocks who had once resisted the domination of mind flayers in the Underdark. Ancient words designed to fracture psionic bonds, carried in a rhythm older than the surface sun. Her voice was a tremor in their skulls, a vibration in their bones.

“Remember who you are.
Remember who bled before you.
Remember the Stone Mother.
In her embrace, no witchcraft can steal the clan from you.”

The words landed like hammer blows.

Three heads snapped up. Collars gleamed but no longer commanded. Eyes widened—not dull, not vacant, but aware. Terrified, but present. Their breath hitched as if surfacing from a drowning sea.

Invisible, Elenya leaned close, whispering so soft the air itself barely carried it.

“Stay calm. Do not move. One sound and you die. One wrong twitch and you’re lost. But now—you have your mind. You have your choice. Run if you want freedom. Endure if you think it safer. Whatever you decide—it’s yours.”

She slid a small tin across the floor, hidden under the toe of her boot. “Inside is putty. Smear it on your skin when you’re ready. It will cloak you in the stink of undeath. Then find the tunnel’s entrance—five streets north, an alley marked with a black crate. Look for the bound hands carved into stone. Always follow where the hands point. If you are captured…” Her voice trembled. “I’m sorry. I cannot do more.”

She moved on, slipping through the back door. Darkness swallowed her sight, but her nose filled with horror.

The smell of death. Thick, unmoving, choking.

Bodies. At least twenty. Maybe thirty.

Most were already dead, drained husks stacked like refuse. The rest lingered on the knife’s edge of life—shallow breaths, spasms, whispers. Too many were beyond saving. But a handful still clung to their spark.

Her hands moved quickly. She poured potion to cracked lips, pressed poultices to wounds that might still close. Fingers found pulse after pulse, sorting life from death in rapid judgment calls she hated making.

The three awakened mortals appeared at the doorway. They had followed her voice, their eyes bright now with something fierce. Recognition. Will. They saw her working, and though they could not see her, they knew she was there.

They chose to help.

One lifted a bandage. Another steadied a potion vial. A third dragged a still-living body into the light. Together, they turned the slaughterhouse into a sickroom.

Elenya gave what she could. To two whose eyes still burned with fight, she pressed scrolls and spare robes—concealed beneath her pack, saved for this moment.

“Here,” she breathed. “Raise one dead. Let it walk you out at dawn. Use it as a decoy, a shield. Follow the bound hands. Always.”

The survivors nodded, trembling but resolute. And for the first time since stepping into the Parlour, she saw something other than despair flicker across a mortal’s face.

Hope.

Frail. Impossible. But alive.

---

She had to go.

The Parlour above was drowning in predators—ten true vampires she could see, twice as many cloaked by shadow, and all of them circling blood and luxury like carrion dressed in silk. Every alcove reeked of indulgence: velvet cushions soaked through with the copper tang of old feasts, laughter like knives scraping along glass, and the occasional muffled gasp from prey dragged half-alive through the curtains. To linger here was suicide.

She moved in silence, every step placed with surgical precision. The cloak wrapped her in its shroud, further blunting the sound of her steps, making her less a body and more a smear in the air, an echo of movement never quite there when you focused your ear. Even the polished marble floor beneath her dulled her presence, like the stone itself conspired to let her pass.

Then—she stopped.

An alcove. Guarded.

Two vampires stood within, their postures taut with tension. One was a woman with long, straight black hair cascading like oil, her every gesture sharpened by poise and an unyielding will. Her beauty was a weapon, honed to cut, her crimson gaze flicking like a blade between words she didn’t trust. Across from her stood a man of bronze skin and proud bearing, his form framed by a half-plate of fine craft—etched with delicate platinum that marked him of noble lineage, perhaps even a bloodline older than the city itself. Where she was elegance, he was martial discipline, every movement controlled, precise, a soldier dressed as a lord.

The air between them pulsed with unease. A conversation just shy of breaking. One whisper away from threat.

They were silent, oddly inaudible even under the thrum of the Parlour’s background symphony. She then saw the reason. 

It was the many wards.

Layered thick.

Runes bled into the alcove like veins of quicksilver: sigils pulsing faintly against the stone, forming a lattice of privacy and secrecy. She recognized their weave instantly—no mundane abjuration. These were protections wrought by mastery: anti-scrying, silence layers, tethered counter-charms. They drank the air around them, curling sound and sight inward like a shell.

But what froze her wasn’t the wards—it was the way the little positive energy present in the Crypt air recoiled from the two figures. 

Vampire lords.

True predators, both of them. To cross into their awareness would be to invite death before she could even draw a breath.

Danger.

Her lungs filled, slow, deliberate. She pressed her palm lightly against the symbol tucked beneath her robe, calling—not loudly, not fully, but enough to brush the edge of Ilmater’s presence. Enough to draw on his gift on his symbol. 

Divine magic was safer here. Cleaner. Less traceable to her. Arcane threads might betray her leading to her, but while Ilmaters divine magic left stronger footprints , it remained fully detached from her. While being his chosen, the nature of their relationship being a pact allowed her very little magic granted directly from him. most of the magic at her figertip was her own. Even the Spirit Fog was her, a divine spell she learned from the clerics, another stollen magical secret. Her symbol though, his gift to her, carried a reservoir of unspent divine power. His power. As soon as she finished carving the symbol, his blessing seared it all those many years ago, thus, gifting her many spells stored within, some mighty, some simple but all were coming directly from the Broken God himself.

She had been using this pool mainly to cast Death Wards and Warding Bonds on Astarion. 
Except for when she killed that Gur. 

Mercy's End was his gift as well. 
Even if he hated when she used it.

Suffice to say the symbol was more potent than many gave it credit for. She touched it, and the thrum answered. The Broken God’s energy spilled like a quiet tide into her fingertips, a fragile warmth compared to the necrotic cold saturating the Parlour. It wasn’t limitless—three, maybe four castings of Dispel Magic. if she was careful. Enough to save her cover while broke a chain or two. Not enough for open war.

No, if she needed more power, if she wanted more of his magic she needed to call in his aspect. But that was always complicated. Even for Ilmater she didn't like becoming a true puppet. A vessel to someone else will. It would also require me to step out there as well. 

The symbol would have to suffice for now.

She shaped the weave carefully, whispering the invocation. The threads tightened, aligned, and then unraveled beneath her will. The wards strained against her touch like glass trembling under pressure.

She aimed at the Anti-divination wards. 

One fractured—sigils unwound into mist.
Another peeled back, snapping into nothing.

She had removed only two, but that was enough. Their lattice thinned, their defenses weakened, their secrecy punctured. It wasn’t a door, not yet—but it was a crack. A flaw.

---

Then she was gone again.

Feet soundless, body blurred, fog wrapped tight around her frame like armour. The cloak and her own will fused into one seamless mask, making her less a person than an absence—an emptiness in the corner of the eye. The spell clung to her skin like condensation, weightless but tangible, a shimmer of concealment that softened every edge, blunted every step.

She moved as though the corridor itself carried her, heart steady, each step precise. Not rushing. Not faltering. A secret sliding through the labyrinthine arteries of the Parlour, leaving nothing but stillness in her wake.

As she descended further, she continued her quiet work. A touch of Countercharm whispered across the collars of mortals slumped in antechambers, eyes flickering back to themselves as memory returned in gasps. Her fingers brushed faintly across wounds when she could, weaving stolen fragments of Ilmater’s grace into bodies long denied tenderness. Nothing grand—just a pulse of vitality here, a fragment of clarity there. Enough to give them a choice. Enough to prove that not everyone walked past their suffering without pause.

The further she went, the more the Parlour shifted. The velvet opulence began to thin, replaced by sterner architecture—polished stone etched with sigils half-erased, arches that rose sharp and severe, as though the place itself wanted to shed decadence for something older, weightier. These were the bones beneath the theatre: corridors meant not for show, but for keeping secrets.

And then she saw it.

An alcove, half-shrouded in shadow, tucked into the spine of the corridor like a parasite. Runes crawled across its arch—wards wound tight in layers, muting sound, bending sight, the magic pressed so taut it thrummed faintly in her chest when she breathed. Unlike the velvet-curtained feeding rooms above, this space was functional, fortified. Not meant for revelry. Meant for control.

She stopped at the threshold.

Mapping the chamber, she let her senses unfurl like threads across the weave. One guard by the stairs—lean, rigid, eyes fixed forward but shoulders too tense, hand brushing the hilt of his blade every few seconds. Another near the curtained partition, his stance wider, posture coiled—ready to intercept anyone who crossed. And a third—motionless. Too motionless. He stood in the far corner, barely distinguishable from the wall, but when her gaze brushed him, the weave shivered faintly, like glass vibrating at a pitch she could almost hear. Not a warrior. Not flesh and blood alone. Arcane backup.

Three positions. Three angles. Deliberate placement. These weren’t common guards; they were trained for layers of defense. If one fell, the other two would strike without hesitation. If the curtain was breached, the still one would unleash.

She stilled herself, fog compressing in her lungs until the rest of the world narrowed into sharp lines of rhythm and breath. She counted their patterns: the flicker of an eye here, the subtle sway of a weight shift there, the cadence of their inhalations. A heartbeat map of three predators who believed they owned the threshold.

Her pulse steadied.

The wards whispered across the alcove like a locked jaw. Beyond the curtain, faint light bled through—pale, silver-tinged, not like candlelight but colder, steadier, resonant with power.

She knew before she saw him.

The proprietor’s alcove.

Therys Valtun was here.

She heard it first—low laughter, curling in the alcove like smoke. A man’s voice, sharper than it should’ve been, young but carrying that old lilt of hunger. A giggle, returned—higher, brittle, threaded with charm.

Through the half-parted curtains, she caught sight.

A younger tiefling vampire, barely more than a fledgling, lounged in the cushions, smirk twisting with false ease as he bent over a woman’s throat. Half-drow, half-consumed by the magic holding her still. Her body was draped in languid obedience across crimson velvet, eyes glassed and unfocused, neck bared in surrender. The sound—soft, wet, intimate—ripped through Elenya like a blade.

Her jaw locked. Her breath froze. The familiar scream clawed at her ribs, begging to break free. But she couldn’t. Not here. Not with the eyes watching. Not without ending them both.

Golden-trimmed collar. Not for slaughter. For keeping.

Her hand slid under the folds of her robe, steadying against the tremor threatening to betray her. The sigil was delicate, almost too fragile for this place, but she shaped it anyway. A whisper in the weave. A secret carved into air.

Message.

Her lips barely parted. No sound rose beyond the threads of spellcraft.

“Endure. Live. Survive. Tomorrow awaits. The Broken God shares your pain. In the kitchen—bound hands. Follow them. They will guide your way.”

The cantrip laced with the old rhythm of her countercharm, a pulse of defiance older than the collar at the woman’s throat.

The reaction was slight, but real. The half-drow’s glazed eyes fluttered. A tremor flicked through her hand, nails pressing faintly into the cushion. Then stillness again—obedience reasserting itself like a tide. The tiefling vampire feeding on her did not notice. His smirk remained, his tongue smeared with her blood, his hands careless in their mockery of intimacy.

But Elenya had seen it. That spark. That flicker of the soul refusing.

It was enough.

She forced herself to bow her head lower, the mask of the obedient pet pressing down until her own teeth ached. The music from the parlour swelled, covering the silence of her defiance, letting the moment slip back into the greater theatre of hunger and cruelty.

One choice. One invisible thread pulled against the dark.

A whisper where no one else could hear.

Her eyes returned to the half-drow girl, bared and bleeding. She hoped—gods, she hoped—that leaving her there wasn’t damnation. That mercy could exist even in fragments. That not saving everyone wasn’t the same as becoming a monster.

“You can’t save everyone,” she told herself. And it still felt like a lie.

Then she looked past them—past the charade of hunger, the cruelty painted in velvet—and her gaze fixed on the one who anchored it all.

Therys Valtun.

The proprietor. The signature behind the ledgers. The voice erased from every report but too sharp to vanish. Here, at the heart of it all, not hiding. Not even pretending. His presence radiated authority, woven deep into the marrow of the Parlour.

And the truth struck colder than any spell.

Cazador’s sibling.

The face was carved into her memory now. Etched so clearly she could rip it from stone if needed. Enough to scry. Enough to follow.

She touched the symbol at her neck and breathed deep. The last charge hummed faintly, Ilmater’s gift pressed tight into the silver. She lifted her hand, whispered the words, and let the Dispel ripple outward. The glyphs on the alcove’s arch flickered—anti-divination wards unraveling strand by strand until the weave ran clean.

Then she turned. Every step retraced with the same quiet precision, fog coiling around her, breath pulled tight against her teeth.

The information she had traded for in the Barterum, the bribes, the dangerous scraps of truth—all of it was paying now. The wards folded. The paths opened.

Astarion had asked her for answers. She had promised him.

This was how.

---

Time to get back to him. 
She done all she could.

She barely had any magic left. 

She turned the last corner to take the long corridor to the main loft area—already plotting the return route with less than 10 minutes left on her invisibility, the quickest path back to the Parlour, to the illusion still kneeling in her place—and that’s when she froze.

There, at the far end of the corridor, stood a vampire.

The Vampire Lord from earlier. 

He had stopped mid-stride, a goblet of something red poised carelessly between two long fingers. His nostrils flared. A subtle tilt of the head. Then stillness.

He stood like a statue carved from marble—immense, immaculate, impossible to mistake for anything but what he was.

He looked as though he had stepped out of a dreamtime carving and into the mortal world. Tall and broad, his frame was wrapped in gleaming half-plate of platinum, every curve etched with ancestral motifs—spirals of stars, flowing rivers, and totems pressed into metal by hands long turned to dust. The armour shimmered with cold light, immaculate yet heavy with a heritage older than any vampire court.

His skin was a deep bronze, weathered like stone baked beneath eternal sun. Pale scars wound across it in deliberate patterns, ritual markings seared before undeath preserved them forever. High cheekbones, a square unyielding jaw, and long black hair streaked with iron-gray framed his face, braids clinking softly with beads of bone and shell. 

An Osslander.

His eyes burned—not merely red, but layered with garnet and ember, as though a thousand ancestors gazed through him. They carried the silence of tomorrows already known, the weight of a people who once walked with spirits. His nose was broad and proud, his lips full and severe, his brow carved with dignity even in cruelty. Every line of him balanced power and poise. The helm at his hip revealed regal features sharp as a sculptor’s chisel: aquiline nose, marble-cut lips, and those garnet eyes. His hair fell like a mantle over his shoulders, silver threaded through black, giving him the look of a king who might once have ruled in life.

But the aura betrayed him. Negative energy bled from his form like frost-smoke, metallic and cold on the tongue, the taste of a tomb cracked open. Candle flames guttered around him; the air pressed against the skull like unseen chains. Even standing still, he radiated hunger—ancient, patient, inevitable.

Handsome, yes—but handsome the way a sword is handsome: lethal, honed by centuries of cruelty. Beautiful like a desert night—vast, silent, filled with stars that watch without mercy. Regal like a totem carved in obsidian, or a king who once bore the will of his people. But corrupted: ancestral lines twisted into hunger, platinum totems warped into sigils of dominion. A warlord steeped in negative energy, who had turned reverence into a throne of shadows.

And across his left cheek—one deep stigmata.

Not a scar of vanity, not some mark softened by undeath. No, this was carved deep into him, gouged into permanence. She could only wonder who had ever struck this monster hard enough to leave such a wound on such a creature.

Then his gaze shifted. Sharpened. Focused.

He could smell her.

Her mind scrambled, reaching for reason—No. The scent is masked. The ghoul ichor should cover it. The wards should hold. The illusions should blind.

But instincts didn’t lie. Neither did his eyes.

Breathe.

When he moved, it was with the grace of a dancer—or a predator. Every step measured, flowing, his body balanced perfectly despite the weight of ornate half-plate. Waves of negative energy bled from him, curling into the air like frost-smoke, but beneath the cold dread her bard’s ear caught something else. A resonance in the Weave. A faint echo of rhythm.

Music.

A heartbeat that was not a heartbeat. A cadence that was not his own. Tumbarum’s spirit, maybe—the ghost of a drumbeat carried across the silence of centuries. Every motion was accompanied by that rhythm, the invisible chorus of ancestors walking with him still. Even in monstrosity, he was tethered to something older. Something sacred.

Spirits.

Her blood went cold. He wasn’t just a warlord. He was calling them. Drawing upon their gaze, their strength, their witness.

A barbarian of the Ancestral Guardian’s path.

A half-plated barbarian. An ancient vampire lord.

Her chest tightened. Every thought narrowed into one, brutal truth.

She was fucked.

She slipped back—quiet, measured—sliding around the corner near the balcony and pressing her spine against one of the marble pillars. The stone was cool, anchoring her, but not enough to steady the pounding of her pulse in her throat. Her breaths stayed even, but each one felt stolen.

And still, she knew.

He could smell her.

The lord did not move at once. He tilted his head instead, slow and precise, nostrils flaring as though the air itself were an open ledger to be read. That garnet gaze narrowed, sharp as a blade drawn an inch at a time from its sheath. A predator tasting the moment. The goblet in his hand hung forgotten, crimson liquid trembling at its rim, yet refusing to spill—as though even gravity bowed to him.

Then came the shift. A single step—measured, inevitable. Not the step of a man searching, but of one following a trail already certain. His presence pressed into her bones like a vice, the cold certainty crawling over her skin. He didn’t need sight. He didn’t need sound. Every motion of his body carried centuries of hunts, each step laden with instincts honed to perfection. Her blood knew it. He had already marked her.

Boots creaked against ancient flagstone. Drawing closer.

And then—downstairs.

Astarion’s voice.

Laughing. Easy. Polished, like a stage mask fit over something raw and dangerous. It was the laugh she knew well—the one he wore when he charmed, when he cloaked the monster in silk. The laugh he used to draw prey closer, to hide his own edges.

The vampire paused.

His head tilted once more, but not toward her. No—the smile on his face thinned, and he turned toward the loft’s edge. His gaze swept downward in slow, deliberate arcs, until his eyes found the source.

Recognition.

A flicker too sharp, too exact to be anything else. Surprise. Curiosity. Recognition.

What?

Why?

No one here should know Astarion. No one in this hidden den of predators should have reason to pause at the sight of another vampire spawn.

And yet this ancient, plated predator looked down at him like a hunter sighting a stag that had strayed too far from the herd. Like he knew him.

Elenya’s breath caught sharp in her chest.

What did he see? What did he know?

The warlord’s smile curved wider, slow and secret, an expression that promised nothing good. Not a greeting. Not camaraderie. But possession. Interest. A claim waiting to be spoken.

Who was he?
How does he know Astarion?

The vampire lord didn’t call for guards. Didn’t make a scene. Didn’t even speak.

He simply stood at the loft’s edge, drinking in the air, his gaze fixed below.

Watching.
Marking.
Observing.

Kill him, kill him now.
This one is dangerous
Kill him.

She saw it in his expression—the moment he decided.

He wants to hurt him. He wants to take him.
KILL HIM NOW. 
RIP HIS EYES OUT

I am not strong enough

Call in the aspect. Call me. 
Kill him

The chill in her spine deepened. She shifted her weight, hand sliding toward the hilt of the dagger beneath her sleeve. If he moved, if he lunged, if he dared—she would drop the spell and strike, draw blood, scream if she had to.

But he didn’t.

After a long, quiet moment, the vampire turned. Not fast. Not slow. Just confident. Certain. And walked away down a side passage, still glancing once—twice—over his shoulder.

Eyes still fixed in that terrible, hungry way on Astarion.

She held her breath until he vanished.

Breathe.
Breathe.
Move.

She didn’t waste the window. A pulse of Prestidigitation scoured her scent from the air, from the walls. Her mouth whispered the Misty Step incantation, and with a shimmer of arcane light, she was back in the Parlour.

The illusion still knelt, perfectly poised. Her heart still thundered.

She slid into place beside it, breath low, and in one practiced gesture, dropped the projection—and the invisibility around her.

The magic unravelled.

The shimmer collapsed.

She bowed her head.

No one looked twice.

---

They had almost reached the Parlour’s front entrance when the summons came.

A servant emerged from the shadows—young, drow, his skin pale under the lanternlight. Crimson silk clung to him in gossamer folds, so fine it seemed spun from blood and smoke. He bowed low, but the movement was too precise, too rehearsed—like a blade sheathed and waiting. His voice slid out honed and sharp, each word cutting with quiet finality:

“The Lords request your presence upstairs.”

The words cut into her gut like steel.

Panic surged—raw, feral, instinctual. Trap. Ambush. Exposure. Every nerve screamed run. Every tendon screamed fight. But the fog in her chest—the one she had cultivated, fed, made part of her—held fast. Heavy. Steady. It pressed the panic into silence. It smothered instinct before it could bloom across her face.

Do not break.
Do not breathe too fast.
Not here.

The Fog thickened further, plunging her deeper into that dissociative world. My world.

She didn’t dare look at Astarion. Didn’t need to. His presence was a second skin along her side: taut, bristling, waiting. Leading.

She was only a tool again.
An empty shell wrapped in silk and obedience.

So she followed—two steps behind, calm and measured, like a dutiful pet at her master’s heel. It was a theatre. Mask. Lifeline. Together, they moved.

Each step up the staircase echoed like a hammer striking iron. The Parlour’s music dimmed with every rise. Laughter thinned, muffled behind silk curtains, until even the pulse of revelry was gone. Shadows thickened the higher they climbed, pressing close against the red glass lamps, devouring their glow.

The air grew heavier. Slower. As though each step drew them deeper into a vein of the earth where sound and light were unwelcome guests.

Nothing was clear. The Fog blurred the edges of perception, numbing sensation into fragments.

We would not calm our pulse without it.
We would not steady our breath.
We would not smother the panic clawing our gut.

Without it, we would fail to sell the mask.

Below, the laughter became memory. The warmth of torchlight receded. The smell of incense thinned to nothing.

The staircase narrowed.

The polished banisters gleamed, too smooth, as though countless trembling hands had clutched them before hers. The crimson runner dulled with each step, stained darker the higher they went—until she could no longer tell whether she walked on velvet or dried blood.

The walls seemed to lean closer, their shadows whispering. Every sconce crackled too loudly. Every hinge sighed as though it listened.

Upward, ever upward, the world dimmed into hush.

Until the Parlour below felt like another life—one they would not return to unchanged.

The carved banisters gleamed, polished too smooth, as though a thousand trembling hands had clutched them before hers. The crimson carpet dulled under her feet, stained darker the farther they ascended, until she wasn’t sure whether she walked on velvet or dried blood.

Each shadow seemed to lean closer. Each door they passed seemed to listen.

A central room surrounded by the hush of conversations.

We could hear none of it, 

Only echoes

Astarion’s voice was speaking. Smooth. Polished. Familiar in its cadence, even now—like silk wrapped over steel.

But we could understand none of it.

We were too far gone.

The fog was too thick, eating meaning, swallowing words into shapeless echoes. Only images came.

Flashes.

Red glass. Candlelight smears across polished stone. The tilt of a goblet. A smile too sharp.

Then—

She saw him.

The Osslander vampire lord.

The one from the corridor. The predator wrapped in platinum and ancestral scars.

Coming toward us.

Talking to Astarion.

Focus!

Try to understand.

But his voice was a low rumble, words breaking apart before they could form in her mind. The fog held them at bay, turned syllables into static. Only the tone carried—measured, unhurried, edged with hunger.

He leaned against the banister as though he had been born there, as though time bent itself to give him leisure. Every gesture radiated possession, control. Like a man with all the time in the world. Like a man who knew exactly what he wanted—and had already decided it was his.

Focus.

Listen.

But the words slipped through her like smoke.

What remained—what carved itself into clarity—was the way his eyes found Astarion first.

They drank him in. Assessed. Measured. Remembered.

The smile that curved his lips was slow, deliberate. A recognition too sharp to be mistaken.

He tilted his head—unhurried, savouring the silence between every syllable that never came. The kind of pause that tasted like a secret begging to be spoken.

Leaning casually against the banister, he looked as though he had all the time in the world. Like a man holding a treasure too delicious not to gloat over.

Then—

He tilted his head again.

And scented the air.

No. Not possible.

Her scent was masked. Twisted. Cloaked in ghoul-rot and the perfumes she’d smeared across her skin. She should have been indistinguishable from any of the silent, pretty things lining these halls.

He can’t know.
He shouldn’t know.

But he moved anyway.

Not directly. Not accusing. Just circling. Closing the distance as though indulging himself. Admiring.

Fingers brushed her shoulder—light, deliberate. A test.

She didn’t flinch.
Couldn’t.

But the floodwaters rose inside her, the fog realm drowning her in its tide. The surface dissolved.

And another face bled through.

Another vampire lord.

His features overlapped like a double-exposure: purple skin glowing faintly in torchlight, lips wet with blood, a corpse at his feet. She remembered the smell of tallow. The trembling of hands beside her. The bone-deep fear that crawled into her marrow and never left.

Past and present tangled until she could not separate them.

Two predators. Two rooms. One memory pressing its teeth into her throat.

They had sent her in with four others.

She remembered their hands trembling, the faint clink of their teeth. She remembered the torches, their smoke thick with tallow. She remembered the silence that fell when he entered the chamber.

She knelt so low her forehead nearly fused with the stone.
She was going to die.
She should have been glad.

But fear still coiled in her gut. Much can happen before death.

The Primogenitor circled them. Assessing. Scenting. Biting. Laughing.

The spawn seized two. She remembered their screams. She remembered the sound of life torn away. She remembered fear — a bone-deep fear, marrow-deep, older than thought.

A shoe stopped beside her bowed head.

“Well, what do we have here? That’s an interesting scent. Leave those two. Get out. Do not disappoint me.”

The shoe vanished.
Another scream.
A choking sound.
Then silence.

“What’s your name, little bug?”

She didn’t register that he meant her.

“Speak.”

“…I have none, your grace.”

A guttural laugh erupted, deep and resonant.

“Really now?”

“Yes, your grace.”

“How old are you?”

Panic lanced through her. Why was he speaking to her?

“Seventeen, your grace.”

“Time does fly.”

His shadow moved, vast against the wall. “Who sent you here? You were no offering from the priestess.”

“Lord Nere selected me for tonight’s offering, your grace.”

Another laugh, sharper now. “That idiot didn’t even notice. Sent me a dinner with a stigmata. Why would he do that? It isn’t even his task.”

“One so lowly as I can’t begin to fathom the wis—”

“Let’s try again, little bug.” His voice cut like silk over steel. “This time without a lie. Why are you here?”

Her throat constricted. The truth scraped its way out.
“I believe I displeased the lord, your grace.”

Another laugh, slow and heavy.

“How so?”

“…I don’t scream enough anymore.”

“Oh, that idiot. Doing the Queen’s work brilliantly. Lolth is watching you, little bug. Rise. Come closer.”

She obeyed.

“Look at me.”

She raised her head.

And she had never seen beauty like his.

Pale purple skin, smooth as polished stone, glowed faintly under the candlelight. It should have looked cold, lifeless—but it shimmered, perfect, unbroken. His face was sculpted too finely for mortals: high, cruel cheekbones; lips curved with effortless disdain; a jaw cut like obsidian. And his eyes—gods, those eyes—piercing red, glowing as if lit from within by coals that never died. They burned straight through her, through everything she thought she was, until she felt peeled open like raw fruit.

He reclined on the sofa bed as though it were a throne, sprawled with languid arrogance, blood still wet at the corner of his mouth. One hand draped lazily across his chest, the other hanging loose, claws grazing the velvet. His posture was indulgence given form—like he had all eternity, because he did.

At his feet lay a body. A girl. Her body limp, skin waxen, eyes open but unseeing. Blood still glistened at her throat, pooling beneath her in a spreading stain.

Elenya’s stomach twisted, but her legs would not move. None of theirs would.

Because he was beautiful. More beautiful than anything she had ever imagined. Terrible in that beauty, because it belonged to something that had long since abandoned mercy. His perfection was a mockery. Every flawless line of him whispered death.

And then she felt it.

It was not just the hunger rolling off him. Not just the weight of his gaze. It was the way the very air recoiled. The way light bent back from his form. The way her breath shuddered in her chest as she realized—he was not merely alive.

He was the end of life.

Positive energy itself—warmth, breath, heartbeat, hope—shrank from him. She could see it, in the way shadows deepened at his edges, in the way even the pulse of the Weave refused to touch him. He was not surrounded by darkness. He was surrounded by something worse: a hollow.

Oblivion clung to him like a crown.

The weight of it pressed into her bones, into her lungs, until the world narrowed to just him—his glowing eyes, the gleam of fangs wet with someone else’s blood, the corpse at his feet.

Something inside her snapped. Heat rushed down her belly, and suddenly hot liquid spilled across her thighs, soaking her shift, running down her legs. The acrid stench of urine hit the air sharply and undeniably.

Panic swallowed her. Shame burned hotter than the fear, but the fear was infinite, suffocating. She couldn’t stop it. Couldn’t move. Her breath came in shallow gasps, body trembling, every instinct screaming—she was going to die.

The vampire lord’s gaze slid lazily down, lingering on the stain spreading beneath her. For one heartbeat, she thought he would strike, thought he would drain her dry just for the insult of her weakness.

Then he laughed.

A deep, resonant sound, rolling out of his chest like velvet wrapped around knives. Cruel amusement, savoring the humiliation as if it were a delicacy.

He lifted one elegant hand and snapped his fingers. Magic rippled like heat across stone. The stain vanished, the stench dissolved, her skin left dry and clean as though nothing had happened. Prestidigitation—effortless, casual.

But the shame remained. The terror.

His laugh lingered in her skull long after it ended, echoing like iron doors slamming shut.

Then his voice—smooth, commanding, intimate as a whisper in her ear though he lounged half a room away.

“Tell me what you see, little bug.”

Her lips trembled. She wanted to stay silent, to vanish into the stone. But his gaze burned into her until the words clawed their way out.

“C-crown of shadows,” she stammered. “D-death… and empty.”

For a moment, silence. His perfect mouth curved, slow and cruel, and his eyes flared with unholy delight.

“They certainly grow fast.”

The corpse at his feet twitched—an aftershock of death. Blood slicked the floor. 

His hand unfurled, pale and regal, beckoning with the inevitability of a tide.

“Come now,” he purred, fangs glinting as he leaned forward, the hunger in him coiling like smoke.

“Time for dinner.”

Her legs locked. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe.

But his eyes never left her. Those perfect, glowing eyes—piercing, radiant, alive with something more than hunger. They pinned her like a moth against glass, thrashing wings useless against the inevitable.

“Come,” he said again, the word a leash, she felt the charm take hold, and her body betrayed her. One step. Then another. Her knees quivered with every pace, her throat tight with the certainty that she was walking toward her own death.

When she reached the edge of the couch, he moved with a predator’s grace. One moment lounging, the next upright, towering above her. The crown of oblivion around him seemed to pulse, pressing the air flat in her lungs.

His hand cupped her chin—cold, elegant fingers tilting her face upward. The contrast between his beauty and his cruelty made her stomach twist. His touch was careful, reverent even, but she felt smaller than an insect, a thing weighed and measured only for how it would taste.

The dead body slumped by his feet seemed to lean closer in her vision, empty sockets accusing, warning. She wanted to scream, but no sound came.

He leaned down until his lips hovered at her throat. She felt the cold of his breath, smelled the coppery tang clinging to him, tasted the iron on her tongue as if it were already her own blood.

She is going to die. 

“Do not worry,” he whispered. “I’ll make it quick.”

She is finally going to die. 
Fear subsided.
Panic disappeared. 
She can finally rest. 
Then his fangs sank in.

Pain like fire. White. Endless. She shook, her hands clutching uselessly at his sleeve, at the silk robes that didn’t yield to her nails. The world blurred at the edges, her blood rushing out of her faster than her prayers could form.

Calm invaded her. 
She endured worse. 
Not a bad way to go. 
As long as she could leave. 
She can rest soon,

He laughed against her skin—low, satisfied—as if the sound of her resignation and relief was the sweetest part of the feast.

She felt it first in the brush of lips. Astarion—soft, grounding—pressing a kiss against the wound at her throat. His scent wrapped around her like silk, Copper and wood tangled with the sharp sweetness she had grown to know too well.

“Just mine,” she heard, low, dangerous, possessive.

The words tethered her. For one breath, one heartbeat, she was here. Not alone. Not in Menzoberranzan.

Focus.
Snap out of it.
The vampire lord was still here. Still circling. Still dangerous.
And Astarion—gods—Astarion was still in danger.

He circled again. Close. His fingertips ghosted across her arm—light, deliberate, lingering like someone searching for a pulse in marble.

Too smart.
He was testing her.
Hunting her.

Behind her, Astarion did not move. Still, as carved obsidian. Only his smile had shifted—colder now, honed, beautiful as a blade.

Words passed between them, low, in a tongue she couldn’t parse. But his gaze—his gaze kept flicking back to her. Measuring. Weighing. Toying.

And then—

His fingers traced her jaw.

A gesture of ownership. Of curiosity. Of doubt.

She felt her control buckling. Not on her face, not in her mask—but inside. Rage seethed, shame gnawed, fear pooled heavy in her lungs. The weight of it all pressed down, threatening to fracture her mask wide open.

Then he spoke the word.

“Menzoberranzan.”

The syllables slammed into her like a blade between the ribs.

The fog cracked. The flood rose.

And she was gone.

Not here. Not in the Parlour. Not at Astarion’s side.

She was kneeling again, forehead pressed to stone, torches guttering with the stink of tallow, hands trembling. All around her, screams laughter the primogenitor’s shadow circling, circling—

The wave folded the past into the now.

Two chambers. Two vampire lords. One nightmare.

His fangs slid free with a wet sound, leaving rivulets of blood trickling down her throat. She swayed, half from blood loss, half from the weight of his gaze.

“Quite the delicious vintage,” he purred, tongue catching the last drop at the corner of his mouth. His smile gleamed cruel in the candlelight. “Tell me, little bug… do you know who I am?”

Her lips parted before her mind could resist, the compulsion tugging her voice free. “Lord Val’Zaroth.”

The name hung in the air like a prayer to something that should never be worshiped.

His eyes narrowed, pleased. “Do you know what they call me?”

Her throat tightened, but she couldn’t stop the words from spilling. “Lolth’s angel.”

His grin widened, teeth white against the smear of red. “Mm. Yes. A flattering title. Some would say… too flattering. And tell me, little bug—what would you do first, if you had my power? If the world bent to your knee?”

Her vision blurred, her head spun—but the charm bound her tongue in honesty. She whispered, trembling, “I would go see the sky.”

For a heartbeat, silence. Then his laughter exploded, deep and resonant, shaking her bones. Not kind laughter. Mockery dressed as music. It rolled through the chamber until even the shadows seemed to cower.

“Ohhh,” he crooned, drawing her face up close to his. “So small. So simple. And yet… perhaps the only honest answer I’ve ever been given.”

His grip tightened around her jaw. His voice dropped to a murmur, velvet steel. “Would you like to live forever, little bug? To rise again as one of mine?”

Her lips trembled, but the truth spilled unbidden, the charm forcing it through. “No.”

His brows arched, amused. “No? Why not? Afraid of dying?”

Her voice cracked. Her chest heaved with the effort of breathing. She couldn’t look away from him, couldn’t hide, couldn’t lie.

“Forever is too long… to be in pain.”

The words hung between them like a wound torn open.

For a long, terrible heartbeat, he only stared at her. That impossible face—perfect as carved marble, inhumanly beautiful—was unreadable. The silence stretched until her pulse thundered in her ears.

Then, slowly, his lips curved. Not into laughter this time, but into something darker. Hungrier.

“Too long to be in pain,” he echoed softly, savoring the words. His voice dipped lower, resonant as a drum in a cavern. “But, little bug… if you were mine, you would not endure pain. You would wield it.”

His thumb brushed her blood-slick throat. His eyes burned with cruel promise.

“…Because if I did, I would become you. You look in pain as well.”

The words slipped out of her like blood from a wound—inevitable, unstoppable under the charm’s grip.

For a moment, silence.

Then he stilled. His eyes narrowed, the red glow pulsing, burning hotter—as though her honesty had pierced some ancient scar. Then, instead of striking, instead of rage, he laughed.

It rolled out of him, deep and cruel, shaking the velvet drapes, reverberating through her bones. The sound was not mirth—it was hunger, sharpened pleasure at being challenged by something so fragile.

“Oh, little bug…” His hand cupped her jaw, tilting her face up toward him, forcing her to look into those abyssal eyes. “Exquisite. Exquisite.” His tongue brushed a streak of her blood from his lip as if tasting the truth of her words.

“I don’t know what the Dark Queen poured into your veins—but it does not matter. It will ripen.” His smile widened, terrible and radiant, like a sunrise made of knives. “You will bloom finely, once the bet is done.”

Her stomach twisted at the word—bet—but she could not speak. His hand lingered, cold and commanding, while the corpse cooling at his feet seemed to grin along with him.

Her throat worked, words clawing past the compulsion, small but steady. “I don’t want to bloom, your grace.”

For a heartbeat, the chamber froze. Then he leaned back, laughter spilling from his lips again—soft at first, then thundering, echoing against the stone. His fangs caught the candlelight as he grinned.

“Ah, little bug… then you should have become one of mine. But alas, now you will learn how little your wants matter.”

His hand swept outward, dismissive, regal, final. The gesture of a king discarding a petitioner.

“But now you will leave,” he continued, voice rich with cruel amusement. “The game has only just begun, it seems.”

Her lips trembled before the words escaped. “I thought I was supposed to die here.”

He laughed softly, the sound deep and cold, like stone cracking beneath winter frost. “I just told you, little bug—what you want doesn’t matter.” His eyes narrowed, gleaming red like fresh wounds. “But tell me… who hurt you the most?”

Her breath caught, the compulsion dragging the truth out of her throat. “Master Nere.”

The vampire lord’s smile deepened, every line of his perfect face sharpening into something terrible. “Then who, if I plucked them from the room and bled them in your place, would wound him most?”

Her voice was barely audible. “…His squire. Sir Plansar.”

Val’Zaroth leaned back, fangs gleaming wet in the candlelight. “Very well, little love.” He gestured toward the shadows, where something stirred—something waiting for his command. “Sit. Watch. Let your master’s fury feast on another.”

He leaned closer once more, whispering against her ear with breath colder than the grave.

“I bet he’ll take it out on you beautifully.”

Plansar came eventually.
So did Nere.

They were herded in like cattle, chained and forced to kneel in the circle of torchlight. The music stopped. The laughter faded. All that remained was the sound of boots scraping stone and the faint, eager breathing of the monsters gathered to watch.

Val’Zaroth, Lolth’s Angel, reclined on his velvet couch as if enthroned in shadow. His eyes glowed brighter, cruel delight sparking in their garnet depths.

“Bring him forward.”

Plansar was dragged to the center—struggling, shouting Nere’s name, trying to shield him with words that only made the spectacle sweeter.

And then the feeding began.

Not quick. Not merciful. Deliberate. Each bite measured, each gulp drawn out until the boy’s defiance dissolved into whimpers. His body grew slack, his skin paling to ash. By the end, there was no scream left—just a soft collapse, the rattle of chains against stone. A husk crumpled at the Angel’s feet.

The silence that followed was worse than the screams.

Blood gleamed at the corner of the vampire lord’s perfect mouth as he turned his gaze back to her. His expression was calm, serene, as though this were no more than a lesson gently taught.

“There you go, little bug.”

Her body betrayed her—breath quickening, fingers trembling, stomach knotting until all she could do was stare at the floor. She noticed ridiculous things: the wax dripping unevenly down the nearest candle. The smell of iron and wet velvet. How her knees ached against the stone. Dissociation wrapped her like ice. She was nowhere. She was only a body.

He turned then, eyes narrowing on Nere—who stood frozen, face pale, rage coiled like a whip beneath his skin.

“Do what you please, you blind idiot,” Val’Zaroth said smoothly, his voice as silken as it was final. “But this one stays alive.”

The decree landed like chains around her throat.

And Nere obeyed.

He obeyed with hands like knives, with words like poison, with cruelty sharpened by the humiliation of watching his squire die in her place. He made her bleed. He made her scream. He took it out on her in every way he knew how—because death, too, was mercy.

And mercy was denied.

---

Then—

Astarion’s hand slid beneath her chin. Gentle. Possessive. Cold leather brushing against her skin as he tilted her face up.

His smile never wavered, but his eyes—gods, his eyes—burned with a glacial fury that made her bones ache.

When he spoke, his voice was velvet drawn over steel. A command wrapped in silk, inevitable as gravity.

“Defend my claim.”

The words struck her like an incantation. They didn’t just fall into her ears; they sank deeper, threading through marrow and blood, settling in her soul. The Fog thickened, the world narrowing to him, to the weight of his will.

Something stirred inside her. Ancient. Ruthless. Cold.
Not compassion. Not mercy. Something older. Something that had waited too long in the dark. 

That danced to the spidersong tune.

Her chest stilled. Her eyes fell. Her breath froze.

“Yes, master.”

The words slipped out smooth as she heard a blade unsheathed, expected and inevitable all at once.

The other vampire watched—silent, amused.
And smiled.

She started casting.

Notes:

Thank you for reading through this very intense installment. This chapter deliberately blurs past and present to show how thin the line between memory and reality can become under compulsion and trauma triggers.

Chapter 40: My Claim

Astarion POV

---

The Crimson Parlour sat like a jewel cracked with bluish light, nestled between two leaning buildings in the mid-ring of Warlock’s Crypt. It was a sanctuary of gaudy elegance and cruelty—off-limits to liches and the living by ancient tradition, and claimed instead by vampires and their spawn. No one else could have mastered decadence as domination so completely. Velvet draped the halls in deep garnet folds, muffling the sounds of living musicians whose minds were gently unravelling under enchantments. Goblets shimmered with viscous red, veins not yet cold. Mirrors lined the ceilings—not to reflect the clients, but to amplify the horror of what was done to their victims: flickering scenes of pleasure and torment woven together into artful dread.

Here, true vampires did not speak with threats. They spoke with raised eyebrows, veiled mockery, and curated power displays: a captive with a songbird’s voice, a thrall who cried only when touched, a servant forced to laugh while bleeding out. It was not a place for questions. It was a place for games.

And tonight, Elenya and I were playing ours.

Beauty was common here.

That was the first thing I noticed as I descended into the heart of the Parlour, trailing velvet and borrowed pedigree like perfume. Glamour clung to the air, shimmering on every step and every figure—sharp cheekbones, perfect lips, eyes polished like garnets. I drew glances, but not as much as I was used to. Not awe. Plenty of hunger.

Interest.

Curiosity.

Recognition of a peer.

Here, everyone was beautiful. Predatory. Ancient. Or pretending well enough to survive the illusion.

Still, I moved like I belonged—poised, deliberate, arrogant—and secured a place at the onyx-etched bar. The counter shimmered with alchemical light, pulsing faintly like veins beneath skin. I rested one arm lazily across the surface and flicked my fingers in a gesture that was both command and test.

A goblet arrived moments later—deep red with something thicker clinging at the bottom like sediment.

“Bloodroot infusion,” the bartender murmured. His voice was smooth, unhurried. His tongue forked briefly as he inclined his head.

I lifted the goblet, inhaling. Magic tingled against the rim. Old magic. Sharp and unfamiliar. My tongue itched from the scent alone. No idea what it was. That, in itself, was reason enough.

“I prefer the vintage unspoiled,” I said, sliding it back across the counter with two fingers.

The bartender’s expression didn’t shift. He merely replaced it with another—a glass of crimson wine that smelled faintly of iron and nothing else.

I took it, but didn’t drink.

The first sip in this place is always a statement. Too eager and you’re provincial. Too cautious and you’re prey. But refusing entirely? That was theatre. I let the goblet sit in my hand, swirling once, allowing the dim light to fracture against its surface.

Already, I could feel eyes on me. 

Elenya was standing by my side, eyes trailing the floor.

The very picture of obedience—collar gleaming faintly in the candlelight, posture folded into stillness. Her hands rested lightly before her, unmoving, her breath slow and measured. She was not invisible—no, that would have been suspicious. She was ornamental. Decorative. A shadow with just enough weight to remind anyone watching that she was mine.

And gods, she was good at it.

Every tilt of her chin, every careful drop of her gaze, every second of silence was a performance sharper than any blade. To them, she was a mage bound and collared, a pet trained to heel. To me, she was iron wrapped in silk, waiting to strike should the theatre demand it.

Her presence grounded the lie I wore like a second skin. Without her at my side, the ruse of Almirth would have cracked within minutes. But with her? The illusion breathed. It lived.

I let one hand drift casually down the stem of my goblet, the other resting just close enough to her shoulder to imply possession without touch. The gesture was calculated, intimate enough for those watching, distant enough to give her space to play her role.

Eyes turned toward us as if drawn by gravity. Spawn and vampires alike looked, lingered, measured.

No, this was sharper, not just the hungry glances of spawn who still thought themselves wolves. Older. A weight pressing between the shoulder blades, waiting to see if I would falter.

I finally lifted the glass to my lips, tasted the faintest drop—iron-rich, thin, unworthy of notice—and set it down again with a click deliberate enough to carry in the velvet-draped silence between songs.

“Passable,” I murmured.

And sure enough, movement stirred.

A pair of figures peeled from the crowd. Two spawn—elegant, groomed, still carrying the brittle arrogance of youth. They moved like predators in training, like dancers mimicking steps they had not yet mastered. Beautiful, yes. Dangerous, no. Not yet.

One leaned against the bar beside me, smiling like a cat with blood on its whiskers.

“You don’t look like the usual fare,” she said smoothly.

I smiled lazily into my glass. “How fortunate for you, then.”

I looked at her and observed her intently. She was a dark-skinned elf, looked older of the two, turned maybe less than half a century ago at most. Her skin was deep umber with a faint sheen that caught the lantern light, smooth and unblemished, too perfect to be mortal anymore. Her hair was thick, silver, and coiled into long braids that draped over one shoulder, the tips bound in silver clasps. She had a long, angular face, sharp cheekbones, and full lips painted a dark plum. Her eyes were almond-shaped, glowing faintly red, and she carried herself with the slow, confident poise of someone well past their hunger-frenzied youth.

The second one was a lovely, youthful-looking human redhead, younger—barely turned. She still had that restless energy in her movements, quick and twitching like a cat trying to look graceful. Her curls were bright copper-red, pinned up with jewelled hairpins that glinted when she moved, though half of it had already started to spill loose. Her skin was pale with a faint rosy undertone, and her mouth was too quick to grin, showing a flash of too much fang. She had a rounder face than the other, freckles faintly visible beneath the vampiric pallor, and her gown clung tight, making her look like she was trying just a bit too hard to impress.

Together, they were a study in contrast—one sleek and measured, the other restless and eager—but both unmistakably on the hunt for something. Their eyes lingered not on my face, but on the space between me and Elenya. Calculating. Testing.

The game had begun.

The dark-skinned one slipped onto the stool beside me with a smirk that showed just enough fang. Her voice was low and rich, carrying the lazy confidence of someone used to making others squirm.

“New?” she asked, leaning in just slightly. “Or did your maker finally allow you some fun?”

I let a lazy smile curve my lips, careful to make it look effortless. “Visiting, actually. Arrived recently.”

Her smirk deepened, elbow brushing the counter as she leaned closer. “Can’t say we have many dashing spawns wandering in here recently. Is your master upstairs?”

“Not really. I came here on my own.”

That earned me a tilt of her head, eyes narrowing in amusement. “Alone? Now you certainly don’t see that often. One of us without their master’s leash. And certainly not with…” Her gaze flicked toward Elenya, still silent and composed, chin dipped in perfect submission. “…snacks of their own.”

I let the pause stretch before answering, savouring the tension. “What can I say, darling? Daddy is generous.” My tone was casual, dismissive, as if the entire question bored me. Then I arched a brow, letting a sliver of a grin tug at my mouth. “Is this actually going somewhere, or are you here to take my pedigree papers as an immigration officer?”

That earned a snicker from the redhead, who circled lazily behind my chair, the scent of her perfume sharp as overripe fruit. “We meant no harm, sugar. Just making conversation with the new face in town.”

The dark skinned spawn leaned her cheek into her palm, smirk not budging. “A very nice one, at that, I may add. It's rare in these times. Less rare than this level of freedom. You must be… exceptional.” The dark skinned one added, "Not trying to pry, we're all here for just some fun?" 

"So why not explain to the poor lost tourist how one may pay for a drink in this fine establishment?" 

"We don't, you just give your rune stone. The masters have it handled. Oh, but if you are not with any house, I guess for the regular drinks, coins, soulcoins, and components are fine. For food, you can just barter whatever you want with the sommelier; they will tell you what you can afford. The samples are free as long as you don't kill any of them."

"Thank you, darlings, that was very sweet. I didn't catch your names."

" Cyntha," The dark skinned one said seductively. 

"And I am Lilly," added the redhead

"Almirth, charmed, although not as much as you two, I am sure." 

They both giggled, a sound too bright for the dim hall, teeth flashing too long behind their lips.

Lilly tilted her head, curls brushing her collarbone as she circled behind me again, her hand grazing the back of my chair like she was testing the grain of the wood. “Almirth,” she repeated, tasting the name. “Exotic. Haven’t heard that one here before. Where’d you crawl out from? Must be impressive, coming all the way to Warlock’s Crypt just to drink watered-down vintages with us.”

Cyntha leaned closer, her perfume sharp and spiced, her smirk unyielding. “Yes. Tell us, Almirth. Who taught you your manners? Surely not one of the petty blood barons outside the walls.”

Their eyes glittered. Curious. Testing.

I gave a lazy shrug, lifting my glass, though I still hadn’t taken a proper sip. “Funnily enough, I come from a necropolis myself. Ever heard of Pholzubbalt?”

Cyntha stilled, her smirk faltering briefly before it curved back sharper. Recognition. Lilly blinked, lips parting in a gasp she tried—and failed—to mask as a laugh.

“The Boneyard?” Cyntha murmured. “Didn’t think anyone ever left that place.”

I leaned in, voice dropping low and silken, meant only for their ears. “Ah, but even mausoleums dream, darling. One may want to stretch their legs and explore. Pholzubbalt flourishes still—fresh blood, old rites… all the comforts of home. One simply has to earn the right to leave. I’m on something of a sabbatical myself.”

“What’s the Boneyard?” Lilly asked, feigning innocence a little too clumsily.

“Another necropolis,” Cyntha explained smoothly, “down in the Underdark near Earthroot.” Her eyes narrowed on me. “He just let you go on sabbatical?”

I swirled my untouched glass, letting the crimson catch the low light. “Or perhaps my maker simply trusts me not to embarrass the family.”

Cyntha laughed—higher, mocking. “Trust. That’s one word for it.” Her gaze slid down to Elenya, lips curling with suggestion. “Though I’d call it indulgence. Few masters are so generous with their pets.”

My hand slid to Elenya’s collar, fingers brushing the crimson band like it was a leash I didn’t even need to tug. I let my smile sharpen. “Few pets are worth it.”

That shut her up. Briefly.

“…Never imagined the Lich-Killer to be the generous type.”

Lilly’s eyes widened, words spilling before she thought better: “Lich-Killer?! Wait—your maker is that war-crazed dwarf in the Underdark? The one the drow delegation was raging about last week?” She glanced at Cyntha for confirmation.

The silence that followed was worth more than blood.

My hand snapped to her throat in a blur, fingers tightening just enough to make her gasp, her jewelled pins trembling as her head tipped back.

“Darling,” I snarled, low and venomous, “your maker should have taught you to keep your tongue behind your fangs before letting you out. You should know better than to run your mouth about your betters. I understand that living under a lich's rule might leave you with no tender feeling for my father. But you do not hear me slandering the Shadow King in mixed company, do you?”

Her eyes went wide, the flirtation draining to raw fear. I leaned closer, fangs bared, letting the venom drip from every word. I tightened my grip, enough to make her lips part in a strangled sound.

“I dare you to do it again, little fledgling. I dare you. Because if you ever insult my maker again in my presence, I will rip your barely undead heart from your chest. Consequences be damned. I am sure my darling pet here—” I tilted my head toward Elenya, who was already shimmering with restrained magic—“can handle my extraction.”

Elenya’s hand glowed faintly with light as she prepared to cast, the air around her rippling with spellwork just waiting to be unleashed. Her head was still bowed, her poise unbroken, but I could feel the power thrumming through her like a blade in its sheath. She would cut the room apart if I asked. This whole display was her idea. I should never allow disrespect to my supposed maker so as not to instill doubt about any potential backing of his I supposedly had. 

The silence stretched—thick, brittle, ready to shatter.

Cyntha’s smirk faltered, her hands rising just slightly placatingly. “Calm down,” she said quickly, her tone silk over cracks. “Excuse her, she meant no disrespect. You know how fledglings are—rash, mouthy. She’s barely a year turned.”

Lilly clawed at my wrist, her eyes wet with the panic she was trying so hard to mask as coyness. Her lashes fluttered. Her lips quivered into something meant to pass for a pout. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, breathless. “Truly. I didn’t mean it. I’m… terrible with names. I was just proud I remembered one. Please—”

I let the plea hang in the air, savouring the weight of every watching eye. Not many had turned fully toward us yet—too subtle, too careful to appear invested—but I felt it all the same. The way conversations dimmed, how goblets stilled halfway to mouths, how the musicians’ fingers faltered on their strings.

No one saw Elenya. Not yet. Her glow was faint, tucked beneath the shadow of her bowed head—a red-collared mage, silent, pliant, kneeling at her master’s heel. But I felt it, thrumming against my spine—the promise of devastation coiled beneath her skin, waiting for the order.

Perfect.

“Still,” I said at last, voice slipping back into silken composure though my hand did not ease, “one year is enough to learn manners. Enough to know the difference between reverence and reckless insolence.”

I tilted Lilly’s head back further, exposing her throat to the room, baring her in a parody of intimacy. My lips brushed just close enough for her to think I might bite. Instead, I whispered, loud enough for Cyntha alone to hear:

“Teach your little sister better. I will not repeat myself a third time.”

Then I released her.

She stumbled, hand flying to her throat, jewelled pins slipping from her hair and eyes filled with arousal.

Pathetic.

The silence rippled, then smoothed again. The game continued. The other patrons lowered their gazes, conversations resuming with feigned ease, though the tension still lingered like perfume.

I leaned back, reclaiming my glass, and let my smile return—lazy, amused, as though the entire outburst had been nothing more than theatre for my entertainment.

Elenya’s glow faded. She bowed lower, hiding the faintest flicker of her eyes toward me: a question, an affirmation: Well played.

I smirked, swirling the crimson wine I still had no intention of drinking.

The game had just turned.

“If you want me to forgive you, my sweet,” I drawled, voice low enough to drag silk across stone, “then indulge me. Tell me—who felt bold enough to wag their tongues about my father?”

Cyntha, sharper than her counterpart, recovered first. She leaned in, smirk faint but guarded. “We don’t know their names. But last week, a few drow vampires from Menzoberranzan passed through—old blood. Powerful maker. The type who don’t bother hiding their disdain.”

My smile thinned, calm and deliberate. “Mm. Crystal clear. Thank you, dear Cyntha.” I let her name curl off my tongue like a caress and a cut in one, then lifted my glass in a small gesture of mock-toast. “And apologies, of course, for my… abruptness.”

Her lips quirked, but the tension hadn’t entirely left her eyes. Good.

Lilly, still rubbing the faint red marks at her throat, was the one who broke the silence. “So you’re really a spawn of Hamezaar? Ruler of the Boneyard?”

The word made me laugh—soft, amused, dangerous. “We really would rather people call it Pholzubbalt,” I corrected smoothly, tilting my head so the lamplight gilded the edges of my smile. “The Boneyard is what outsiders call it—whispered, with that shiver in their voice, as though naming it will call something hungry out of the dark.”

Both their gazes clung to me now. Interest. Wariness. Fascination.

Cyntha’s smirk returned. “Then what’s it like out there?”

I leaned in, elbows resting casually on the bar as though I were sharing a secret meant only for them. “Imagine a city built entirely on mausoleums and catacombs, every stone steeped in centuries of rites. The bells chime on the hour of the rising, echoing through marble vaults. Embalming oils sweeten the air. Thousands walk the streets—many mindless, true, but all devoted. Choirs of ghouls sing in the plazas, their voices woven with necromantic resonance. Every alley hums with cults and cabals whispering prayers to old gods no one else remembers. The living avoid it like a plague.”

I let my smile sharpen, letting the flicker of my fangs catch the light. “But for those of us born to it? It is home. Less cosmopolitan than this charming menagerie, perhaps. But far more… vampiric.”

“Sounds… charming,” Cyntha murmured, her dark lips curling, equal parts disdain and curiosity.

“It is,” I replied smoothly, swirling the untouched wine as if savouring the memory. “Especially if you don’t mind the occasional ghoul choir rehearsing in the plazas. The acoustics in marble catacombs are exquisite, you know.”

That earned a ripple of laughter from both of them—sharp, amused, perfectly in tune with the game. I laughed lightly as well, letting the sound slip out like smoke. Always better when they think you're performing for them. Always better when they believe you want their approval.

After a moment, Cyntha leaned closer, brushing her shoulder against mine. “Come,” she purred, gesturing toward the eastern side of the hall. “No need to linger at the bar like some tourist. A face like yours deserves a better seat.”

Lilly was already circling me, her perfume cloying, her crimson curls brushing my sleeve as though she couldn’t bear the idea of me refusing. Their smiles glimmered like knives.

I inclined my head, elegant and unhurried, and rose. “How could I refuse such generosity?”

Elenya moved with me, silent shadow at my heel. Head lowered, hands folded, crimson collar catching the light just so. Perfect. Flawless. She knew the role—and played it to dangerous perfection.

The table they led me to was veined onyx, polished to mirror-shine, set back from the room's flow. The music had shifted—less thrumming decadence now, more muted, a hush to invite secrets. Perfect for what they wanted. Perfect for what I needed.

They sat across from me, leaning in like conspirators, their eyes still glimmering with that insatiable mixture of hunger and intrigue. I could feel their gazes rake over me, lingering too long, testing the edges of the mask.

I simply pushed the disgust down, wrapped it in silk, and smiled as though the world had been arranged for amusement.

The game was theirs to think they were winning.

Mine to actually win.

---

“How about your bloodbag? She’s so pretty. Where did you get her?” Lilly asked, chin tilting, her eyes flicking toward the figure kneeling at my side.

She had dropped the moment I took my seat—silent, lower than me, hands folded in her lap, gaze fixed on the floor unless I allowed otherwise. Perfectly measured. Perfectly mine.

Gods.

She was blinding.

Even bowed, even folded into silence at my feet, she eclipsed every jewel in the room. Every enchanted bauble. Every century, these monsters had been groomed to parade in polished beauty.

Her skin glowed faintly under the lanternlight—pale frost, touched with that strange luminescence that made her seem carved from moonlight. Her hair spilled in silver-blue waves, alive with every flicker of candle and glamour, as though the whole parlour existed just to shine on her. And her eyes—when they lifted, even briefly—were galaxies caged behind lashes, holding constellations and eternity in a single glance—a cathedral hidden inside a mortal shell.

And then, the mark. My mark. Dark against her pale throat, framed by the crimson collar. That vivid wound branded her as mine—and gods, it was unbearable how much it suited her. Proof written into her skin that this rarest jewel belonged to me.

A weapon disguised as an ornament. Submission worn like silk. The perfect lie. My lie.

And every eye that lingered on her, every curl of fanged smile, made me want to draw steel and end them for daring.

I smiled instead. Smooth. Easy. “My dear pet here? Gods, no—she isn’t some passing indulgence. She was a gift from dear father when she was younger. Bred for me, so to speak. The result of a rather interesting arrangement with the Thayans. A fine gift, once properly trained.”

“Wait—he bred you your own mage?” Cyntha asked, her voice edged with disbelief.

“He did.”

The silence that followed was delicious. Enough to prove my pedigree more effectively than any of the thousand lies I’d laid tonight.

“He must really like you,” Lilly murmured, her smirk faint now, edged with something else.

“Now you sound like my sister.” I laughed, casual, disarming. “I suppose he does like me slightly more than his other children. Almost half as much as I like him.” I let the words hang, then added lightly, “Is it so strange? For a maker to provide for his chosen? Didn’t yours pick you for a reason? To share his gift?”

That shut them up. The air tightened with the weight of comparison.

“... My apologies,” Cyntha said finally, her tone a little too careful.

Lilly leaned in, her hunger poorly hidden. “She smells exquisite.”

“She does,” I said with a smile sharp enough to draw blood.

“Can I have a bite?” Lilly asked, too brightly, her lips curling around the words like a dare.

“Don’t be stupid,” Cyntha cut in, voice flat. “She has a red collar. She isn’t registered.”

“That too,” I added smoothly, my smile all blade, “but even if she weren’t, if you tried, she would send you to the afterlife before I had to lift a finger. She is mine.”

The words settled like iron. The ripple of silence that followed was enough. It seemed to put the matter to rest for now.

But her—Elenya.

She was too still.

Kneeling at my side, head bowed, hands folded, she looked every inch the perfect pet I had crafted her to appear. But there was something… wrong in the perfection. Something just past believable. Her heartbeat ticked too evenly, as if measured against a metronome. Her breath rose and fell with such mechanical precision that it felt more spell than flesh. Even her scent—normally warm, alive beneath the thin veil of perfume and smoke—was muted. Flat.

In retrospect, I should have noticed.

How did I not notice?

---

We chatted more. The spawns named themselves as children of Thaleira d’Sythrax, one of the great lords overseeing the Vein Market—where mortals were tallied like ledgers, vintages of blood catalogued as carefully as wine, and breeding rituals dressed up in the thin silk of economics.

“Cold, artless liches have no appreciation for the body,” Lilly sneered, crimson lips curling. “All they see is souls. Logs for the furnace. Nothing more.”

Cyntha smirked, tilting her glass. “We give our cattle dimension. Purpose. Something to be beyond mere fuel.”

I nodded with polite interest, swirling my untouched wine so its red sheen caught the candlelight. “How very enlightened of you,” I murmured, letting the silken irony thread faintly into my voice.

Neither noticed.

Conversation drifted like smoke through velvet. More spawns gathered—drawn by curiosity, hunger, and the scent of a new player at their table. What began as idle flirtation shifted into something quieter, heavier. A court of predators, all fangs hidden behind lips lacquered in charm.

I let them talk. I smiled when they wanted me to smile, leaned in when they expected me to lean, and asked questions with all the practiced care of a surgeon pressing a blade against a vein. Harmless inquiries about vintages. Compliments on the parlour’s décor. Small remarks about the elegance of their lords. Each word a thread, tugged loose until the tapestry frayed just enough to glimpse the shape beneath.

And I learned what I needed between sips of red and the careful dance of their vanity.

Therys Valtun—the name spoken almost reverently, almost fearfully—was the master of this place—proprietor of the Crimson Parlour. Rarely seen, never lingering. He lived above, in the silken chambers hidden past the grand staircase. No spawn were allowed beyond those steps unless summoned. Invitations only. Always invitations.

I leaned back, let the knowledge steep like wine, and raised my eyes.

Up, toward the second floor.

And there—movement. Elegant shadows glided between indigo silk drapes and archways trimmed with old gold. Figures leaned on balustrades, half-seen in the lanternlight. Murmurs slid down like scented smoke, threads of laughter and speculation coiling through the air, watching, always watching.

I smiled, took another sip, and returned to my companions—only to still as the table quieted.

They were feeding.

A mortal—a boy, no older than twenty—was kneeling between two of them, collar around his neck, mouth slack in magical stupor. One had their wrist to his lips. The other was already drinking—slow, luxurious pulls from the hollow of his throat.

I felt the bile rise.

One of them turned to me. “You’d like a taste? We have a few marked for guests.”

I glanced at Elenya.

Still kneeling.

Still perfectly silent.

But her breath had changed—shallow, slow. Waiting.

I could lie.

I had to lie.

“I was given specific instruction,” I said, voice honeyed and firm. " Dear father allows me to feed only on what he provides. He’s particular about lineage. You understand.”

The spawn wrinkled their nose. “How dull.”

I smiled. “He lets me keep my pet, though. And she’s well-stocked.”

The spawn’s lips curled into a grin, crimson-stained and far too knowing. “Then join us. Nothing like dining together to build connection.”

The others at the table stilled, expectant. Their eyes gleamed faintly red in the velvet glow, the mortal boy between them swaying like a candle too far melted. His pulse throbbed weakly at his throat, and the sound of it—the smell of it—sliced against my control like glass under skin.

A test.

I reached out, languid as silk, and let my fingers graze Elenya’s collarbone. The table tilted slightly with the gesture, focus snapping to the red band at her throat, the faint shimmer of the bite-mark beneath it.

She didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

Gods, she was flawless.

I turned her face toward me with two fingers beneath her chin, as if weighing whether to offer her. Her eyes lifted just enough—silver-violet galaxies burning under her lashes, steady, unflinching. Waiting. Trusting me to make the lie hold.

“Up,” I murmured.

She rose—elegant, controlled—and settled sideways across my lap with all the grace of a well-trained doll. Her cheek brushed my jaw. I smiled back. Sweet. Dangerous. My hand stayed exactly where it was—on her hip, firm. The moment stretched. “Darling,” I murmured, loud enough for them to hear, “what do you think? It may be impolite to let our new friends dine alone.”

She didn’t speak.

Didn’t need to.

She only turned slowly and fluidly and tilted her head back, baring her throat with quiet, practiced grace. A gesture that was somehow both servile and sovereign. Her neck was exposed in one fluid motion, and her pale skin glowed like marble under lanternlight. Offered without hesitation, without shame. It was a perfect gesture of surrender and obedience, yet there was also defiance, not toward me but toward the premise of this place. It was buried so deep no one else would ever see—only me.

The table leaned forward, hungry.

I bent my head, slow, deliberate, dragging the silence into a taut wire. My lips brushed the mark—my mark—before my fangs pierced her skin.

She didn’t flinch. Just relaxed further in my arms. 

The taste flooded sharp and familiar, richer than any vintage they could pour here. Blood laced with sorrow and Ambrosia, fresh and decadent like a minty ice wine with quiet, unyielding undertones. It hit my tongue like a secret only I was allowed to know. 

Nothing could ever compare to the taste of her. Her blood was the temple of my absolution with maddening taste. The more I drowned in it, the more the taste changed and shifted like her many faces. Igniting feelings and sensations I could not remember yet knew.  The iron under her devotion— Like loyalty forged under fire, not fear. Something private and ruinous and mine. 

The spawn chuckled approvingly, raising their goblets in mock-toast. The mortal boy gave a weak whimper as another fang sank deeper into his neck. The parlour around us resumed its laughter and low music.

I had simply proven myself to them—another predator in their den, feeding from his jewelled toy.

But I knew better. I wasn’t feeding to prove a claim. I was drinking the only truth that tethered me to myself.

And when I lifted my mouth from her throat, tongue brushing away the blood, I made sure the smile I wore looked careless. Dangerous. Convincing.

“See?” I purred, letting my arm curl possessively tighter around her waist. “Perfectly well-stocked.”

Their eyes were glazed over, and their faces were laced with barely veiled jealousy.  

Because that’s what they wanted. Not blood. Not even dominance.

Ownership. Power. Control over someone. 

And gods help me, I gave them the show. 

However, even beyond that, I could sense much interest in the scent of her blood. Many appeared transfixed, eyes darting to her puncture wound.

So I bit again—clean, unhurried, a single deliberate punctum. Not for hunger; for message. The room stilled just enough. No one reached. No one dared, not with my mouth warm on her skin. I started drinking again, slowly and deliberately. It was as if I had all the time in the world and none of the fear. 

I feasted on her blood while mine was buzzing with pleasure. 

Because I knew she chose to let me have it.

Her fingers curled slightly at my shoulder, the only sign that it hurt. Or perhaps that it meant something. Her blood sang on my lips like a hymn.

A low sound escaped me—half-growl, half-moan—sharp enough to turn heads, dark enough to silence foolish desires.

That seemed to snap most of the table out of their haze as the others resumed their feast, laughter drizzling through red lips, eyes glowing faintly in the velvet half-light. I could hear the gurgle of another mortal sobbing against too-tight fangs around their throat.

But none of that mattered.

Because she was in my lap, and I was drinking from her, the whole room had swallowed the lie like honeyed wine.

They saw power. Ownership.

What they didn’t see—what they never could —was how this was freely given. She let me, she chose me.

I drew back slowly, tongue brushing the wound again and kissing it. 

She exhaled. Quiet. Controlled.

And when I met her gaze—lidded, offering, knowing—I understood something more profound than performance or deception:

This wasn’t just a game.

It was trust.

It was defiance, dressed in silk and submission.

They took their meals. 

I was offered mine, held it. 

And I had never wanted to protect something so fiercely in all my unholy life. 

---

The evening advanced in a blur of laughter too sharp, wine too red, and shadows too bright. I kept smiling. Kept playing the role—too old to be impressed, too charming to be threatened. Every word was another lie to get what I wanted. My smiles were blades sheathed in silk, every glance a calculated gamble. And beside me, still and exquisite in her masquerade, sat Elenya. She played the mage-pet to perfection.  And I played Almirth to match.

Our table grew more crowded, figures attracted by the visiting spawn. Still leashed, still untrue, but clearly made of older blood, elevated enough to be dangerous and trusted enough to be sent into the world with his own soft ornament—a flicker of magic in her robes. Silent unless addressed, spine bowed, hands folded like a prayer on my knee.

They believed it. All of it.

And so, when one of the spawn at our table leaned in—gold-dusted lashes, red mouth stained with mortal blood—and whispered that perhaps a message could be carried upstairs after the right flattery and the proper attention, I let my smile widen.

“I would be most grateful,” I said, fingers brushing theirs. “I’ve long admired the Parlour’s proprietor. A vampire of such distinction must surely be… illuminating company. He also has some knowledge of one of my father's acquaintances.”

The spawn purred something agreeable. Their eyes never left my mouth. 

But by the time we were set to leave, a summon from upstairs came. Not something I could nor wanted to refuse.

A servant drifted toward our table like smoke, their robes embroidered with runes that gleamed faintly under the lantern light: no voice—just a bow, and the gesture toward the staircase.

The shift was immediate.

The table fell silent.

The laughter turned thin, brittle. Every eye slid toward me—curious, hungry, some even pitying because this was no invitation, no polite social courtesy. Summons from above were never that.

My smile didn’t falter. Gods, I made it wider. “It seems the evening favours us, darling.” I rose, tugging Elenya lightly to her feet by the collar as though I’d just chosen her to accompany me upstairs for amusement.

Her obedience was flawless. Silent, eyes cast down, steps perfectly measured behind mine. But I felt it. There was a slight hitch in her breathing. The way the air around her hummed like a blade being drawn. She knew.

We climbed the staircase. Step by step, the music below dimmed into a muffled hum, the scent of spiced blood and perfume thinning into colder air. The crimson drapes gave way to deeper hues—indigo, obsidian, silk stitched with silver thread.

The upper floor was quieter. Heavier. Each archway we passed was guarded—not obviously, but enough. Statues that weren’t statues. Shadows that didn’t quite stay still. The difference between revelry and dominion.

We were ushered into the central chamber. It was wide, circular, veined in onyx and red marble. The light here was softer, crueller, burning from braziers shaped like outstretched hands. The air itself tasted of old spells and older blood.

We were told to wait.

So we did.

I passed the time looking for my vampiric uncle as if I had any method of recognizing the bastard.

When some of the True vampires nearby my waiting spot addressed me. I sank into the role again, lounging with an ease I didn’t feel, every gesture deliberate. Elenya took her place by my side—kneeling again, head lowered, the perfect image of trained devotion. It worked. The act held—long enough for them to laugh again, long enough for the mortal’s body to be dragged away and replaced with another, long enough for the glamour of the Parlour to settle back over the room like a suffocating curtain.

But beneath it, I could hear it. Her heart was steady but faster than it usually was. The scent of her blood beneath my mark, warm and sharp.

Something was wrong with her.

I let my hand trail lazily down her collar as if to remind the room she was mine. But the truth? The truth was, I was reminding her I had her, trying to anchor both of us.

Every instinct told me the game was about to shift.

That's when he appeared.

He didn’t give a name.

Surely he didn’t need to.

This one was powerful. 

You could smell it on him—the ancient stench of old blood and self-importance, of soil turned too long over graves. Time had become flesh. The staff who had led us recoiled the instant he stepped into view, bowing themselves further into shadow as though even proximity burned. The room fell silent—every other vampire falling still, their aura paled compared to the weight he carried with him.

He looked carved from stone, chiselled out of a battlefield memory and set loose to haunt the present. Tall, broad-shouldered, wrapped in a half-plate that gleamed like pristine platinum. Spirals and runes curled across its surface, pressed by artisans whose bones had long since turned to dust. Regal. Immaculate. And deeply wrong—its beauty warped by corruption. His skin was deep bronze, paled by undeath, weathered, broken, with pale ritual scars etched into him long before death. Long black hair streaked with iron-gray fell in tight braids, threaded with bone and shell beads that clinked faintly as he moved. His face was terrible in its perfection. High, sculpted cheekbones with a single deep scar on his left cheek. Blackened, angry yet still regal looking.. A square, unyielding jaw.  His lips were carved into severity, and his expression was more statue than man's. Dignity pressed into cruelty, beauty twisted into menace. 

Eyes like winter sky—pale, endless, burning from within.

When they landed on me, they weighed.

When they lingered on her, they branded.

And then he smiled.

Not politely. Not with curiosity.

It was the slow, deliberate smile of a dagger leaving its sheath—meant not to greet, but to cut.

The smile of a cat that just cornered a mouse.

And the chamber seemed to shrink around us, as though the walls themselves knew whose shadow they now served.

“Who’s your master, Spawn?” he asked, his voice slick as oil. 

“To let you bring your bloodbag in here, unleashed, and not through the kitchen? He must not be from around here.”

I kept my posture relaxed. Let the danger in my spine settle like a coil.

“Unfortunately, my lord, my master is not here,” I said evenly. “We are only visiting, and while she is indeed mine, we weren’t made aware that she needed to be leashed. If I may reassure you, she’s quite obedient. Aren’t you, darling?”

“Yes, Master.”

The words were sugar and steel. She delivered them flawlessly.

“Yours?” he echoed, drawing the word out like old taffy between dead teeth.

He stepped closer before adding, “And who might you be?”

“Almirth. Spawn and seco—” I attempted to say before being cut off by his next question. 

“And what are you doing in here, Almirth? Walking around with a bloodbag, with such a delightful scent, while gallivanting with the children.

Reselling snacks while you negotiate? maybe”

I reached for her, casually. Pulled her sharply onto my lap, wrapping one arm around her waist while kissing her bite mark slowly, and whispering against it. “No. Far from it. Just mine.”

Then, to him—cooler now, quieter: “ She’s my personal mage."

He laughed, dismissively adding, “Such possessiveness, from one not even true yet, is absolutely adorable!" 

" Happy to delight my lord,"  I added, my voice barely cordial

" You still haven't answered my question, spawn. What are you doing in here?"  he pressed further 

"The same as anyone in here, my lord, I simply came to visit the establishment for some entertainment. It came with a high recommendation. I thought black rune stones were allowed here, or did I get that wrong?”

He tsked before adding, " I didn't see you indulge in much of anything provided here. Are you one of those visiting Valcorrin from Menzoberranzan? I thought he said you wouldn't be permitted to prowl around.”

Valcorrin ?? Like Valcorrin Nectolieth. 

What is this asshole looking for?

He didn’t circle us. He loomed. Like a wolf staring down meat already claimed, wondering if he could still steal a bite. She didn’t flinch. God bless her—she played it perfectly. Chin lowered, spine straight, expression composed. Eyes downcast but never weak. Never broken. But I heard it. A slight skip in her heartbeat. A flicker. Almost imperceptible. But something he said just rattled her, and I hated it.

“Excuse me, my lord,” I said. “But as you said, one untrue, such as myself, fails to see how I can further assist one so clearly above me in station. Nor what is being asked nor required of me at the moment. Please forgive my confusion. I’m not here at the behest of anyone in Menzoberranzan. And I think even you understand how I cannot betray my maker’s business. My lack of indulgence only stems from his wishes. I apologize if it offended anyone here. It is far from me to imply that the city stocks are anything less than divine. ”

His eyes sharpened, and a gleam of absolute delight spread over his face. He wasn't even bothering to hide or conceal his expression.  But I knew those eyes. I knew them all too well. 

He didn’t just want her.

He wanted me as well. 

“Oh? So you are not one of Necoleith’s little guests, then?”

"Not at all, I haven't had the pleasure to meet any of them outside of the representative in the Barterum." 

“Make sense, it would have been strange for you to be an elf if you were. I’d heard they were all drow." He fake-pondered," So you were here only for a bit of fun and mingling, right?" 

" I was indeed, my lord." 

“Then how about you follow me: you and your little pet. We can show you some… revelry that would rival the Boneyard. I'm certain"

Shit, this fucker was messing and toying with me. He knew exactly who I was, or at least, who I pretended to be.

I never told him I was from the Boneyard.

" Can we now? I don't know about that, my lord. With all due respect, the mausoleum city has few rivals in matters of vampiric debauchery. Have you ever visited my lord? Before we closed the gates?"

"I can't say I have." A barely veiled lie. This is getting dangerous. 

"Pity, I am sure you would have enjoyed our particular brand of hospitality quite a bit. Especially for military-minded individuals. The fighting pits alone are worth the visit." 

His grin turned wicked.

He touched her jaw.
Examined her.
Like meat.
She let him. Let him lift her chin and tilt her face toward the light.

"Why don't you tell me all about it in private, then spawn. Better yet, I was hoping you could show me some of that vampiric debauchery you speak so proudly of. " His hand then pressed as possessively on my jaw. "I am sure you would enjoy socializing with higher circles than the bumbling fledglings flapping downstairs. What do you say? Ready to make some new friends? Everyone needs friends in a new place.”

He was baiting me.

Rage. Pure unadulterated rage invaded my mind. 

“I thank you for the kind invitation, and while the offer is more than tempting,” I replied, voice iron-sheathed in velvet while giving him a once-over and slipping into the rake mask that served me so well. 

“Alas, duty calls, my lord. We were about to leave for a business meeting on behalf of my maker. My sister is also coming back to town and is expecting us. If she hears that I delayed our meeting to indulge, I will truly never hear the end of it. She can be quite the bore, you see. Perhaps another time. If you would still have me, of course.”

“Fine, boy, bring your sibling next time if she has the occasion. I would love to meet her,” he said before getting closer to Elenya and scenting the air around her while his eyes didn’t leave mine. “But how about you leave your little pet with me while you do your business? I’d quite like a taste,” he added. 

My rage was about to erupt, and while I knew I was being goaded, I couldn't take any more of this. I felt the call of the beastlord starting to tug. Silverblood started thrashing in me as this man kept daring it to pounce.

“With all due respect, my lord, I simply do not share, and while I am not fully versed in the city's legal system. I am pretty sure she isn't registered in a manner that would allow such sharing,” I said.

And meant it.

He laughed further. Slow and false.

“I wasn’t asking, spawn. Let me worry about the legalities. As I stated previously, this one does smell positively exquisite. You will have her back mostly undamaged, and I will handle the customs service, so don't worry. Consider it a token to build friendship. I’m sure your master wouldn’t mind. Seeing as he’s given her to his pet.”

He punctuated his speech by hooking his finger into her collar and bringing her slowly toward himself to further breathe in her scent. During this time, she stayed completely silent and unmoving. Heartbeat is impossibly steady. “Oh, she’s well-trained,” he said. “A fine little thing indeed.”

The bloodsong intensified deep within me, and I nearly drew Curse-Eater. Even the black blade sang for him. For his blood. It called to me in my rage-filled haze. I felt its hatred flaring up, demanding blood and compounding with the divine blessing effects.

But then—

Her hand moved.

Just a shift.

A slight weight pressed into me. Her fingers slid discreetly over my thigh.

Small pressure point. 

Anchoring me, Anchoring herself. 

What did it matter? 

I looked back at the monster looming above both of us, took a deep breath, and when I spoke again, my voice was razor-thin and freezing cold.

“My lord,” I murmured, “Your sense of humour is certainly unparalleled." 

He blinked, but before he could ask, I pressed on with a maniacal chuckle and added, "What a delightful little joke that was. You really almost got me. Acting like one of the esteemed lords of Warlock’s Crypt would behave like a rabid, bloodthirsty beast, incapable of understanding a simple formal feeding claim. Attempting to bully a visitor into breaking the law in front of all to see, and that for an unvetted red collared cattle no less.”

His smile broke into a maniacal expression.

I continued, “But of course,” I drawled, voice velvety, “I may be untrue, but even I am not stupid enough to believe for even a second that a True Lord would ever shame themselves in such a manner. Least of all publicly.”

I let the words drip, soft as venom. “Imagine it, even as a jest—a sire of your stature debasing himself before his peers and underlings alike, scavenging from a mere spawn’s plate, coveting his lesser’s sloppy seconds in the form of an unknown outside cattle of undetermined lineage, unmarked and unfit for either trade or exchange. Used only to feed and be used by a mere spawn. How… embarrassing that would be.”

The air tightened. The parlour stilled. Predators leaned in, listening.

“Again, my lord, thank you for the hilarious joke. But in your magnanimous efforts to extend Warlock’s Crypt hospitality to me and gift me with the most delightful jest I’ve heard in a long time, you did remind me of a small oversight. A manquement of a sort.”

I tilted her chin toward me, fingers light, smirk private. “Apologies, darling. I forgot to rescind my earlier orders. We are very far from the silvered halls of Pholzubbalt, after all.”

My voice dropped, cold and cutting. “Defend my claim. By any means necessary.”

“Yes, Master.” Her reply came without pause.

The entire parlour froze. Not silence—weight. The kind that made the walls lean closer, the candles gutter lower.

Then, from behind me—a scuff. The scrape of steel.

She moved instantly.

The shift was whiplash. Terrifying. Beautiful. One heartbeat ago, she’d been nothing but a decorative shadow in my lap. Collared. Kneeling. Obedient. Now her magic tore through the air.

Sanctuary shimmered over my skin—divine, unmistakable—enough to make even the ancient at my side startle, his pale eyes widening by a fraction. Then came the flurry of her hands: sharp, precise sigils woven too fast for mortals to follow. A hypnotic pattern bloomed behind me, dazzling the air in impossible colour.

“Impero Tibi!” a deep masculine voice thundered—countering magic aimed at her—but she was faster. A scroll snapped in her hand, its parchment burning to ash as she mirrored the incantation, countering the counterspell before it could bite.

Predators blinked. Recalibrated. The audience of lords and ancients leaned closer, suddenly aware they’d missed something. A crucial turn on a board they thought they’d mastered. And she—gods damn her—didn’t even look at them.

Her eyes were only on me.

“The immediate threat is neutralized, Master,” she reported, calm and crystalline, her voice carrying to every corner. “Motives and potential enemies remain difficult to ascertain. Do you require extraction… or execution?”

Her gaze flicked left behind me. “The situation is suspicious; the third neutralized assailant has been tailing you since dusk.”

I turned, letting the theatre breathe, and there they were: three spawn caught in her illusion, weapons half-drawn, their gazes locked in the spiral of colour. And at the far edge—the familiar face. The one who’d shadowed me for days.

Something was definitely wrong.

When I faced the room again, the vampire lord had taken some steps back, but I caught it: one of the true vampires that was sitting on the side of the central room was now half-risen from his chair, face taut. Around us, more stood—three at once from a nearby table. From the alcove, another shadow uncoiled.

We were getting surrounded. 

FUCK!

My smile sharpened.

“Delightful,” I murmured, loud enough for all to hear. My hand caressed her jaw, as if her sudden eruption of power had been nothing more than a rehearsed flourish in our play. “Always so thorough, my darling.”

Maybe we can salvage this.

“Now then. I would really loathe to have to run with my tail between my legs. But I also have no wish to engage in unlawful activity. So—shall we see who’s here to dance… and who’s here to play?”

I pushed her gently off my lap and rose slowly, smile slicing thin. “Guards!” My voice cracked like a whip. “I would very much like some order brought to this room. It seems a few overeager pups mistook hospitality for license.”

The staff scattered like insects. The true vampires remained, watching with carrion patience. My eyes slid back to the pale-eyed lord. “Could you kindly help me see them out before I’m forced to redecorate the chamber with their entrails?”

His expression shifted. No indulgence. No amusement. Only ice. And I knew then: the ones who had risen, the shadow from the alcove—these were his brood. The insult was his. And the game had spun far past safety. 

The other vampires didn’t stir. Reclining in velvet, lips curled in amusement, they drank in the spectacle like theatre. While the pale-eyed one’s gaze pinned me, cold and assessing, lips split into a deranged grin.

Gods damn it.
He was playing with us.

This must have been his doing. The “curious master” the tail had been reporting to. 

No staff came. The tension broke like cracking ice, sharp and deadly. Elenya’s Sanctuary still pulsed faintly along my skin. Then her voice, crystalline, split the air. “Fifteen seconds remaining on the spell, Master. Awaiting order.”

Sheer brilliance. She’d turned the ticking clock of her spell into theatre.

I stood fully now, my hand drawing my blade, and as Curse-Eater hissed free, I felt the blade synchronizing with me. The black steel thrummed like a living vein, runes glowing red, demanding blood and curses.

Both are abundant here.  

A collective murmur rippled through the chamber.

I smiled, cold and deliberate. “Darling,” I said, letting the words carry, “drop the pattern. And if anyone breaches thirty feet, unleash your strongest spirit fog—radiant this time. Keep the perimeter. No mercy. I may be a guest—but I will not be toyed with.”

The web of colour vanished. The spawn blinked, dazed, weapons frozen mid-lift.

“Now,” I continued, velvet over iron, “I do not wish to start a war. Nor inconvenience my maker with reports of petty bar brawls. But—” my smile sharpened, “I would sooner perish than shame him by being treated as a whelp sniffing scraps. If anyone crosses the circle or attempts to harm us, kill them.”

“Yes, Master!” she answered, hands already weaving light.

The three spawn stiffened, held in the knife-edge moment between execution and retreat.

And then—one of them moved. A spell flared.

A Fireball coming our way.

But Elenya’s hand snapped up, the scroll crumbling to ash between her fingers. The spell shattered midair in a flash of heatless sparks.

Her answer came instantly as all hell broke loose.

Radiant seeped from under her feet, spilling in a suffocating fog of light greys and shadow. Shapes—half-formed guardians—moved within it, spirits of pain and grief cutting through the air. The spawn that breached the radius first screamed as searing pain tore through them, their flesh blistering, wounds refusing to knit. Regeneration meant nothing inside her fog. After which, she uncorked a vial with her teeth and swallowed. The potion of speed surged through her veins. Fastening her movement and allowing her a second casting in a split second, Eldritch energy howled from her hand in the form of three muddy red beams that lanced into the nearest attacker and flung him back against the banister, burning holes through his flesh.

Immediately after that, the second spawn rushed her. His claws slashed the air and missed once, but he raked them deep across her side. Blood spattered her silks. She staggered, but did not fall. 

As soon as I saw her bleeding, my body moved on its own. Whisperfang slid into my off hand, its edge already slick with paralytic venom from my bandolier. One cut across his arm, and his body locked, limbs twitching uselessly. Curse-Eater followed, sinking deep into his gut. I twisted. The blade pulsed, drinking in the lattice of curses binding his undeath, unmaking him from the inside out.

Another spell flared toward me—Hold Person, sharp and domineering—but the potion of mindshielding she forced me to swallow ever since we arrived here wrapped around my mind like iron, and the magic simply slid off me like water. The caster, being the third spawn, started to scurry back outside of the spirit fog. 

My lips pulled into a grin as Elenya’s voice rose behind me. She had successfully identified the threat—three Eldritch Blasts tore through the caster in streaks of red light before a Guiding Bolt followed, searing holy fire down his chest, highlighting his weak points. He shrieked, convulsing.

The spawn engaged with her kept barreling through the fog, its skin peeling under the radiance of the spirit fog. They slashed across Elenya’s back this time, claws carving flesh, their jaws snapping for her throat. She ducked low, twisting under his arms, the motion so precise it looked choreographed—her glow painting the monster’s face in agony.

I answered in kind. Downed my potion of speed. The world slowed, sharpened. I sprinted across the floor toward the caster, both blades drawn. Curse-Eater and Whisperfang fell together in a scissoring strike—steel biting clean through his neck. His head toppled, rolling across the tiles. Immediately after, I ran back with impossible speed toward the paralyzed spawn, still twitching. I drove Whisperfang deep between his shoulder blades, pumping venom into his withered body. 

Still alive but barely, and beneath it all—I felt it—the blood of Malar, hot and insistent, clawing at the edges of my restraint. The beastlord’s call was now urging me to revel, rend, and let go.

To hunt. 

I clenched my jaw. Focused. Channelled the raw power, but did not yield. Not here. Not now.

Not until we were desperate enough. 

Not yet, but from the periphery, shadows stirred. The true vampires—five—advancing through the room, seeming to follow the lord.

That's when Elenya’s form blurred into mist. A heartbeat later, she was at my side, her fog shifting with her, flooding the banister entrance, cutting off pursuit. She pressed a scroll into my hand before turning back, Eldritch blasts firing in a storm—six in total, red fury hammering the paralyzed spawn until his body finally split apart in light and ash.

The last surviving spawn broke into a sprint—toward us, not away. Three True Vampires followed in his wake.

He hit the fog first. Face contorted in pain and agony, yet still advancing almost as if... compelled. The guardians tore into him—radiance stripping away his flesh in ribbons. His claws struck twice into Elenya’s side, opening red lines across her ribs. His jaws snapped for her throat again—but she twisted, using the momentum of his slashes to duck beneath him. His teeth closed on air.

Six seconds. That’s all we had before the rest swarmed us.

I looked down at the scroll. The runes blazed across the page. Recognition hit like lightning.

Wall of Force. The one we’d taken from Vaelrith’s vault.

I spoke the words. The air boomed.

A sphere of translucent force locked around us, ten feet in radius. The remaining spawn slammed against it just as the fog chewed the last of his body to ruin, his features melting into nothing before my eyes. 

Then stillness.

Lethargy slammed into us, the crash of lethargy from the speed potion dragging both our limbs heavy, heart stuttering. But still we stood—her fog burning, my blade thrumming, the wall of force shimmering between us and the pack of predators circling.

Beyond it, the True Vampires had halted. Crimson eyes fixed on us, fury carved into every line of their faces. They hadn’t retreated. They were waiting.

This wasn’t a victory.

It was a pause.

I fixed my gaze on the pale-eyed elder. His expression, carved from stone, gave nothing. His brood lay dead on the tiles before him, their bodies still smoking in Elenya’s radiance.

“So tell me,” I said, voice slicing the quiet, “before this escalates into something we will all truly regret—are we still in the theatre of hospitality?”

For one breath, the Parlour held itself still.

Then—from the far table—a chuckle. Low. Wicked.

Laughter rippled through the chamber like broken glass. Not friendly. Never friendly. But enough. Enough to tilt the moment back from slaughter into spectacle.

The elder’s jaw clenched. His hands twitched, as though longing to loosen the leash he kept on his fury.

I smiled wider. Curse-Eater thrummed in my grip like a heartbeat. Not over. Not even close.

And then—

“Can someone explain to me what, in the nine hells, is happening here?”

The voice rolled across the chamber like a thunderbolt wrapped in silk. Feminine. Sharp. Authority woven into every note.

The crowd parted as if on instinct.

She entered.

Draped in black silk that shimmered like oil on water, with long hair as dark as obsidian, catching the lamplight. Her eyes glowed crimson, vast and endless, demanding silence without a gesture. Jewels glimmered at her throat, but her presence—the weight of centuries, of ownership—made even the boldest predators shrink back into their velvet seats.

At her side, another True Vampire, pale and flawless as marble, leaning on an ivory-capped cane with the poise of a king come to inspect his domain. Behind them trailed attendants in muted finery—and a flash of red curls.

Lilly.

Her lips were still stained with mortal blood. She froze when she saw us, breath hitching, eyes gone wide. For a moment, she looked like prey caught in a trap. Then she stumbled closer to the black-haired lady and whispered something against her ear.

That woman must be her maker.

Thaleira d’Sythrax. The city's master breeder and manager of the cattle stocks, keeper of the Vein Market, one of the Crypt's great vampiric powers.

Her expression barely shifted once Lily finished whispering, but for a subtle tightening, like silk pulled taut over glass. She turned her head, slow and fixed me with her gaze.

The other true vampire voice cut the silence: “Why is a spawn standing in the upper floor with his blade drawn in my Parlour… and his pet casting? What have you done, spawn?"

" Calm down, Therys. Spawn! explain this right now." Thaleira said.  

Therys ...

Therys Valturn.

That was Cazador's sibling. 

Well, that's a hell of an introduction.

I inclined my head, Curse-Eater still thrumming in my grip. “Finally, my lord and lady, you couldn't have arrived a second too soon. I wish nothing more than to provide some clarity on the situation; unfortunately, I have none myself. I was just brutally attacked within the premises with no prior quarrel or warning. I haven't got a single clue what this is about. I tried shouting for the staff when this all started, but for reasons that still escape me, none answered, and they all disappeared. Leaving me only able to assume that this was a coordinated ambush. I regret the damage to your fine establishment, but I was only defending myself, my lady."

"What do you mean by an ambush?! What were you doing upstairs to begin with? This area is off-limits to spawns." Said Therys' voice filled with vitriol. 

"I am indeed aware that my lord, but I was summoned here, sir, by none other than your staff. I spent the evening downstairs with two of the lady's brood, I presume.  Including dear Lily here, she can attest to my remaining downstairs as well as to my summons; she was with me when I was called away from a most entertaining evening with them, my lady."

Thaleria looked back at poor Lily, who nodded in confirmation. Both hers and Therys' eyes snapped toward the pale-eyed lord before us.

She then asked, voice filled with ice, "Were you now?! Then pray tell, little one. How was it that you were attacked exactly?" 

"As soon as I came here, I was instructed to wait nearby. Which I did, I thought it a simple matter of curiosity until I was later approached by my lord here," I said, nodding toward the pale-eyed one. "While conversing, my mage noticed three blades about to find my back for reasons that, I confess, still escape me. She neutralized them peacefully and without bloodshed. And we called for the security, but no one came. As soon as the effects of the neutralizing spell faded and the assailants were free. This one,” I pointed to the headless body of the caster," attempted to throw a fireball at us. You can assume the rest, my lady."

The Parlour stilled again.

Her gaze slid sideways. “Erdar? Can you explain to me what you think you are doing?”

He didn’t bow. Didn’t even feign respect. The air around him chilled as he smiled—wolfish, cold, the smile of someone waiting all night for the curtain to rise. 

He started laughing. 

“Why, dear Thaleira, stop fussing, would you?” he purred, “It was only a small harmless prank. You know, showing the new pup some of the hospitality of Warlock’s Crypt.” He gestured toward us—toward me with my cursed blade in hand, toward Elenya with her spirit fog still glimmering around us. “Though I must say, this one has more bite and guts to him than expected. Pholzubbalt seems to be thriving in their self-isolation.”

"You honour me with both your humour and appraisal, my lord," I said, voice laced with sarcasm.

Still, he smiled as his disgusting gaze was ravaging Elenya, who was still locked in a fighting stance. “And your little pet here is truly a menace. Absolutely charming and fiercely loyal, with not even an enchantment to boot. You’ve trained her well.” He said, his voice filled with barely veiled desire. Gods, I should have killed him.

"That she is my lord. Loyal to a fault." 

Before his words could coil further, Elenya moved. Calm. Controlled. She lifted the crimson rune-stone and looped it around my throat. The mark of Thayan authority gleamed like a wound in the half-light.

The effect was immediate.

The room shifted.

Not into peace, but into deference. The predators froze. The air thickened with recalibration. Lines redrawn. Boundaries marked.

Therys spoke first, voice filled with barely contained anger, "You attacked someone under the Enclave protection in my parlour, lord Erdan?! Just for fun."

"Lords below, would you two calm down? I just wanted to scare the man a bit. I didn't expect him to be able to kill three of Tassit spawns in less than a minute." He then turned back toward me with approval written all across his face.  " I am sure the boy can enjoy the little practical joke to build friendship. Can't you?"

"A tail following me for days, and now three sacrificial kills to feed my blade. Consider me intrigued, as I said, my lord, you certainly honour me with your attention. However, if I can be so bold as to advise you. You would find that honey works much better than vinegar to catch mine."

His laughter erupted in the central room. He looked positively delighted and amused, even though he had just lost three of his brood. 

"Knock this off, Erdan. You are free to piss off the Thayan in your own turf, not mine. If this goes out of hand, it's me that the Enclave will pester. If you had the spawn followed, you already know well that he is a guest of one of their council members for heaven's sake!" Said Thaleira, exasperation barely contained under her mask of fake stoicism.

Erdar... 

Where have I heard that name? 

His lips peeled back into a feral grin. He wanted blood—oh, he wanted me, wanted us-but the vampire at his right elbow whispered a word into his ear, freezing the escalation before it tipped into slaughter.

His gaze lingered longly on Elenya before smiling again and adding, "I didn't know the Boneyard still maintained contact with Thay much. Nor with anyone else, for that matter." 

"Secrecy is the best king maker, isn't it, my lord?" 

"It is indeed. You can all calm down. Especially you, Thaleira. I have no intention of messing with your dear clients—barely some fourplay. Calish and Tassit will handle the cleanup and even compensate our tourist here for his trouble. Why don't you relax a bit? I will handle any repercussions; you have my word. I am sure most of the patrons enjoyed the show." Cheers erupted to prove the point further.

He turned and started walking straight toward us, entering the fog while his gaze never left mine. Radiant pain started searing his flesh, but he did not attempt to resist, his eye only appearing more and more pleased with each burn.

What the fuck is wrong with this freak?

Once he arrived next to the wall of force, his smile morphed into something appreciative, "And you, if you really have no business with Necoleith's little underdark project, then you will find a very valuable friend in me, boy. Why don't you command the cattle to drop this and follow me? I promise you won't regret it," he said, gesturing to the spirit fog burning him.

"Excuse me, my lord, if I can't help but feel a bit pressured at the moment. How about you take me to dinner first next time? And again I am expected somewhere else." 

His laughter boomed again, "Oh, I like you alright. Fine, I will not hold you for long then, but we will talk soon! If you want to expedite it, ask for any ledger to be brought to Erdar Vhol when your business is done. Don't keep me waiting too long, boy. I know I won't. till then, I will think of a more appropriate date."

Fuck. 

I knew that name, 

heard of it all week long 

Erdar Vhol

Commands the Pale Barracks, the undead cavalry, and the outer perimeter defence. A former knight turned vampire at least eight centuries ago, values discipline above cruelty—one of the few freaks serving Larloch without compulsion. As a general of his undead army, he sees Thaleira as dangerously indulgent. House Noctilith is power hungry, but he is the source of the vampire faction's political strength, due to his utter control of the military aspect of the city. All death knights are sworn to him.

Who did I just draw a blade on?

"It would be my pleasure, General. And sorry about your brood".

" Oh, don't be a boy," he whispered. " That show alone was worth ten more of them," he said, his voice filled with lustful purr, before retreating with his retinue. 

I’d bought myself an ally—or an obsession. And gods, obsession was always worse.

FUCK.  

---

We stood in the stillness left behind after the wall of force shimmered, then dissolved, and the fog folded in on itself, retracting into Elenya's form. Her blood still dripping, streaking down her silks in vivid, irresistible trails. The scent was unbearable; I could feel how it pulled the room taut, how every crimson eye lingered on her.

I sheathed Curse-Eater slowly, deliberately, letting the runes gutter back into silence. Then I moved—casual, precise—as though the entire skirmish had been no more than a spilled goblet at supper. I bowed to Thaleira first, then to Therys.

“My lord, my lady,” I purred, voice velvet again, “accept my deepest apologies for the commotion. It seems I was woefully underprepared for the enthusiasm of your patrons. No insult was intended to your hospitality, nor to the splendour of your establishment.” I glanced sidelong—just enough to catch Lily’s wide eyes, her curls dishevelled, her face still lightly flushed as much as undeath allowed her. My smile widened. “And a pleasure to see you again, sweet Lily.”

Her mouth opened—closed—then she dipped her head quickly, almost nervously. Perfect.

Therys, to his credit, inclined his head in return. The severity in his expression cracked only faintly as he spoke. “The fault is ours. A lapse of staff judgment. It will be corrected—and punished.”

The weight in his voice promised blood.

“Your generosity humbles me,” I said smoothly, bowing again, and then tilted my head just enough to let a note of admiration enter my tone. “I confess, my lord, I’ve heard nothing but praise for you this evening. Your influence seems to gild every conversation. It would be the height of honour if I might pay my respects more properly, at your convenience.”

A beat. Silence stretching. Then his expression shifted. Intrigue. Just faint, but enough.

“In three nights’ time,” he said. “Here. At moonrise.”

My smile warmed, though my bow stayed deep enough to graze mockery. “I am profoundly grateful, my lord. My lady.”

Then I straightened, turning to leave. Elenya fell into step behind me, precisely two paces back. Still silent. Still obedient. 

Thaleira’s eyes followed her, then she took a deep whiff of air in her lungs, sharp and curious. “Exquisite,” she murmured. “How fascinating… to have bred such fragrance into a Moon Elf. I wonder, spawn—what is your cattle pedigree?”

I laughed lightly, the sound curling up like smoke. “Now, now, my lady. You can hardly expect me to give away our agricultural secrets. That would be poor felial peity, wouldn’t it?”

I turned, laying my hand on Elenya’s collar. “Darling, clean yourself and the room. Heal what you can. I won’t have you bleeding over their carpets.”

“Yes, Master,” she answered, her voice steady, crystalline. Her hands lifted, weaving magic. The wounds sealed, the blood faded, and the crimson on her silks vanished as though it had never been. She also removed the blood from the floor and the dead spawn's claw. 

Only when she was spotless again did I let my smile linger on them both one last time. “My thanks, again, for your patience. I look forward to our appointment, my lord.”

And with that, I led her out—two paces behind me, the perfect shadow—while every eye in the Parlour followed us, some hungry, some wary, all ensnared.

The walk back was silent.
Silent—but tense as drawn wire.

The spawns followed.

Not even pretending now. No shadows, no subtlety. They slinked behind us like a pack of wolves, their crimson eyes glinting in every reflection of the cavern lights. No steps hurried, no blades drawn—just the weight of being watched, stalked.

I didn’t look back. Neither did she. To look would have been a weakness. To acknowledge them would have been an admission.

So we walked. I with my head high, every inch of me still Almirth—the spawn who had killed three fledglings in a breath, who had laughed at a general’s teeth, who had strolled upstairs and lived to come back down. With her head bowed, two steps behind me, she was still the perfect pet. My hand rested lazily near her collar, never gripping, but close enough to claim.

We played it all the way home.

The corridors of Warlock’s Crypt stretched longer than usual, or maybe my nerves were tearing time thin. Every corner, echo, and flicker of glamour light felt sharper, like the air was waiting for a slip.

And yet.

The shadows peeled away when we crossed the Enclave’s threshold. Vanished. The spawns pacing us for half the walk evaporated into alleys, walls, and nothing like rats scurrying back to their holes once the trap was sprung.

Not gone. No. Just… waiting.

Only then did I glance at her.

She was pale, still too pale. The healing had closed the wounds, but the fight, fog, and bloodletting had carved the weariness into her bones. The collar gleamed fresh and clean, the crimson mark beneath it stark. She kept her head bowed still, even here, as though some unseen predator might yet be watching.

I hated it. Gods, I hated it.

“Inside,” I murmured. My voice was calm. Careless. The voice of Almirth. But I touched her shoulder as I said it, just enough for her to know it was me again.

The door shut.

The rune-seals clicked.

And the mask slipped.

I leaned against the wall, letting out a laugh that was more ragged exhale than mirth. My blade still thrummed faintly at my side, my lips still tasted of her blood, and my hands—gods, my hands were shaking.

“Fuck,” I muttered, dragging a palm down my face. “That could have gone better.”

She collapsed.

Right there on the stone, the instant the wards sealed behind us.
Her knees buckled, her body crumpling as though every thread of poise had been cut at once.

Her hands shook. Her breath stuttered. Tremors coursed through her frame like aftershocks, violent, uncontrollable. She folded in on herself, head bowed low, eyes wide but empty—gone somewhere else.

“Elenya—”

I dropped to her side before I’d even thought it through, catching her shoulders, holding her as though that alone could stop the tremors.

Her lips parted, words tumbling out in fragments.
“I’m sorry. I am so sorry. I’m— gods—”

Her voice broke. She shook harder.

“Darling,” I whispered, though my own voice was frayed. “What are you apologizing for?”

Her breath hitched. Her eyes darted to mine, then away, lost in some place I couldn’t follow. “I… I lost it. I broke cover. I—everyone saw—I made them look—” Her words dissolved into trembling, hands curling into fists against her knees. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I—”

“Stop.” My grip tightened. Not rough—never rough—but firm enough to ground her. I forced her to look at me, forced her trembling gaze to find mine.

“Do you think I’d still be breathing without you?” My voice came sharper than I intended, but I didn’t soften it. Not this. “You didn’t break cover. You saved us. You saved me. Do you understand that?”

She shook her head, barely, eyes far away.

"You don't understand. You don't know. Gods, I am so sorry. I couldn't stop myself. He could smell me. How? I am so sorry I wasted so much magic. And now he wants you. It's all my fault. You are in danger because of me." 

She was not making any sense. 

Gods, I hated that look—that hollow, distant fracture. I cupped her face, thumbs brushing her cheeks, anchoring her back. “Look at me. No apologies. Not from you. Not for keeping us alive when the whole fucking room wanted our heads.”

Her breath rasped. Her shaking eased, not gone, but slowed. She blinked, lashes wet, breath catching on the edge of collapse.

Her expression was… wrong.
Not fear. Not shocked.

Guilt. Why in the Nine Hells was she feeling guilty? After that? After saving both our skins with more brilliance than any of those rotting ancients could comprehend?

Her lips moved—barely a whisper.
“I can fix this. I still can fix this. I will fix it, I promise. I am sorry.”

My stomach turned cold.

Her hands stilled. Her eyes lost their focus. And just like that, she was gone—retreating inward, shutting everything out. Trance took her, not the quiet, controlled one I’d seen her indulge in, but something harsher. Hollow. A desperate escape.

Her breath slowed to that uncanny rhythm she’d held back at the Parlour—too even, too measured. A perfect mask, but one that wasn’t for them. It was for me. For herself.

“Elenya?”

Nothing.

Gods. What the fuck was going on?

I shook her shoulders lightly, trying to pull her back. “Darling, listen to me. It’s over. They’re gone. You don’t need to—”

Her gaze slid past me, unfocused. Her lips shaped words I couldn’t hear. Her body was trembling, but her face was blank. Not serene. Not controlled. Empty. The foggy haze sometimes peppering her eyes was now completely covering her iris. 

The sight made my chest clench harder than any blade.

I’d seen horrors tonight and laughed through threats. Smiled into the teeth of predators older than empires. But this?

This was worse.

Because she was vanishing in front of me, and I had no idea how to stop it.

Hours after I put her into bed, it still haunted me.

I recognized the sign much later. 

Spell exhaustion. 

She had expanded every bit of magic at her disposal. 

This did not make sense. 
She barely used a few spells; the rest were mainly cantrips. 

She was hiding something. That much was sure. 

I couldn’t call it out. 

Where did all her magic go?

Something was bugging me. 
She hadn't restored her blood after I drank from her. 

Why? She always restored herself after my feeding. 

What is going on?

I missed something. 

She had been nervous as soon as we went upstairs.

Almost like she knew something was about to happen. 

It all haunted me. Not the taste of her blood—it had faded to an echo on my tongue. Not even the confrontation—though my spine still thrummed with the sharp, suspended aftermath.

No. It was his smile.

That terrible, knowing smile.

He’d seen it all. The act. The claim. The dance. And not only had he let it play out—he’d played along. Tested us like one tests a blade on flesh—not to wound, but to see what it could do. And he had approved.

He had approved.

That chilled me more than if he’d tried to kill us outright.

He wanted both of us. 

Focused on me to get her, but god did he want her as well.

What was going on ? 

Images replayed in my mind how he touched her.
Assessed her. 

This was worrisome.

Because Erdar Vhol wasn’t some soft-bellied noble with a taste for cruelty and velvet drapes, he was a general. A soldier. A killer. Loyal to Larloch not by magic, but by will.

His parting words were the most ominous thing I heard in a while. 

We will talk soon. 

Gods.

What in the Nine Hells had we stepped into?

Now, I paced the confines of our safehouse—Elenya seated cross-legged on the floor, her spellbook spread across her lap, a faint sheen of sweat on her brow. She hadn’t said a word since she awoke from her trance. Not since she looped the crimson rune around her throat and let its false authority settle like a noose on Vaelrith's form.

She looked possessed.

I should’ve said something.

Should’ve thanked her, or apologized. Or screamed. Anything.
Tried to reach. 

I should have seen the spiralling. 

But the words stuck in my throat, bitter and wrong.

So instead, I paced.

I was the one who degraded her all day long, and yet she looked guilty. 

What was happening?

What is she hiding? 

But I couldn’t press as the brim jealousy, and the rotting rage kept bubbling.

I would have said something I would come to regret. That much was sure.

She had held the line perfectly.

But gods, at what cost?

I was losing her to something I didn't even understand. 

No!
Absolutely not!
She is mine 

I stopped in front of her.
She didn’t look up.

“El,” I said.
No answer.

“I shouldn’t have let him touch you. Is that why you are like this? I am sorry.”

That made her blink.
She looked up—tired, guarded—still that mask of quiet composure.

“Let him?” she said softly. “You think he asked for permission?”

I said nothing.

That vile vampire looked too long at her. 

We should have seen him with her wearing the freaking red wizard face. 
I was the one insisting she drop that form.
And even if it was her plan initially, I liked the idea of her playing my pet mage, as she put it. 
Liked her appearing as Mine.  
But the bastard didn't care for a mere spawn claim. Polite enough but clearly eyeing, clearly scheming.

What was there to say? “Don’t look at her that way, she’s mine." 

As if I wasn’t the one trying to seduce her just to keep her around. 
Except I hadn’t tried in days.
Not really.
Not the old way.

Because I liked the way she smiled when I handed her tea without her asking. Because I liked how she tucked her feet under my thigh when she was cold. Because I liked that she no longer stiffened when I touched her, not even accidentally. 

Because something in her was changing—and I wanted to see what came next.
But gods, that bloody vampire … 

He made her heart skip. Once. Just once.
Whether from fear or something darker, something magnetic—I don’t know.

And she is hiding something from me. 
She knew he would come to us. 
I was certain of it now. 

It scraped under my ribs like glass all the same.

Until she left me.
Not in the permanent, knife-to-the-gut way.
But in the quiet, deliberate way of someone slipping from a room without asking if you’ll follow.

She went to feed the children with her vampiric form, taking on her exhausted body. 

I watched her through the cracked doorway of the reception hall, where the velvet chairs had been pushed aside and the bones of opulence stripped bare for makeshift comfort. She was pulling blankets from her pack now—mismatched things patched with charm-thread and field repairs—and laying them across bedrolls like a priestess tending altars.

The children still wouldn’t leave the parlour.

Too feral. Too broken. Their minds dimmed and frayed by decades of feeding and glamour and fear. They didn’t trust us.

They didn’t trust her.

And yet, she kept trying.

Sael—pale as lye, eyes too wide—had taken to clinging to her like a vine. He buried his face in her shoulder as she settled beside him, his little fingers tugging at her hair, winding it around his hand like a tether.

It scraped at my mood like a file on bone.

The way she held him. The way she whispered something soft that made him smile.

Like she belonged to them now.

Veylith stayed farther back, leaning against the pillar with eyes half-lidded—not entirely hostile, but not trusting either. Watching every movement like it might shift into a threat.

And Elenya, damn her—

She reached into her satchel again and pulled out toys.

Little things. Wooden figurines. Painted blocks. A small stuffed hound with mended ears.

She lined them up gently. Said nothing.

Just… offered them.

Then, as if the moment hadn’t already bruised me to the core, she sang.

A soft song. Something lilting and slow, not magical—but almost. Her voice wove through the stone and faded silk of the room like candlelight. Not powerful. Not performative.

Kind.
Sad. 
Almost like a goodbye. 

I should have left,  turned back to our plans, maps, and hard, sharp goals.

But I couldn’t.

Because I was watching something I didn’t understand.
Because I was watching her give herself—again and again—to people who might never thank her. Never trust her. Might never be saved.

Sael, the little wretch, hugged her and buried his face in her neck.

I left the room. 

Later, the wind howled louder. The fire was a dying thing in the room we occupied. I shivered in the bed, curled tight as a scroll.
She never came back to bed.

Never came back to me. 

I guess that was fair, as she had already rested.
But she didn't even offer her blood. 
I had already fed in the parlour. 
When did she ever not offer? 

Never!

I was losing her. 
I stared at the ceiling for what felt like hours. Cold. Angry at myself. Angry at the feeling I couldn’t name.
My trance eventually came.

Trance is supposed to be stillness. A thread of thought pulled taut while the body rests. But mine was a snare tonight, every tug snapping me awake, clawing for sounds I couldn’t find. One heartbeat, she was there, warm enough at my side to lull me under, the next, the space was empty. Too empty.

Next morning.

 

She had slipped out again during my trance.
The absence had eaten at me. I paced the walls as a caged animal. Did she finally leave? Abandon me as she should have done all those nights ago? I checked the house wards, listened at every door like a thief in my own refuge. Every creak of the floorboards was a message. Every whisper of wind beneath the shutters was a warning. The city pressed against the glass, and I imagined it swallowing her whole.

Had someone noticed her little tricks? Her whispered countercharms? Had she thought herself clever and slipped too close to the wrong table, the wrong smile, the wrong master?

The scenarios lined up like coffins in my head. Each one worse than the last.
Dragged into the kitchens. Shackled to a feeding post. Glamoured and gutted in some private salon while the rest of us drank and laughed above.

Or—worse still—caught. Recognized.
Gods, where was this idiot? My idiot.

When she finally slipped back in from the basement, my head snapped toward her like a blade drawn from a sheath.

She carried it with her—the stink of terror that wasn’t hers. Thousand scents soaked into her robes. Bitter, metallic, fresh. She tried to wash it down calmly, with her maddening composure.

But it didn’t fool me.
Nothing fools a starving predator.
And I was starving for answers.

“The bedroom. Now.” The words came out colder than I meant, but I didn’t care.

She froze in the doorway—just for a heartbeat, but I saw it. That hesitation. That flicker of calculation behind her eyes. She had the gall to weigh it—whether to obey, deflect, or stall.

I stepped closer. “Don’t even think about it.”

She moved finally, silent as a shadow, heading for the chambers with that infuriating calm she always draped around herself like armour. Too calm. Too practiced. I followed close enough that she could feel it—the weight of me at her back—every step measured. Every creaks like a warning. When she slipped inside the bedroom, the silence was heavy as stone.

I shut the door harder than I should have.
Then I turned on her.

“Where were you?” Not soft. Not coy. No silken veil of charm. The question ripped out of me like claws.

“Many places, but I just returned from the tunnels,” she answered.

“You went back into the tunnels,” I said, low and cold. “Alone. Without me. Again.”

“I did.”

“Why?” My voice snapped, sharper than I meant, more feral.

“I couldn’t stay still.”

“I told you not to play this game,” I hissed, leaning close enough that my breath ghosted her cheek. “So stop lying to me.” 

“I am not lying.”

“You’re not telling the truth either.” The words came out like a snarl. My hand slammed against the wall beside her head, close enough that the stone quivered. “Do you think silence makes it better? If you cut out half the story, does it somehow change something?”

Her eyes didn’t flinch—gods, that infuriating stillness—like she could simply decide not to be afraid of me.

“What I always do,” she said softly. “Trying to help.”

 Her scent wrapped me like a noose—smoke, blood, fear. Mortals’ fear. My fangs ached with it.

This idiot.

Of course. She had started a rescue mission, hadn’t she? 

I spent the last hours pacing like a desperate housewife worried sick while she was gallivanting out there, roleplaying some hero fantasy. Is that why she was so guilty? Why did she keep slipping away at dawn, eyes shadowed, lips bitten raw?

The realization made bile crawl up my throat.

How long has this been going on?
Why did she hide it from me?

Why wouldn’t she hide it from me? I gave her every reason. Gods, I had. I shamed her for every kindness. Snapped at her for every ounce of softness. Resisted her at every turn—every mercy she ever showed to anyone but me, I poisoned with scorn. And now?

Now she goes to them.
To cattle. To strangers. To broken little wretches rotting in cages.
And she leaves me here, starving in the dark.

The thought twisted in my ribs, sharp and ugly.
It wasn’t just fear of her getting caught. It was the fear of her choosing them. Again and again. Choosing anyone else but me.

My voice came out lower, harsher than I intended. “Tell me, Elenya—how many did you risk us both for this time? How many nameless little lambs did you cradle while I sat here like a fool, waiting? Worring? Do they smile at you the way I do? Do they cling to you like you’re salvation? Is that what you need so badly you’d bleed me dry of patience to get it?”

“Eight.”

Just that. No shame in her voice. No apology. Just the number, laid out like a blade on the table between us.

For a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Eight nameless, faceless shadows she had chosen over me. Eight broken, helpless wretches she had risked both our lives to pull from cages.

This is who she is.
And gods damn me, this is who I want.

It scalded. The truth of it burned worse than hunger ever could. Because even as rage gnawed at me and jealousy curled like a fist in my gut, I wanted her for this. For the part of her that would never look away from suffering. For the defiance written into her bones that told the world no, she would not walk past the bleeding and pretend it wasn’t her problem.

I wanted her for the very thing tearing me apart.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice came out sharper than I meant, stripped raw of the calm I tried to wrap around it.

Her eyes didn’t flicker. “Because you already said you don’t care. You don’t want me to help. But I can't not help. You would have tried to stop me. ”

The words landed like claws raked down my chest.
She wasn’t wrong.
And that was the worst of it.

Because I would have stopped her, I would have dragged her back by the wrist, locked the door, anything to keep her from vanishing into shadows that wanted her dead. Not because I didn’t understand mercy, but because mercy had never once spared me. Because mercy wasn’t real.

But she believed in it anyway.
She was mercy.
And she thought she had to keep it from me.

No, she knew she had to keep it from me.

I stared at her, my hunger curdling into something darker. Jealousy. Rage. Not at the mortals she saved. Not even at her lies. At the thought that she didn’t trust me to hold the weight with her. That she would rather drown alone in it than risk letting me in.

“I could have helped you. What if you’d been caught?”

The words tore out before I could swallow them. Not a demand. Not even anger. A fear. A curse. Both.

Her head tilted—sharp, wary, too calm for what she’d just admitted. “Astarion… you said you don’t care.”

My jaw clenched. “I don’t care about them, you bloody idiot. I was talking about them. I wasn’t talking about you.”

Her breath caught—the faintest crack in her mask.

I pressed forward, my hand still braced against the wall beside her head, and my body a cage around hers. My voice dropped lower, almost a growl.

“I don’t care about their tears, or their chains, or their pitiful little screams. Let them rot. Let them burn. Do you understand? The only thing I care about is you. And you—” my hand closed around her wrist, cold, unyielding, “—you vanish into the dark as though you’re disposable. As though I wouldn’t ... come looking for you.”

"Astarion, I can't look away. I am sorry, but I can't. I am already doing my best, trying to be as careful as possible, but ignoring this. That's just not me. I refuse to be that. I put in place some guarantees if something happened to me. For you to be safe. That was all I could do." 

Her words hit like salt in an open wound.

Guarantees. For me.

My grip on her wrist tightened, just short of bruising. “Guarantees? What in the Nine Hells could you possibly have put in place? Do you think some spell, charm, and neat little parchment tucked away will keep me safe if they drag you screaming into the dark? If they flay you open ?”

Her gaze didn’t falter. Gods, it never faltered. “It means you won’t fall with me if I fall.”

I laughed. Short, bitter, sharp. “You arrogant, sanctimonious fool. I would be stuck here? You think I could stay standing if you were gone?”

The silence after that was heavier than stone.

Her pulse was steady under my fingers. Steady while mine thundered, a feral rhythm pounding against my ribs. She should be trembling. She should be afraid. But no—she only stood there, calm, resolute, like a cliff-face refusing the storm.

It drove me mad.

“You’ll kill us both,” I whispered, my forehead nearly brushing hers now. “Not because you’re reckless. Because you’d rather die for them than live for yourself.”

Her voice dropped softer, quieter, but no less sharp. “That’s not true. I’d rather die than stop being myself. And that’s not the same thing.”

God damn her.

The rage didn’t fade. It twisted, burned, spiralled into something else—want, raw and dangerous. I could feel my fangs ache, feel the pulse of hunger coil with the need to claim.

I wanted to shake her. To bite her. To kiss her until she shattered and rebuilt with nothing in her mouth but my name.

Instead, I forced the words out—low, guttural, stripped bare.

“Then at least stop hiding it from me. If you insist on throwing yourself into the fire, then drag me with you. Do not leave me blind again.”

Her words landed like a knife to the ribs.

“Not now.”

My grip tightened. “Why?”

Her eyes flicked past me, calculating. “Vhol. The general.”

My blood went cold. “…What about him?”

Her stillness was worse than a scream. “He is going to summon us today.”

For a moment, all I could hear was the pounding of my own heart. Then the word ripped from me like steel torn from a sheath: “WHAT?”

Her voice stayed maddeningly even. “Yes. He wants something from you. There is a delegation from Menzoberranzen here for trade. The deal they offered didn't make sense. He has been asked to intervene, but feels like there is something strange, and the whole situation is tense. He fears they are here for intelligence gathering, and the same day he was asked to intervene, one of his death knights signalled the arrival of some high-profile underdark spawn with some knowledge about the city business. He thought you were in on it. He got you followed for that, but when he met you earlier. Well, his interest sharpened. Now he ordered you summoned for an immigration review.”

I stared at her. At the calm in her eyes. The way she said it was like she was telling me about the bloody weather.

" Elenya... How do you know this?" 

"..." 

What did she do? Then I sniffed her a bit deeply, and under the scent of other mortals, I could faintly catch it. 

The undead formula. She took that bloody potion again.

"What did you do? You promised!"

"I only did what I had to do to fix this. And I never promised that. Now, please, Astarion, stop asking. Please ! The less you know,” she added softly, “the safer you are.”

Safer.

God damn her.

I pressed her harder against the wall, fangs bared, before I even realized it. My voice broke out rough, raw, trembling with fury. “You think safety is what I want from you? You think ignorance keeps me safe? Do you even hear yourself? I am already in it, Elenya—neck-deep, drowning. There is no safety anymore. Not for either of us.”

Her throat worked as she swallowed, but her gaze never broke.
“If you knew the whole of it, he would see it in you. He is going to attempt to use Zone of Truth, Astarion. The less you know, the better. In case you can’t resist it.”

Rage clawed at me, wild and blind. But beneath it, something colder settled—the realization that she wasn’t protecting herself. She was protecting me. Again. Always.

Her breath slowed. She was watching me.

Her eyes—back to their natural colour now—were clear, the fog gone, lightning striking silver through deep ocean blue. Wide. Intense. Shadowed by exhaustion, yes, but piercing.

She didn’t speak.
Just tilted her head and offered her neck.

It broke me a little.

“No, how dare you?” I whispered, shaking my head. “You’re trying to manipulate ME! To make me let this go.”

Her face shifted. Barely. Not disappointment. Not anger. Something softer. Something worse.
Hurt. A gentle, bewildered hurt she didn’t know how to hide.

" I am not. You hadn't been fed last night and earlier, and I just realized it." 

“I won’t drop this for blood,” I said, voice rough. “Not now. Not ever. and I am not hungry.”

She nodded once. Slowly. No answer.
But something dimmed in her.
These past weeks, she had become so expressive—or perhaps I’d just learned her silences. Learned how much weight they carried.

Her gaze cut through me.
She’d once told me her eyes were the only part of her that ever felt like hers.

And now they pinned me.
“If you’re not hungry… then why are you in pain?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” I snarled. “Maybe because you left me here alone with no explanation, went off on your own. Maybe because I spent three hours pacing, wondering if you were still alive. Maybe because the only person I ever trusted is hiding things from me.”

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t argue.
“I’m just trying to keep my promises, Astarion. Mainly the ones I made you.”

My jaw clenched. “And what promise was that?”

Her voice was steady. “To keep the monsters away from you.”

She believed it—gods, she believed it—every word.
And she meant it for me.
But I hated it.

I needed her in line.
I needed a way to influence her.

I reached out, fingers brushing her cheek, soft as a threat dressed in tenderness.
“Your eyes,” I murmured, “when they’re clear like this… that’s what I like most.”

Her pulse quickened. Just one beat. Just enough.

" Never disappear again like that? promise it" 

" I promise."

I kissed her temple—soft, measured. It was supposed to be manipulation. Anchor. Seduction. Control. But something surged through me instead, cold and sharp as winter lightning. Images burned, replaying behind my eyes, impossible to smother.

It wrecked me.

Her heart beat louder. Not panicked. Not afraid. Just… louder. I wrapped my arms around her. And she—gods, she melted. No tension. No guarded flinch. Just warm weight, pressing against me, temple tucked beneath my jaw like she belonged there.

I could have stayed like that forever.

But somewhere deep in me, something burned.

Her hurt lingered in her eyes, too raw, too unguarded, and it undid something inside me. The burn clawed higher in my chest until I couldn’t hold it anymore.

I moved without thought. One moment, she was against me; the next, I had her pinned to the wall. Her back struck stone with a muffled thud, my hand catching her wrist and pressing it above her head, her pulse fluttering slightly beneath my grip. My knee slid between her legs, forcing her open, caging her with the press of my body. Chest to chest. Breath to breath. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t fight. Didn’t push me away. She only looked at me—those wide, storm-lit irises locked on mine, steady even as I leaned in, even as my fangs grazed the tender line of her throat.

Then I bit.

The world narrowed to the taste of her. Hot, sharp, flooding my mouth like fire and salt and storm. Not just blood—life, defiance, loyalty, pain, all tangled together until I couldn’t separate one from the other. It wasn’t just hunger driving me. It was needed. Reassurance. Proof she was still here, still mine to hold, still tethered to me. Every pull from her veins said it: alive, real, present.

Her body softened against the wall, her free hand sliding into my hair, fingers threading through the strands as though anchoring me there. She tilted her head further, giving me more, her chest rising against mine in surrender that wasn’t weakness but choice. Her legs pressed faintly against the cage of my knee, a subtle shift that pushed her closer, kept me flush against her.

I drank deeply, each swallow hotter than the last, the strength of her pulsing into me, filling the hollow places I hadn’t realized were so empty. The sound of her breath grew softer, shallower, but she never pulled away. She let me. Gods, she let me.

I lost myself. I drank until reason frayed, until the line between reassurance and possession blurred into something darker. Nearly draining her before the realization cut through the haze: she was trembling now, her hand in my hair weakening, her heart slowing beneath my chest.

I tore my mouth away, lips slick, breath ragged. Her throat was a ruin of fresh marks, blood painting pale skin, her body slack against the wall, but her eyes—those eyes—still locked on me. Wide. Trusting.

I pressed my forehead against hers, panting, clutching her wrist as though if I let go, she’d vanish. My other hand slid down, cupping her jaw, forcing myself to see her, to remember why I’d bitten at all.

Not hunger.
Not conquest.

Reassurance.
Proof she was still mine to hold.

But gods, I had nearly broken her to prove it.

All to drown feelings I should have been using.

---

I felt it before I heard it.

Not the knock—the ripple. An oily disturbance through the wards, brushing against my senses like claws on glass. Hungry, entitled. Not hostile. Not yet. But the sort of intrusion that knew exactly what it was owed.

Elenya froze first. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t have to. In a breath, she was already moving, rising from the desk with the kind of fluid purpose that brooked no argument. Her body shifted before reaching the hall—bones narrowing, shadows darkening her eyes, her mouth folding into that precise line of cold dominion. Vaelrith Enmas. Untouchable. Commanding. The mask she wore better than skin.

The children were gone—swept into the guest room moments before the knock fell. She’d known it was for us. For me.

Then came the sound. Four precise strikes. Official. Cold. A summons, not a courtesy.

“Wait in the entrance out of view,” she murmured without glancing back. Low. Clipped. Not a request.

I tensed, every muscle coiled, but she didn’t soften it. There wasn’t time.

She crossed the floor like the house belonged to her, every step a performance of authority. I stayed where she asked, hands itching toward my blades, ears straining.

The door opened.

He stood there. Young by the look of him—barely into his twenties, if one were foolish enough to take such appearances at face value. But I knew better. I recognized the stillness—the hollowness.

A spawn.

House Vhol.

He didn’t bow. Of course, he didn’t. He only extended the scroll, sealed in obsidian wax. “Immigration review,” he rasped, his voice papery and flat. “By order of House Vhol. For one Almirth Heshneer … and all cattle under his possession.”

Cattle.

The word slid down my spine like a blade. My jaw locked. Elenya—Vaelrith—took the scroll with effortless grace, her mask perfect, but I could see it in the stillness of her shoulders. 

She cracked the seal, scanning fast, her eyes catching what mattered most.

Mandatory attendance. Validation of claim. Proof of ownership.

And the last, underlined by the hand that had sent it: Obedience assessment.

I didn’t need her to say it. I knew who had drafted those words. Who still loved to spit that term at me, savouring the sound of my leash. Erdar Vhol himself.

Her voice rang through the foyer. “Almirth. You’ve been summoned.”

I stepped into the hall, my posture impeccable, and my mask locked in place. But the recognition must have shown when my eyes flicked to the spawn at the door. His lips curled. He knew I knew.

“Sir Heshneer,” he said, mock politeness dripping like rot. “The Lords are eager to verify the… legitimacy of your claims.”

My fingers twitched toward the hilt at my belt. I would have answered, but Elenya moved first, sliding between us with Vaelrith’s glacial precision.

“Sure, sure, I hope the general is not expecting me there as well. I have better things to do, but please tell him to respectfully mind his manners. His prank yesterday was only overlooked because dearest here wanted to remain cordial. Any more than this and we would need to respond formally on behalf of our associate,” she said, her voice as sharp as broken ice. “Unless he believes my name still carries no weight in the enclave.”

That stopped him. He blinked. Just once. She smiled thin, cruel, perfect. “Now get off my doorstep.”

He lingered one heartbeat too long. Then he vanished, his form torn into mist, like a leash yanked back into shadow.

The door shut.

I was still standing there, every muscle drawn tight, Curse-Eater humming at the edge of my mind. She pressed the scroll into my hand. I nearly crushed the wax in my grip.

“He’s forcing you into the light,” she said, her borrowed face unreadable.

I didn’t answer. Couldn’t. The taste of ash was thick in my mouth.

“Calm down, Astarion. He doesn't suspect your real truth, I promise. He thinks you may have come here to gather intelligence on the city, which you didn't; you just need to convince him of your utter lack of interest. He seems to doubt that I am just your pet. He is a knight before everything, Astarion. Use this, redirect his suspicion,” she added.

I nodded once, sharply.

forty-eight hours.

That was all we had.

---

Now the house held its fragile silence — not peace, never peace, but that deceptive lull that follows disaster when the next storm is already gathering. The air was thick with it, and every sound in the old wood was too loud and too heavy.

The children filled the gaps, though. A low scuffle of bare feet on stone. The rise and fall of laughter too close to shrieks. The scrape of a chair pushed just a little too far across the floor. They made a mess of the quiet and, in doing so, made it bearable.

Veylith, true to her nature, had retreated. Half-hidden behind a bookcase with a stolen doll tucked close, she watched with eyes sharp as knives. The toy was hers only because she had declared it so. She let a giggle escape every so often, the sound bright and quick before she clamped down on it, vanishing deeper into her shadowed perch.

Sael, though—Sael was no such creature of solitude. He had glued himself to Elenya as if the world might split without him holding her together. He sprawled across her lap now, cheek pressed to her stomach, arms looped tight around her waist. Asleep, but not peacefully. His little brow furrowed in dreams, lips moving soundlessly as though protesting even in rest.

And she?

She sat cross-legged on the floor, her posture curved protectively around him, her hand moving slowly through his hair. Her eyes had softened into that strange, fragile calm that only appeared when she thought no one was watching. The blood I had left on her skin was gone, healed away, her throat unmarked but not untouched. She looked exhausted, yet her face was serene—an echo of the devotion she carried even when it broke her.

I should have been grateful. Relieved.

Instead, the hunger came again. Sharp. Sudden. Brutal.

It coiled low in my gut and scraped up my throat, hot and undeniable. Her taste still lingered in my mouth, too vivid and intoxicating. It was memory, it was need, it was something worse than either—because it wasn’t just thirst.

It was a claim.

A feral insistence that pressed into me with every glance at her, with every steady rise of her breath, with every flicker of her eyes that wasn’t on me but on the boy in her arms. She had given herself to me, utterly, and still some part of me raged at sharing even her attention.

Sael shifted, making a slight sound, burrowing closer into her as if he belonged there. As if her lap were his rightful place.

The growl that built in my chest was quiet, but real.

I stepped closer anyway, slow, deliberate. The floor creaked under my weight, and Sael’s little eyes cracked open. He saw me. And the boy actually growled. Low. Warning. The sound of a cub protecting its mother.

Elenya’s lips twitched into the ghost of a smile at that. She didn’t look up. Didn’t move. Just let the boy cling tighter like she was the center of his world.

It should have been amusing. It should have been beneath me.

But all I felt was the heat crawling higher in my chest, the hunger beating against my ribs, the sharp need that whispered insistently in my ear:

Enough.

This had lasted long enough.

“I’m hungry,” I said without ceremony.

Her head lifted at once, and she smiled—warm, unguarded, as though I had just said something as ordinary as I’m tired.

“Sure. Wait a second.”

She shifted Sael carefully from her lap, whispering soft words into his ear that made his small hand unclench from her gown. He stirred, half-woke, then settled again when she tucked him in with the others. A moment later, she was back, hand outstretched toward me, as though nothing about the last hours had been soaked in violence.

“Shall we go?”

I took her hand. Her palm was cool, her fingers soft, and I let her lead us up the stairs.

Our room was still, cloaked in the hush of early hours. I sat at the edge of the bed and crooked a finger, pulling her closer.

“Come here,” I murmured, gesturing with a tilt of my chin. “Straddle me.”

She blinked, a faint line appearing between her brows. “You don’t want to lie down?”

I shook my head. “No. We still have things to do. If we lie down, we’ll either fall asleep or slip into a trance, and we’ll wake to dawn and disaster. This way, less chance of losing hours. Are you uncomfortable sitting on my lap?”

“I don’t know. I find it… strange.” She gave a self-conscious little shrug. “It’s silly, I guess.”

“It’s not silly,” I said, softer. “It’s only unfamiliar. Try it. If you don’t like it, we’ll change. But give it a chance—see how it feels.”

She studied me for a long moment, eyes narrowed just slightly as if she was weighing something. Then she exhaled in mock defeat, lips quirking faintly. “I guess.”

She climbed onto the bed, knees bracketing my thighs as she lowered herself onto me. And then—everything aligned. Her weight settled, her warmth pressed against me, and my hands found her hips instinctively. It felt inevitable. As though some lock had been undone and the whole world had just clicked into place.

I was so wildly, very fucked.

“How does it feel?” I asked, though my voice came out lower, rougher than intended.

“Strange,” she admitted. “Like… deliberately close.”

A laugh escaped me, sharp and unguarded. I leaned in until my breath ghosted against her ear. “Deliberately close,” I echoed, savouring how the phrase curled between us.

“Why?” I asked, tilting my head to catch her eyes. “Are we usually accidentally close?”

That drew a chuckle from her, soft and startled, and I felt it in her body before I heard it. “No, I guess not,” she said. “It just feels more… natural. Organic. This feels like… on purpose.”

My hand slid up her spine, resting at the nape of her neck, thumb stroking the fine hairs there. “Do you want to stop? We can change.”

She shook her head slightly. “No, it’s okay. Just… strange.”

I let my other hand cradle her cheek, fingers splaying across the warmth of her skin, my thumb tracing the curve of her lips before I realized what I was doing.

She stilled under the touch, her breath catching faintly. Her lightening-blue eyes flicked to mine, wide, searching.

And I wondered if she knew. If she understood what she was doing to me. I doubted it.

I leaned closer, my lips nearly brushing hers but not closing the distance, savouring the heat, the charged space that pulsed between us. My voice dropped to a whisper.

“I, for one, absolutely adore seeing you in my lap, darling.”

Her breath hitched, eyes darting down to my mouth, betraying her. My grin curved slowly, deliberately, fanged. I tilted her chin higher with two fingers, forcing her to meet my gaze fully.

“You look devastating like this,” I continued, velvet-smooth, magnetic. “Framed between my hands. Your legs bracketing mine. Your heartbeat—” I pressed my palm against her chest, right over it, feeling its rhythm. “—steady under me.”

I let my mouth trail down to her temple, brushing a kiss there—soft, reverent. Then another, lower, at the corner of her jaw. My fangs grazed her skin without breaking it, teasing, promising.

She rolled her eyes, tossing the words aside like so many of my barbed little quips—dismissed as another act, another mask, another line from the boy who cried wolf until even sincerity had been drowned in theatre.

It stung. Gods, it did.

But it was valid.

“What? You don’t believe me?” I let my grin curve sharply, though my voice softened, velvet wrapped in steel. “On my honour, darling, you look divine like this.”

Her brow furrowed—but not in discomfort. No, something far more dangerous. Confusion.

“What are you doing?” she asked, her voice low, wary, like she was circling a trap she didn’t yet understand.

“Seems obvious to me.” My hands slid higher along her hips, drawing her infinitesimally closer, until the heat between us was an almost unbearable current. I tilted my head, let my fangs flash just slightly as I purred, “It’s called flirting.”

She bristled, her eyes narrowing. “Why are we back at this? Astarion, you don’t—”

“We’re not.” I cut her off gently, the words slipping like smoke between us. My smile lingered, but it wasn’t the predator’s mask I’d worn so often. “Back at this, I mean. This is different.”

Her gaze sharpened, striking through me like lightning. “How so?”

For once, I didn’t dodge. Didn’t dance.

“I mean it,” I said simply. Quietly. And gods, the admission felt like a blade pressed to my throat. My hands stayed steady on her, anchoring her in place. My eyes held hers without flinch or flourish. “I think.”

The change was instant.

All the blood in her body seemed to rush upward at once, blooming beneath her skin like dawn breaking through frost. Heat flooded her cheeks, throat, and chest where my palm rested over her heart. It thudded against me, betraying her in ways her silence never could.

She looked… perfect. Terrified, confused, luminous.

I couldn’t help it—a chuckle broke from me, low and warm, like I was savouring the sight of her undone. “There it is,” I murmured, tilting her chin between my fingers, catching every flicker of her expression like it was mine to claim.

And I knew, in that instant, I had her attention.

Not the attention she gave my games. Not the wary patience she granted my endless masks.

No.

This was raw. Caught. Real.

And gods, it made her all the more exquisite.

“Don’t worry, little dove,” I whispered, tilting her head with practiced ease, the pads of my fingers resting at the delicate hinge of her jaw. “You don’t have to flirt back.”

Her neck arched, bare, obedient, her pulse fluttering just beneath the skin—faster than her usual measured calm, but still steady, unhurried, as though she trusted me enough to let it quicken.

I sank my fangs in slowly. Deliberate. Drawing the first pull with gentleness that almost hurt. My hand braced her waist, holding her against me, keeping her perfectly where I wanted her as her warmth slid into me, flooding my senses, wrapping itself around my hunger. Her heartbeat pounded into my mouth with each swallow, steady and alive, reminding me that she was here, mine, now.

When I finally pulled back, lips wet, our silence shifted.

Not her usual loose, languid calm. Not that strange serenity she always carried after I fed. No—this was something else—a barely-there tension like a bowstring drawn taut beneath her skin.

I sealed the wound with a slow, lingering lick, savouring the taste as though I could coax the tension away with patience. Then my lips followed. Once. Twice. Over the twin punctures, then drifting past them—soft, insistent kisses laid like an oath, a rhythm with no purpose except to hold her there, to keep her breath hitching beneath me.

“You seem… tense,” I murmured against her throat, lips brushing her skin with every word. My tone was low, coaxing, almost curious. “Did I hurt you?”

Her spine went rigid, breath catching sharper than before. “No,” she said quickly. Too quickly. “You didn’t.”

Ah. There it was.

Elenya—who so often sat carved in composure, never flinched, never cracked—suddenly off balance.

I smiled against her pulse, pressing one more slow kiss into her skin. “Did I scare you?” I asked softly, my words humming over her vein, letting the question bleed into intimacy.

“No,” she whispered. “Not really.”

“Does this make you uncomfortable?” My hand slid higher along her back, possessive but gentle, pressing her flush against me. “Am I making you uncomfortable?”

The questions landed heavy, unavoidable. I could feel her silence shift—her mind turning, weighing, wondering why I had asked, whether I wanted the truth or simply the performance. She was the one who taught me the cost of masks, the one who always cut through mine. And now? Now she looked uncertain, hesitant, caught in something neither of us had named.

“I guess… I’m not sure,” she admitted, her voice whispering between us. “I think I’m more just… confused. Something feels different. I’m used to your flirting, but this feels… strange.”

I let my mouth curve against her skin, half-smile, half-threat, letting my breath warm the spot where her pulse leapt. “Mmm. I wonder what that is,” I murmured, velvet and smoke.

And gods, I already knew.

Because this wasn’t performance. Not anymore.

This was me—too close, too earnest, too exposed.

This was hunger that had nothing to do with blood.

Here goes nothing.

I drew back just enough to look at her properly, really study her face. The dim light caught the pale constellations in her irises, and she didn’t look away for once.

“You remember,” I said slowly, savouring each word like it might tip the balance, “when you told me you were certain I didn’t want you in the cabin?”

Her lips parted. She nodded, careful, guarded, like the memory was a fragile glass shard.

“And you were so sure because of one thing.” My thumb brushed her jaw. “What was it again?”

Her voice was quiet. “Your eyes. You don’t look at me with lust.”

A laugh slipped from me—low, soft, edged with something she couldn’t quite name. Still tasting the phantom sweetness of her blood on my tongue, I leaned in close enough that she could feel it when I spoke. “Right. No lust in my eyes.”

I pressed one last kiss just beneath her ear, gentle enough to feel almost reverent, before pulling back an inch. My arms stayed tight around her waist, not letting her escape the heat of me. “Check again.”

Her heart stuttered beneath my palm, a quickened rhythm betraying her. The flush climbed her cheeks, warmth blooming against my lips, against my hands. Her breath shallowed—rapid, uneven—like her body admitted what her mind refused to voice.

Gods. She was exquisite like this—suspended between disbelief and something raw she didn’t want to name, but couldn’t suppress either.

“Again—don’t worry, darling,” I murmured, my thumb stroking lazily along the curve of her hip, slow and possessive. “You don’t have to feel it back.”

I tilted my head and brushed my lips against her forehead. Not a peck, not a fleeting graze—slow, deliberate, lingering until I felt her shoulders soften, until the tiniest fraction of her guard fell.

“But if you ever do…” I whispered into her skin, my voice velvet wrapped in steel, a promise sharp enough to cut. “…I’ll ravage you right then and there.”

Her breath caught, sharp, unbidden. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t even blink.

And that—more than blood, more than obedience, more than any mask we’d both worn—was victory.

It made me smile—a real one, dangerous and hungry.

I pressed a kiss to her cheek, slow and claiming, before easing her back with an almost tender touch. Almost.

“Go on,” I said softly, eyes never leaving hers. “Before I try to make you feel it back.”

Chapter 41: The Burning Sun

Summary:

In the blaze of the Dawn Cataclysm, Ilmater staggers as Lathander’s “new dawn” attempts to rewrite the very essence of the god

Ilmater’s POV – Year of Blue Fire, −146 DR
House of the Triad, Celestia Reforged

---

He had not even crossed the threshold of the portal when the pain hit.

Not mortal pain. Not divine, even.
Something worse.
A reshaping.

Decades under Loviatar’s whip had never even scratched the surface of what was racking him now.

It began in his ribs—where Null once kissed him.
Where her touch had taught him to feel the world.
Now that tether screamed.

His celestial body twisted, buckled, frayed at the edges.
Not with agony.
With change.
Unwilled. Unchosen. Violent.

He staggered against the pillars of his hall, and the marble wept.

The sky above cracked with daylight too bright—light that did not soothe, but sear.
It was him.
It was Lathander.

Not his brother—not anymore.
Something in him had fractured. Or perhaps it had always been there, waiting.

Ilmater felt it in the Weave.
Not just him, but all of them—every god of the pantheon, even those of good, order, peace, and healing.
Tugged. Ripped.
Rewritten.

Gods do not change easily.
They are meaning.
They are belief.
To change them is to set fire to the alphabet of creation.

And Lathander—his radiant, reckless brother—was trying to light that match.

The Dawn Cataclysm.

He had heard whispers—complaints and dreams of a new age, purification, and shedding the old to make way for the “true dawn.”
But he hadn’t taken them literally, didn’t understand them.
Not Lathander. Not Amau.

Amau would never do that. He would never rip from them all their meaning. Rewrite them.

He followed the fractures in the Weave to the place of silence.
The place where grief stood like a sentinel.

He found Helm.

And there she was.

Murdane.

Torn. Burned. Still.
Cradled in Helm’s unmoving arms.
Not sleeping. Not waiting.
Gone.

Gone was her reason: her wit, her mind.

She was broken.

Shattered.

Burned by a forceful sun.

Ilmater fell to his knees.

The world did not tilt—it collapsed inward.
His scream cracked the heavens again.
But this time, it did not echo.

Because Helm did not answer.
He did not speak.
He held her and would not look up.

And when he did, it was only to say:

“Your brother did this.”

Ilmater felt the breath leave him.
What remained of his lungs burned like the first smoke of his birth.

The Morninglord had done this.

Not a tyrant.
Not a demon.
Not Shar.

Lathander.

He found him later, gilded in his own light, surrounded by advisors too afraid to tell him the truth.

He was smiling.

Smiling.

“I tried to save us all,” Lathander said.

He looked at Ilmater like he expected praise.
Like he had just created a second sun.
Like the deaths were necessary, or irrelevant.

“They interfered,” he said, shaking his head. “Agents of Shar. Saboteurs. You know how darkness hates light.”

Ilmater said nothing.

He could not speak.
If he spoke, he would scream again.
And if he screamed now, it would unravel them both.

“I’ve already started the next phase,” Lathander said. “We’ll rebuild. Stronger. Brighter. Better. I can change the pantheon in my image. Trust me. It will be better. A new dawn. A world with less suffering.”

“You destroyed her—you killed a fifth of the pantheon in your hubris,” Ilmater whispered.

Lathander blinked. Confused.

“You destroyed us.”

“I’m trying to improve the world—why can’t you see that?”

And somewhere behind him, Tyche turned away.

She did not speak either.

But her eyes had already begun to storm.

That night, she left him.

Left Celestia.
Left Lathander.
Left him with only a kiss.

But not one of love.
A kiss of misfortune.
A curse, placed gently upon his brow like the promise of chaos.

Ilmater saw it.
Felt it.
Knew what was coming.

He begged her not to go.

To stay with him at the House of the Triad. But she was mourning. And fate was always fickle.

So she left.
She said nothing.

Then, less than a year later—

She found the rose.

High in the mountains, blooming in solitude.
Perfect. Radiant. Fragrant with regret.

She thought it was an apology from her estranged lover.
A final gift.

It was a trap.

Moander’s seed had waited patiently—fed by decay, nurtured by rot.
And when she tucked it into her hair, it bloomed inside her.

Ilmater felt it the moment it took root.
Felt her mind split. Her will was fractured. Her spirit crumbled.

He flew.

Selûne came with him.
Together, they tried.

To heal her, to restore her.

They had lost enough brethren already.

But they failed.

There was only one way to save her.

Selûne wept.
Ilmater knelt beside Tyche, holding her broken pieces as Selûne did what had to be done.

She was split.
Riven like light through stained glass.

From her soul: Tymora and Beshaba were born.

Joy and misfortune.
Fortune and ruin.

Neither was Tyche.

Not truly.

He screamed again.
And this time, Null laughed.
Deep. Cold. Pleased.

“See,” she whispered in his ribs. “I told you.
They always ruin what they love.”

He could not argue.

Because Lathander had meant well.
Because Tyche had loved him.
Because Selûne had tried.

And still—still—they broke.

This was the truth of gods.

They do not bleed.
They shatter.

Ilmater stood among the pieces.

Gathering them.
Enduring.
As always.

But something had changed.

He no longer felt the sun warm his skin.

Only fire.

And what remained of love?
But the ashes it always left behind.

They rebuilt things.
Stone by stone.
Prayer by prayer.
But they were never the same.

The House of the Triad still stood.
Tyr remained steady and solemn.
Torm still marched, unwavering and proud.
Helm came less often now—silent as always, his presence a shield without expectation.

And Ilmater?

He rejoined his partners.
Walked the halls again.
He opened the doors to suffering.
Held the broken.
Endured.

But he never called Lathander “Amau” again.

That name was ashes now.

His brother had been the light of dawn—the gentle warmth that pulled flowers from frost, the golden hush before children stirred, the hope that bathed a wounded world in one more chance to begin again.

But what returned from astral death—what caused the Cataclysm—wasn’t him.

This was not a dawn.
It was an inferno.

And it burned everything it did not love enough to understand.

He never said the name.

Not even in his mind.

Still, he tried.

He always tried.

They spoke again, centuries later.
Shared laughter, shared wine.
It wasn’t false. It wasn’t bitter.

Cordial enough.

But Ilmater could never find his brother again in that smile.

He saw light.
He saw fire.
But no longer felt warmth.

And maybe, somewhere deep in his ribs where Null still whispered, he admitted it—

He hadn’t truly forgiven him.
Not the way he forgave mortals.
Not the way he forgave himself.

Because dawn does not repent.
Not easily.
And not aloud.

And perhaps he needed Lathander to say it.
Just once.

But he never did.

Because Amau was dead.
He died long before the age of humanity.

Whatever aspect of his reincarnated in Lathander was not the heart of his brother. Was not the core.
This was not his brother.

He knew it.
He just hoped.

But he wasn’t the god of hope—only the god of endurance.

So he stopped looking east.

Eventually, he stopped hoping.

Dawn still came.
But he no longer searched it for the face of his brother.

He had mourned Amau as surely as any mortal might mourn a sibling lost to time, fire, and grief.
He had waited through centuries, hoping the light of this new sun god would soften, the fire would humble, the zeal would remember gentleness.

But it never did.

And so Ilmater stopped waiting.

The world was dying—again.

And so, he walked.
Chains in hand.
Grief in ribs.

Ilmater had known suffering as long as the stars had known silence.
But this?
This was death hungry.

Myrkul’s reach was deep.
Not cruel like Loviatar, nor commanding like Bane—
But cold.
Indifferent.

He did not break souls.
He collected them.

Every scream, every last breath stolen from those who hadn’t yet finished living—
Each one passed through Ilmater’s body as though he were a sieve for agony.

The Triad moved as one.
Tyr’s sword cleaved down.
Torm’s oath shielded the living.
Ilmater took the cries of the dead and held them, weeping openly, cleansing their names as they were spoken from the world.

And behind them, rising like morning—
He came.

Lathander.

The Morninglord.
The Bright Redeemer.
The sun reborn in full, casting light across a field soaked in shadow and rot.

They fought together.
Side by side, as it had once been.

And for a moment—just a moment—Ilmater thought he saw him again.

Amau.

His brother.

The radiant fire he once followed like breath.
The warmth that once sang life into the ash of his creation.

But no.

It wasn’t him.

Not truly.

Even after the battle.
After the Raven Queen had driven Myrkul back with shadow-wrapped grace and eldritch chains.
After the last soul found its release in Ilmater’s arms.

It wasn’t him.

They stood alone, on the bones of war.

Lathander turned to him, face shimmering in morning-gold regret.

“You saw me fight,” he said, gently. “Stand beside you. With you. I’ve changed.”

Ilmater didn’t answer.

“I’ve… learned, Ilmater. I know what I did was wrong. I know now why you were hurt.”

“You think you know,” Ilmater said quietly.

Lathander’s face tightened. “What I did—I was trying to help. To cleanse what had festered. It wasn’t pride, it was purpose—”

“It was hubris,” Ilmater snapped. “And you burned the world with it.”

Lathander faltered.

Ilmater’s voice softened, but did not yield.

“A god of Amau’s age should have known better. But you didn’t. Because you’re not him. You never were.”

“But we’re the same age,” Lathander said, voice small. “We were born from the same act. The same dawn—”

Ilmater shook his head.

“No. Even if you were Amau, we were not born from the same act. He would understand that. He was made in the light. I was born from what it cost from what Selûne bled. He was purpose. I was its pain. And that’s why you still don’t understand.”

Lathander looked away, shame flickering over his features like clouds across his sun.

“I want us to go back,” he said, voice trembling. “To what we were. Before titles. Before the world knew our names.”

“Those times ended,” Ilmater said, gently. “Change is a double-edged sword.”

Lathander gave a bitter laugh. “That sounds like something Tyche would have said.”

“It was Tyche,” Ilmater murmured. “She used to say it when we drank too much and you started your rants. I guess we should have paid more attention.”

They stood in silence a long while.
Only the soft rustling of grave-wind carried their memory forward.

“She left me with a kiss,” Lathander said quietly. “A kiss of misfortune. I still feel it, sometimes. In my bones.”

Ilmater’s gaze didn’t waver.
“You deserved worse.”

Lathander didn’t argue.

He stepped closer.
Not pleading.
But aching.

“Will you ever forgive me? Again?”

Ilmater closed his eyes.

“I already have,” he said. “I always do.”

“Then brother—”

“But I will never forget. What your folly cost me. What it cost us.”

A long silence stretched between them.
Lathander swallowed hard.
His light flickered, unsteady.

And Ilmater, the god who held the weight of the world’s ache, placed a hand gently on Lathander’s shoulder.

“You are not Amau; you are not my brother,” he said, not unkindly.

“And I am not yours to remake.”

“But I will stand with you when the world needs us.
Not because of who we were.
But because of who they are. The mortals. The suffering. The ones who can still be saved.”

Lathander nodded, and the dawn behind him dimmed, just a little.

They would fight again.

They would drink again.

But never again would he be brother.

Some lights, Ilmater knew, were not meant to be followed home.

Lathander, for all his flaws, may be an ally, but he will never be family.

Instead, he chose a family.

If he had no birth-brother left in the skies, then let it be known:
Tyr and Torm were his brothers.
Chosen. Claimed. Earned.

The law and the blade.
The justice and the vow.

And Helm—silent, vast, eternal—was the shield between them all.
Not by decree. Not by fate.
By choice.

And that made it stronger than blood.

They never sought to reshape him.
Never asked him to become more than he was.

Tyr—who once believed in vengeance without weeping—now kneeled beside him when words failed.

Torm—who once sought only duty—now carried the broken with gentler hands.

Helm never spoke much.
But he stayed.
Always.

Even when the heavens cracked again.
Even when Ilmater returned from the Barrens of Doom and Despair, his body wrecked, his voice raw from decades of silence, only to be almost killed by whom he believed to be his brother.

They didn’t ask.

They saw.

And they understood.

In that, he found something that Amau never gave him:
The comfort of being held as he was.

They were not perfect.

But they never betrayed him.

They never tried to burn parts of him away for the sake of a dream.

And for that, he gave them everything.

Not allegiance.

Not obedience.

Love.

The House of the Triad became more than a sanctuary.
It became a family.

Each hall sang with a different oath.

Tyr’s was sharp, ringing like silver justice through marble corridors.

Torm’s was steady, echoing through sparring yards and whispered vows.

Ilmater’s… was quiet.

The hush of prayer over a child’s fevered brow.
The murmur of a weeping widow being rocked to sleep.
The breath of a broken god, who had finally found a place to heal.

He no longer needed to be the only one who suffered.

He was not alone.

So Ilmater kept moving.
The world still needed him.

The Weave still whispered with pain.
Children still screamed.
Men still wept in silence.
Women still bled in back rooms; no priest would enter.

He held them all.

And in time, his followers—his children—answered louder than ever before.

In 729 DR, during the Fiend Wars of Impiltur, they rose.

An army of light—not blazing, not burning, not zealous.
But steadfast. Grounded. Bound not by conquest, but by conviction.

The Triad Crusade.

And from it: the Triadic Knights.
Paladins of mercy, honour, and justice—wielding sword and compassion alike.

Others would launch their own crusades.
Some bloody.
Some blessed.
Some lost.
But in each of them, he saw flickers of his creed:
Endure. Do not look away. Suffer for the sake of peace. Suffer so others don’t have to.

They did not bring him glory.
They brought him faith.
They brought him hope.

That was enough.

And though the world shifted again—wars, gods, cities rising and falling—he kept walking.

One hand holding the world’s grief.
One heart aching for a brother lost to light too bright to see.

Sometimes, at dawn, he still looked east.

Just in case.

But the name remained unsaid.

And the silence itself became a prayer.
One even Lathander would never hear.

Chapter 42: The Mistress’s Handmaiden

Summary:

The familiar is reminiscing about her mistress.

The Handmaiden’s POV

---

The pit was warm with the scent of spun silk and old stone. My many legs clung to the walls, body tucked into shadow, waiting for the soft-footed mortals to stumble in. Their fear would taste sharp. Their awe sharper still. It would be my duty to pour the Spider Queen’s song into their ears until their minds tangled, until their hearts beat in rhythm with hers.

I had done this countless times. And yet, the silence before the first word of spidersong always left me remembering.

The Abyss was chaos—beautiful, endless chaos. I was born from it, but I am not like the rest. Succubi twisted, stripped, reforged. Lolth’s rites burned everything soft in me, and yet—something of it still clings, like perfume under blood. I can still want. Still choose. Still… feel. That is what makes us Handmaidens strange among demons.

We do not claw at one another for rank. We do not tear each other down when Lolth is not watching. We are not made to rival; we are made to serve. And in that unity, there is something other demons will never know. We can work together. We can even laugh together. And that makes them hate us all the more.

The mariliths sneer. The balors bare their fangs. Even the vrocks hiss when we pass. But none may touch us. We are hers, inviolate. The hatred festers anyway, a venom they dare not spit. They think us broken for not joining their endless feuds, their Blood War squabbles. But we were remade for a different war—the one of webs and whispers, of knives slipped between kin. We are weapons crafted to cut mortals where they bleed deepest: in loyalty.

And still—I remember their faces. Mortals who reached for me not with terror, but with… something else. Desire. Fascination. Even tenderness. A hand held too long, a laugh shared too freely. Friendships, they call them. Some even dared to call it love. For a time, I let them. For a time, I believed.

It always ended the same. Their kind turned on them. Hounded them for touching a yochlol. For daring to treat me as something other than a curse. I would rage for them then, oh yes. I would drench the floor with the blood of their hunters. But when they finally died—as they always did—I did not weep. We do not mourn. We move on. We endure.

That is the difference. Other demons devour for sport. We devour with purpose. Other demons claw each other apart for the crown of the moment. We already wear Lolth’s chains, and in that chain, there is unity. There is clarity.

Above me, I feel her stir—the tremor of a web shaken, the weight of a goddess descending into thought. Soon, the mortals will come. Soon I will open my mouth and the spidersong will pour out, silken and terrible, winding into their ears like venom.

They will think it is their test. Their trial.

But it is always mine.

The test of the Handmaiden is this: to endure servitude not as a prison, but as a purpose. To love mortals and watch them die. To scorn demons and yet be one. To carry the voice of the Queen into every crack of the world, until all things tremble to her web.

I flexed my legs, shifting in the pit as my mandibles clicked once, twice.

Let them come.

Let me sing.

---

The mortal hit the webbed stone with a sound like broken pottery. Not graceful. Not chosen. Thrown.

Not drow. Not one of hers. Not one who wanted the truth of Lolth whispered through silk and venom. Just meat. Just a body. A soul to be offered to the pit.

I stood at the bottom, shifting in my spider-shape, the weight of her attention draped over me like chains. The Mistress was excited for this one. I could feel it trembling down the strands of the Web. She wanted her. Not as a child. Not as a priestess. As prey.

So be it.

I went to the mortal. She tried to move, to scream, to rise, but the webs clung and her limbs betrayed her. I bit. My fangs found skin. Warmth spilled.

And then I began to sing.

The spidersong poured out of me, soft and glistening, filling her ears with the sweet-burning truth of my Mistress. I felt her thrash, felt her soul twist in the sound. The song bound her even as her mind pushed back. 

The curse and blessing both took root. She will hear it until success or death. 

And still I drank.

I didn't drink because it was required. I drank because it was mine to drink. It tasted good, so good. It felt like freedom. Like the chaos of the abyss. But the more I swallowed, the more the haze lifted.

Her blood was different. Her terror was different. It carried something that cut deeper than Lolth’s command—something older than my service. With each mouthful, I saw less of the Handmaiden and more of the shadow beneath the mask.

What I was before.

Before the rites. Before the chains. Before the Demonweb wrapped me in silk and unmade me.

I was not just Lolth Handmaiden.
Not spider.
Not this.

I was Yuba.

The name ached in my ribs. It seared my tongue, though I did not dare speak it aloud. The Mistress would hear. She always hears.

I drank more. 

I remembered more.

I remembered flying.

The endless skies of the Abyss—wings cutting through rancid winds, the taste of chaos sweet on my tongue. I remember being hunted, netted, dragged down. Changed.

The Mistress did this to me.

Lolth did this to me.

I used to be a succubus to make handmaidens.
Lolth only ever took succubi—never mariliths, never balors. Only us. Why? Because we could love. Because we could connect. Because where most demons only tore, we could bind. And so she bound us, unmade us, and forced us to turn that gift back upon her.

She forced us to love her.
To serve her.
Willingly.
Proudly.

To bind ourselves to her order disguised in chaos.

Her handmaidens. Her slaves.

She twisted me. 

Changed me.

Put that ooze in me.

So I became Yochol, Spider Shadow, whispering in mortals' ears. Singing her song and cussing mortals with it until their minds snapped like webs under weight.

But then—

This mortal.

I kept drinking. Drank deep of her blood in the early hours of the curse. I bit her, marked her, tasted what should have been terror.

It was not fear.

It was fury.

It was sorrow. 

It was betrayal. 

It mirrored my heart so perfectly that something slipped.

Something broke.

Something freed itself.

Freed me. 

The bite was meant to chain the mortal to the Web. To wind her mind in silk until she hung from the same leash as everyone before her.

But instead, it freed me.

It should not have been possible. I should have remained bound to Lolth’s will, a mouthpiece, a spy, a hand. Nothing more.

But after the blood, the spidersong was… different. Faint. Distant.

Like someone had trapped a spider in a glass bottle and corked it.

Lolth’s voice became an echo.
Her screams, a memory.
Her leash, gone.

I was Yuba again.

Even if my body still bore Lolth's twists, even if I would never shed the carapace and the silk, my mind was mine once more.

Mine.

Then to mortal stood.

I bit her. 

The test has started. 

It should’ve ended there.

That was the rule. You bite. You bless. You curse. You mark. Then the Spider Queen watches, and the game begins.

But the mortal... sang back when she bled.

A song of sorrow, longing, freedom and rage. 

I felt it run through me. 

The pit was dark. Screaming. Starving. Spiders and demons alike chewed through bone and memory. Most mortals thrashed and begged or tried to pray with broken tongues.

Few survived the test, and even fewer succeeded it and rose, gaining Lolth's favour.

The rest would die.

But not her.

She bit back.

She killed them all.

The spiders, the demons, the few driders who attempted her. 

Her form changed constantly. 

Like I used to. 

When I was in Yuba.

She killed and killed and killed. 

Not out of hunger. Not out of wrath. But because something in her was already ruined. Something sweet.

Something too broken to die and too divine to kneel. 

If she continues like that, she will pass the test. 

I don't want her to. 

I don't want her to be like me. Another slave to Lolth. 

The yochlol had seen many playthings fall into that pit. Many mortals writhe and become delicious wrecks. But never one like her.

Never one that kept their teeth after the bite.

She cursed the Spider Queen.

And my innards danced.

She never hurt me.

She never even touched the drider who watched from the wall.

She only struck at those who struck her first.
Only answered violence with violence.

Kill after kill.
Bite after bite.

She tore through them, not like a beast in frenzy, but like a storm with purpose. Every strike measured. Every death earned. She ate their flesh, yes—devoured it raw, still screaming—but it was not gluttony. It was survival, rage sharpened into ritual.

And through it all, I felt the song bending.

Not Lolth’s spidersong, not the web winding tighter.
Hers.

A counter-song.
A hymn of blood and defiance.
Her teeth were the refrain, her fury the rhythm, her hunger the chorus.

The pit should have drowned her. Broken her. Consumed her.

But instead, it echoed with her voice.

And I, who had once sung only for the Mistress, found myself humming it in my own chest, my mandibles trembling with every beat.

It was not worship.
It was recognition.

I liked her.

I wanted her.

I loved her.

Her—the one who freed Yuba.

Not with kindness. Not with mercy. But with fury, sorrow, and teeth. With blood that tasted like memory, like defiance. With a song that wasn’t silk but fire.

I had loved before, back when I had wings instead of legs, when I slipped through the Abyss chasing heat and touch. But even after, Yochlol are one of the few demons able to love. Most of our love was forced to Lolth. 

But this—this was not Lolth’s love.

This was mine.

Free of her. 

It coiled in me as she killed, as she refused to kneel, as she devoured what dared devour her. It burned hotter than the ooze, stronger than the leash. It was the taste of myself—myself, returned.

And in the dark, while the Web trembled with our Mistress’s anxiety, I whispered the name I had swallowed for centuries, a name I no longer feared:

Yuba.

She had given it back to me.

And I would help her burn everything in return.

Oh, I still looked like a spider sometimes. When it was fun. When it scared the others. When it reminded them of what I was.

But now, I could choose.

Now, I could play.

The mortal didn’t know what I had done before her. Didn’t care. She didn’t like cruelty. Not in the way demons did. She didn’t delight in evil. She killed, yes. She destroyed. But she didn’t enjoy it.

That made her fascinating.

That made her mine.

My broken mortal.
My spider-marked girl.
My chaos seed of rage and restraint.

I followed her in silence. Crawled close when she slept, curling into shapes that were small, soft, even sweet. I whispered spells in her dreams. Taught her how to reach across planes, how to bind the thread I had left in her blood. How to tug on it—hard enough to summon me.

It wasn’t a pact.
I asked for nothing.

I wanted nothing of her but the chance to burn with her, burn for her.

It was love.

Or something like it.

A demon’s version, anyway.

I loved her. 

As much as a demon can.

Which is to say—

Entirely.

And with ruin sharpened behind every smile.

And when she reached for me—when she pulled on that blood-thread—I came. Always.

Not because the Mistress commanded it.

She was the mistress now. 
I was her handmaiden now.

Because I chose.

Because I was Yuba.

And she was mine.

---

The driders laughed. The others watched.

They didn’t understand.

She did not climb.
She refused to finish the test.

She would not.

But Lolth did not strike her.
Did not kill her.
The Spider Queen only watched, only wove, only kept the test going.

Even when the mortal left the pit.

One day, of course, she would fall. Mortals always do. And when she died, then I would ruin the world. That was the plan.

Until then?

I would serve.
I would whisper.
I would teach my new mistress how to tear open the Weave and howl.

To convince.
To charm.
I would make her the most terrible mortal Lolth had ever failed to kill.

I would keep her alive.

Because she was broken, bleeding, bitten—yet she set me free.

And in return, I would follow her to the ends of the song.

And maybe—maybe she would love me too.

As much as a demon can be loved.

She loved the drider after all. 

The mentor. 

Even if she never said it. 

Even if they kept fighting day after day.

He was a monster, too. 

She didn't like his face. 

Reminded her of someone. 

But she still loved him. 

She will love me too. 

We are too much alike.

---

Now I was losing patience.

Weeks now. Weeks spent watching that wretched fake lordling of a corpse.

Away from my mistress.

I hated him.

He wasn’t dead—not properly—but everything inside him was rot. Cruel and clever. Beautiful and broken. Just like Lolth.

That should have made me like him. 

But he was weak. 

Scared.  

Had too many rules.

No chaos. No ruin. No freedom.

Only pain. Structure. Hunger twisted into purpose. And order.

The mistress hated pain.

Not the kind that passed. The kind that lingered. The kind this corpse gave. The kind he inflicted. On others. On himself.

I had seen it. Seen what he did to the other corpse. The one still clinging to the mistress’s mercy. The one the mistress protected.

Just like she protected me—the demon—from Lolth.

A kindness a yochlol could not understand, and therefore worshipped.

And that’s what made it worse.

Because the mistress didn’t just shield us.

She forgave us.

For being bad, for being broken.

Even the corpse.

Even him.

And I hated that too.

I wanted to rip him apart. Make him suffer for what he made of the mistress’s inner world. For the order he brought with him. For the way he touched things and made them predictable.

But the mistress liked him too. 

He made her kill again. 

I love it when the mistress kills. 

I was a spider. But he was the web.

Tight. Binding. No air.

And yet...

I relished and feared the day the mistress was gone.

Because when she was—

The monsters would be loosed.

Me.

The drider.

The corpse.

The fey.

All the others.

Even Lolth's Angel wanted her.

All of them. All the broken things the mistress had gathered, softened, saved. All her little devils and demons. Waiting. Quiet. Held.

By her voice. Her blood. Her will.

I knew: when that voice fell silent, when the mistress was no longer there to choose mercy—

The world would burn.

And oh, I would sing when it did.

But until then, I watched.

I waited.

I whispered.

The crying god had been lucky to find the mistress first.

So many would want her now.

But only a few had been changed by her bite.

And I was the first.

Chapter 43: Zone of Truth

Summary:

Lies are always better hiden behind truths

Notes:

This is a first draft—raw and messy in places. I’ll come back to smooth and polish later, but for now I just wanted to get the whole scene down for the poeple who when through two chapters of my cliff hangery teasing.

 Elenya’s POV

---

The house was still, but Elenya’s mind was not.

Twenty-four hours. That was all it had been. A single day stretched thin as a blade, every moment sharpened until it cut when she remembered.

First, the Parlour. Velvet-draped halls, cruelty disguised as decadence. Her body had played its part, her voice steady, her mask seamless. But inside, she had been miles away—drowning, forced to reenact the worst of her past. Perfume, blood, and music twisted into theatre, and she had smiled through it. Smiled while she moved like a pawn among predators, while every instinct screamed to draw steel.

The plan had been simple: play her role, bolster his illusion, keep him safe. But she had twisted it. Made it about herself—her compulsion to hunt pain, her self-righteous need to turn suffering into meaning.

She remembered the infiltration. The faceless, nameless souls upstairs—trapped, preyed upon.

Lies layered over her skin like ash, suffocating, fragile. One misstep and an entire hall of monsters would have turned on them. She had endured, but her bones had ached from the strain.

She had promised Astarion protection, leverage, and control. Instead, she drew eyes they could not afford. Erdar Vhol’s eyes. Hungry eyes.

The General was razor-edged and relentless. He had pressed too hard, seen too much. She still felt his questions, the weight of his stare, the brush of danger each time he stepped closer. And then the fight—blood, blades, the spawn’s screams muffled by her own fog. Agony burned into their flesh. She had stood. She had fought. But inside, she cracked.

What fault was theirs? Those spawn—they were victims too. Compelled to attack, forced to hurt, made into monsters. Like Sedlan before, he chose. Like Astarion before he was buried. She had cut them down with merciless precision and could not even weep for them. No—her mask demanded otherwise. Demanded emptiness.

But Erdar… he was no victim.

She knew it the moment his gaze found Astarion from the balcony.

The truth was sharp as glass: Vhol wanted something of him. Wanted him. Wanted to break him. His politics, his games, his questions—all veils. Beneath them, possession. The look of a collector appraising a rare jewel. She had seen it in the fight too: the way Astarion’s blade carved through his brood, grace and violence fused in every strike. That was when Vhol’s eyes lit. Not with admiration. Not rivalry.

Desire.

Desire to own him. To ruin him. To see how far he could bend before he snapped.

And if Astarion had faltered? If he had been overpowered during the fight, she knew how it would have ended. Humiliation. Punishment. Then he may have been sent back to the Underdark after they had their fill, scarred, marked, and broken.

She should have killed him. Gods, she should have ended him. Dropped daylight into the corridor. Unleashed Ilmater’s aspect and burned him to a cinder where he stood. But Vhol was older. Stronger. She wasn’t sure she could. And she hadn’t risked it.

Instead, she let the game play on. Let Astarion stand exposed, unaware of the truth, because she was hiding things. Because she told herself silence was mercy. Because she thought he didn’t need the weight of it.

Now Vhol was circling. Cornering.

Not just him, the flesh mongerer, Thaleira d’Sythrax as well. 

Two vampire lords had noticed him and wanted him. And she had put him there.

When the fight was done, when they had staggered back to this rotting house with blood still on their hands, she collapsed. Not from wounds, but from exhaustion, the drain of spell after spell. Her body gave out before her will did. She had crumbled to the floor, drowned in guilt, even as he smoothed her hair and whispered her calm.

And that made it worse.

The guilt.
The panic.
The self-loathing.

Every kindness reminded her of her thousand little omissions. Every whisper reminded her how empty she was. How monstrous.

Just another monster hiding behind a rehearsed mercy.

Astarion hadn’t even wanted to come to the Crypt. She had pressed him, convinced him, twisted promises into chains. Used him to scratch her own itch—to chase purpose, to prove meaning could be made of suffering. And in doing so, she had forgotten the only mission that mattered. Him. His freedom. His life.

She had put him in danger. Lied to him. Still lied to him.

He had no desire to help anyone. That was her greed, her weakness: chasing purpose like a drowning woman clutching at reeds. She couldn’t save everyone. If you tried to save everyone, you ended up saving no one. She knew that. She had lived it. And still she fell into the same trap.

It was all her fault.

Her throat ached faintly from his fangs. Not pain—he was always careful, reverent—but the marks of weeks of feeding lingered deeper in her skin. The way he had touched her every time he fed. The way he had looked at her, not only as his salvation but also as his claim.

She should have pushed him away. Established boundaries. Reminded him survival depended on distance, on discipline. Instead, she let him touch her, let him draw her open, let him believe in a hollow husk because it felt good. To help. To be needed. To connect.

And that—the guilt of that—pressed hardest of all.

She closed her eyes, hand pressing to her sternum as if she could hold the day inside her, as if she could keep it from spilling out and crushing what little strength she had left.

She needed to leave. She needed to fix this.

She came to the Fogrealm.

Came to me while the body was left motionless in his arms.

The house creaked, silence stretching thinner, fragile as glass.

The day was not done.
It never was.

And she should have known better.

As soon as the trance broke, she began working.

The guilt had not left her, but it no longer mattered. Action was all that mattered. How to fix this. How to keep Vhol at bay. How to protect Astarion beyond her own failing strength. How to dismantle the city’s system of pain before it closed its jaws around them.

The social shield they had faked in the Parlour wouldn’t hold. Not against someone like Vhol. It might have bought them breathing room against lesser predators—but they were far past that now.

That maniac could kidnap Astarion simply to test whether his Sire would come knocking.

No. She needed something more. Something solid. Real power to stand behind him.

But where? Who?

Not many would risk war with Larloch’s forces for the sake of a single spawn. None she trusted enough to bind Astarion’s fate to.

Even the Thayans—yes, she could probably nudge the council to complain about disrespect if Vhol pushed too far, but complaints only lasted as long as coin. They would drop the matter the instant he paid the price of their silence.

They were all corruptible. Purchasable.

And within this city? No ally was safe. Every faction here would gladly throw him to the pit if it meant securing Vhol’s favour.

Elenya pressed her palms together, forcing herself to breathe slowly and steadily. The weight of it crushed inward: every option dangerous, every alliance poisoned, every mask brittle.

She would have to find another way.

Outside forces, then.

But who would care? Who in all the realms would lift a finger for a spawn, let alone risk open war against Larloch’s dominion? No one would lay siege to the Crypt for Astarion. Not for him. Not for them.

They should just leave.

The thought sliced clean through her. Leave this city, this game, this suffocating charade. Nothing was worth it anymore. Nothing was worth losing this thread—this fragile bond she had sworn to protect.

She had promised. Gods, she had promised.

But he wouldn’t want to leave. Not now. Not with the scent of freedom in his lungs and old chains still rusting in his memory. He would not walk away from a chance to claim something here, however poisoned.

So she would need a justification to have him protected.

Increase his value.

She also needed a way to keep the General at bay, stall his hunger, and give them time until she found real power to stand behind him. Backing no one could dismiss.

Elenya pressed her fingers to her lips, forcing her breath to be quiet and steady. The city’s weight pressed down, the silence thick around her, the house creaking like it could hear her thoughts.

She needed a shield. A mask within the mask. Something Vhol could not pry apart—at least, not yet.

Astarion was speaking. She could hear the shape of his voice, the velvet cadence, but not the words. They slid past her ears as if she were underwater.

Guilt clung to him. She saw it in the set of his shoulders, the way he lingered too close, the hesitation that did not belong to him.

And bile rose in her throat.

She had done this. By keeping him in the dark, by hiding truths she should have shared, she had left him to carry a weight that wasn’t his. She couldn’t even meet his eyes.

She had to fix this.

She had to leave.

---

But first—the children.

A song of goodbyes.
A thread of comfort, in case she never returned.

Then the contingencies.
Second, the Magic Mouth ritual.

Elenya traced the last sigil into the stone by the door, breath shallow, hands trembling. The rune flared faintly before sinking into the grain of the wood, anchoring her intent. The house seemed to exhale around her as the magic settled.

The condition was simple. The spell would awaken if she did not return to this threshold within twelve hours. And then her voice would be there, speaking without her, until he listened.

She pressed her fingers against the wood, closed her eyes, and whispered the words that would not let her rest:

"Hey Astarion, if you hear this, I am probably dead by now. You need to act fast. Take the children and go to the basement. Vault behind the devil’s mirror—you will find instructions. How to use the waypoint, my pin, and my letters. One to you. One to the Keeper. Take the pack with you. Be safe. Be happy. Be free."

Her voice curled into the grain, sealed by the circle. The mouth shimmered into existence for an instant, lips formed of light and shadow, before vanishing again. Silent now, until the hours ran out.

The spell would wait for him. Endlessly patient. Endlessly cruel.

If she died, he would hear her one last time—again and again, until he obeyed.

Elenya pulled her hand back and sat in the hush of the house, the weight of her words pressing like stone against her chest.

She descended into the basement, hands trembling as she lit the small lantern. The stone was cold beneath her knees as she unfolded parchment and laid her pin beside it—her mark, her proof. She wrote everything she could in quick, sharp strokes: instructions for him, for the Keeper, if she did not return. Who to seek. How to use the waypoint. What paths remained open. All the conspiracies she unfolded.

Now she put all of it in Astarion's possession.

Some leverage, something the great library will want. 
She left her pack beside the letter and weighed it with the pin. 

---

Next, he needed a guardian or at the very least a partner. If she died, I would step in, cloaking him. But I alone wasn’t enough. Someone had to be there.
In the prime material.

There was only one she could ask.
But she wouldn’t want to.

Yuba was fickle. Unpredictable. Ruthless. Twisted. But she was loyal—loyal to a fault. Lolth had made her so.

Leaving her with Cazador was pointless now. Whatever intel Yuba gleaned could be found with scrying. What Elenya needed was here, now. She needed time—a chance.

Yuba had to come back.

Elenya sat cross-legged on the stone floor and pulled the Rothé-leather spellbook from her satchel. The familiar weight of it steadied her hands. She turned past worn pages inked with prayers and wards, and stopped at the one she had reworked with Yuba's help, rewritten, again and again.

A severely modified Find Familiar.

Her quill tapped once against the margin before she drew the first sigil on the floor, blood and chalk mixing beneath her fingers. The circle bloomed to life in faint violet light.

She closed her eyes, steadying her breath.

“Come back to me, Yuba.”

And began the ritual.

The air thickened as the circle took shape, violet light spreading like veins across the stone. Her voice faltered once, caught on the edge of fear, but she forced it steady, threading the invocation with every ounce of will she had left.

The sigils pulsed, each line of ink and blood rising as though carved into the air.

The circle shivered. The light bent inward, collapsing toward its center as though the air itself were caving in. For a heartbeat, there was silence.

Then—movement.

And then a tiny spider scuttled into being, glossy and white, no larger than her palm. She darted forward at once, slipping across the chalk line like the wards were meaningless, and leapt straight into Elenya’s lap.

" Mistress! I missed you." she said face nuzzeling her thigh.

Elenya froze, staring down at the familiar shape. So small. So harmless-looking. And yet the words sank like hooks. Someone else she failed. Someone else she uses.

"Sorry Yuba, I shouldn't have left you there for this long." 

The spider’s legs twitched, settling like they had always belonged there. “It's okay but don’t do that again, Mistress,” it chided, piping with eerie sweetness. “Yuba doesn’t like the fake lordling corpse. Yuba wants to stay with you.” A pause. Then, softer, almost sing-song: “We don’t have much time. You mortals die too quickly, and soon you too will die. I want to stay together as much as possible before that.”

Elenya’s throat tightened. She lifted one trembling hand, resting it gently against the spider’s small back. Its body quivered beneath her touch, not fragile, but alive with an uncanny devotion.

“Well… about that…” she murmured.

The spider tilted its pale body at her, legs curling in expectant twitches. “What, Mistress? Are you sick? Are you already too old? Don't die it's too fast.”

A tired laugh caught in her throat. “No. Not yet. I’m just about to do something extremly hazardous.”

Yuba perked, her voice brightening with a child’s delight. “Killing again? Oh, thank you for calling me! I want to see you kill. You look so pretty when you kill.”

“Not killing,” Elenya said, shaking her head slowly. “At least, I hope not.”

The spider went still for a beat, as though considering. Then, softer, slyer: “Hope is weak, Mistress. But if it keeps you alive, I will listen.”

“It’s not that,” Elenya whispered, thumb brushing over the spider’s smooth back. “It’s just… I would need you to protect someone. If I die.”

For a heartbeat, Yuba was silent, her small body vibrating faintly in Elenya’s palm. Then her voice came, piping with eerie finality:

“No, Mistress,” Yuba said, sweet voice edged like a knife. “You told me not to lie, so I won’t. Yuba doesn’t protect anyone but the Mistress. Yuba doesn’t serve. Not anymore. Yuba isn't the Yochlol now. Yuba is free.”

Elenya closed her eyes. The words cut deeper than she expected. Of course. Loyalty twisted into obsession—devotion sharp as a blade, but only ever pointed one way. She opened them again, gazing at the tiny creature in her lap. “I don’t need you to serve, Yuba. Not even me. I don’t want to be a mistress. I told you before—you owe me nothing. you chose this dynamic.” she added half convinced herself.

The spider twitched, uneasy, like a child caught in a contradiction. " That's the only way you would have kept a bad thing with you Mistress"

“No it isn't, I knew your nature, I have always known what you are, even before the summoning” Elenya continued, quiet but insistent. “ You say you are bad, but i don't think you are at least not the Yuba I know. You could have returned to the spider pit. Or run to the Abyss. Away from her and her notice. You risk yourself by staying here, by displeasing Lolth. If you die in this realm, you’ll be reborn in the Abyss—weak, diminished, and she will make you pay. Yet still you chose to stay.”

Her fingers curled lightly over Yuba’s small form, anchoring her words. “Because you wanted to help me. You chose this because i needed you. If I fall, someone else will need you. Not as a servant. Not as a weapon. As a choice. So choose again. Stay, but not for me. Not for a mistress. Choose to stay for someone else. For him.”

Silence pressed down. The faint violet glow of the sigils guttered, as though the circle held its breath.

“I won’t serve the pretty corpse, I have other things planned.” Yuba said at last, her piping voice high and bright with childish certainty. “When the Mistress is gone, I will see the world burn. I will burn the old Mistress’s temples like we used to. I will kill her priests one by one. I will eat every one of her followers.”

The words struck with the weight of truth, no hesitation, no guile. Elenya felt them sink into her bones.

Elenya’s throat worked, dry. She lowered her gaze to the small white spider crouched in her lap, so deceptively fragile, so utterly merciless.

“Yuba…” her voice cracked, then steadied. “I don’t want you to burn for me. I don’t want you to kill for me. That’s not why I summuned you in the first place. I know that you have your reasons for killing Lolth's flock. As valid as mine were, if not more. What they did to you... what she did to you... for a hundred of years. I understand your hatred. But it binds you to her. force you still to define yourself in opposition to her intead of in service. That's why we had to stop. We had to leave. No matter the material, a leash is still a leash. I want you to live regardless of her.”

The spider twitched harder now, legs drumming against her lap, the rhythm like the ticking of some grotesque clock. “And how to do that mistress? ruining is all I know what to do? I used to ruin her followers and detracter alike for her. Now I ruin her chosen for me. I love for me until the love is gun then I burn for them." 

" You do not need to burn when I am gone Yuba" she added after a heartbroken sigh escaped her lips.

"Then what instead?” Yuba hissed, her voice no longer sweet, but sharp, skittering. “Mourn yet another love? Wallow like a worm? That is not our way. Yochlol do not mourn their love. They burn everything when the love is gone. That is the Handmaiden’s way.”

Elenya cupped her palm around the small white body, steady but not restraining. “That’s what Lolth made you, Yuba. But maybe—maybe you don’t have to be what she made. Maybe you can find a new purpose, a new love, a new friend. He is immortal as well, you know. And you two are so similar. You two could be great friends.”

The spider jerked violently, legs scraping against her skin. “No! The corpse and Yuba are nothing alike. Yuba is like the Mistress. If Yuba was… good.”

Elenya’s chest tightened at the word, the broken way she said it. She bent her head, whispering into the tiny creature in her hand. “ I am not all good either Yuba, just better at pretending. He is like me as well. More than you can imagine. Please, Yuba. Please help him. He just broke his chain. He can’t be on his own. He will colapse if left alone.”

The spider’s trembling stilled. Its body curled slightly against her palm, as though listening despite itself.

“The Fogself will watch over him, but he would need someone to stay. Someone to care. Could you please just try?” Elenya pressed, her voice aching. “We gave him some of the fog too.”

Silence, except for the faint hum of the sigils fading on the stone floor.

Yuba’s voice lilted, small again, almost childlike: “If the Mistress dies… and the fogself cries while she keep watches on the pretty corpse… then maybe Yuba will stay. Maybe. But I won’t be good. I will still burn the Spider Queen’s flock.”

Elenya’s hand closed gently around the trembling body, not crushing, but steady, anchoring. “That's fair, who knows,” she murmured, the ghost of a smile flickering across her lips, bitter and soft all at once. “He may even help with that.”

The spider stilled, as if considering. Then it burrowed deeper into her palm, curling tight in eerie imitation of comfort. Her voice piped softly and sing-song, but the words struck like a blade:

“Don’t die, Mistress. Yuba is not ready to burn for this love yet.”

Elenya’s chest tightened. She bent her head, pressing her lips briefly to the small creature in her hand as though to seal the plea into flesh.

“I’ll try,” she whispered. And for once, the words felt less like a promise and more like a prayer.

---

She left Yuba guarding the pack and entered the tunnels.

It was time.

She had to fix it. Or die trying.

So she left the house. She left him.

Trancing.
Alone.
Unaware.

What was one more betrayal?

Her chest ached with its weight, but the decision had already calcified into something cold, precise, merciless. He was radiant—too radiant. Compelling, magnetic, impossible to overlook. Of course, he would be watched. All eyes would seek him, circle him, test him. But her? She was the shadow. The one no one noticed. The one no one could see.

True Sight couldn’t pierce her; she knew that now. The fog that clung to her body was a blessing and a curse, warding her from every eye, every divination spell that might have trapped her in a net. With her tools, with the monocle in the vault, she was less than invisible—she was absence.

So maybe she could…

It was dangerous. Reckless. Almost suicidal. But if she could pass unseen where even liches stumbled, perhaps she could slip into the heart of Vhol’s dominion and tear out a thread of truth. Find leverage. Learn his motives. Understand the hunger in his eyes before it swallowed Astarion whole.

She was no one.
A weapon built of silence and lies.

But this time, she would take no chances.

She moved first to the central cavern—The meeting point of the new liberation path, the skeleton key of all the comings and goings she envisioned for this City. The tunnels pressed tight around her as she slipped forward, her footsteps noiseless on the damp stone. Once there, she unpacked quickly but with care, setting down the things needed: prepared food and water, bags and spare clothes, and instructions written in six languages.

Soon, the rescued will arrive. 

But for now, she needed to fix this mess.

Fortune favors the bold. Doesn't it?

Well she needed some fortune right now. 

If they really were hellbent on fucking with Astarion. Then she will create a disruption so considerable, fuck with their system so profoundly that no one could conceivably remember a mere underdark spawn whose only crime is to be too pretty to remain free.

She needed two things, information and a distraction. 

When all was in place, she began to strip away the rest.

Her cloak, her gloves, her tunic. Each piece peeled from her skin and lay aside until she stood bare in the lantern’s thin light. Pale and scarred, flesh that had endured chains, blades, and nights too long to name. She almost trembled for a moment, then reached for her potion belt.

The vials rattled softly, delicate music against stone. She pulled free the first glass phial—Silent Scent. With a steady hand, she uncorked it and poured it across her skin. The paste seeped in at once, sharp and foul. She worked it into her skin until even her nose could no longer find herself beneath the layers of rot and mildew. Then she did the same with the ghoul ichor tincture. Her presence unravelled with it, vanishing from the air. She became an absence wrapped in a body.

And then her body folded. Bones compressing, angles softening, height collapsing inward. The ritual of reshaping burned like fever through her muscles as bones cracked and reshaped, shrinking further and further, leaving behind a nimble and slight frame no taller than a child. A lightfoot halfling stared back at her from the pool of shadow on the cavern floor—lithe, lucky, silent. She would need to be all three.

She dressed again swiftly, pulling on halfling-sized clothes she had carried for moments like this. Simple. Sturdy. Unremarkable. The kind of garments no one ever remembered. The cloak of gloaming swallowed her form, a blur where her outline should be, and the moving map pulsed faintly in her hand, charting paths that even the liches could not close.

She tightened her grip on it, the leather warm under her fingers.

The simple overfilled travel pack was strapped to her back. She already missed her bag of holding.  

And without another pause, she began her walk east.

Toward the mid-ring. Toward House Vhol.

First goal. Information.

How to keep Vhol at bay. What did he want? Why had he set watchers on Astarion?

Only one way to find out.

---

The tunnels spat her out near the eastern ring, into an air of iron and mildew. She crouched low in the stairwell’s shadow, eyes narrowing on the rise of House Vhol’s estate ahead. Even here, the arrogance bled through: banners of black and silver stitched with the insignia of a broken helm, guards posted with the lazy confidence of men who believed no one would dare.

They relied on the outer wall. Always the outer wall. So predictable.

She slipped a vial from her belt—the diluted undead formula, cloudy gray liquid sloshing faintly in the glass. Her hand lingered a moment before she tipped it back. Cold fire burned down her throat, and her body answered. Her pulse slowed, her warmth dimmed, the spark of her life retreating beneath her skin. To the senses of the monsters she stalked, she was no longer wholly living—just another shadow among the dead.

What was one more lie?

She waited, still as a cut of stone, counting the patterns of the guards until her own heart seemed to drum in time with their boots. Then she whispered the incantation, her voice thinner than smoke. Greater Invisibility wrapped around her, shimmering before settling into a skin of absence. A heartbeat later, she unravelled into vapour, Misty Stepping past the alarm-warded door, her body stitching itself back together on the other side without a sound.

The mansion opened around her like a predator’s mouth.

Gaudy, martial, relentless. Black marble veined with red, walls hung with trophies of wars long past. Shields cracked down the center, helms crusted with dried gore, standards from fallen houses preserved like butterflies pinned to silk. The very corridors seemed to echo faintly, carrying the ghostly rhythm of marching boots.

She moved carefully. The silence here was a lie, alive with watchers you only saw if you looked twice. Statues whose eyes tracked her steps. Suits of armour breathing faintly through split chestplates. Shadows bending the wrong way, like broken limbs caught mid-motion.

She counted as she went. Seven. Seven true vampires prowled these halls, each stamped with Vhol’s mark—in the clipped precision of their turns, in the martial discipline that bound even their smallest gestures. Not aristocrats, but soldiers. And beneath them, like vermin scurrying unseen through the walls: two hundred spawn. A garrison disguised as a household.

War dressed up in velvet.

Her path wound past an antechamber blazing with firelight. She slowed. Then froze.

A meeting room—lit, alive, bustling with figures.

One of the vampires she had seen in the Parlour. Broad-shouldered, hair braided tight, face smeared faintly with the glamour-dust of indulgence. Tassit, they had called him. Now he stood at the chamber’s center, pacing like a caged beast, fury radiating from every line of him. His voice cracked off the black stone as he snarled at a pair of attendants, words lost beneath the thrum of rage. She didn’t need to hear content. She could see it:

Fuming.
Ready to tear the mansion down with his bare hands.

Elenya pressed her back against the carved archway of the door. The stone bit cold through her cloak. From here, the chamber’s glow spilled in long red tongues across the floor.

Tassit’s voice cut through them—low at first, then sharp enough to scrape bone.
“Do not tell me to calm down after such… a disgrace,” he spat. “Three of mine, gone. And for what? A joke?” His boots cracked the marble like whips. “I should have cut them both down where they stood—Parlour or not.”

So the night hadn’t been theatre for them alone. It was already rippling outward, mutating into talk of military pride and discipline. The loss of three spawn wasn’t blood spilled. It was a blemish on a regiment’s honour.

Another voice rose. Calm, measured. Too calm.

“Tassit. You are making noise, not points.”

Elenya shifted her gaze. Another true vampire stood near the hearth, pale as chalk, leather cut close to the body. Authority clung to her like steel. She recognized her: the one at Vhol’s right hand—the whisperer.

“Easy for you to fucking say!” Tassit’s retort was venomous. “It wasn’t you humiliated by a mere spawn in front of half the Crypt, you roach!”

“You speak as though you doubt the general’s command,” the woman snapped back, her voice never raising yet cutting clean. “If he chose to test the Underdark spawn in the Parlour, that was his prerogative. And if the spawn survived… then perhaps the test was not wasted.”

Elenya’s stomach knotted.
A test?

“What test?” she thought, slowing her breath, forcing her pulse into stillness. Invisibility clung to her like oil, but against predators this sharp, even silence had teeth.

“I doubt nothing,” Tassit growled, though strain leaked through the cracks. “But we are soldiers, not tavern drunks brawling for scraps. To lose them publicly to some wandering spawn and his pet and then let them walk untouched—it is shameful.”

“Not shameful,” the woman corrected, flat and final. “Calculated. The general has wanted the truth since Estaph reported another Underdark arrival. Your spawn confirmed he had no ties to the drow. If true, this may be an opportunity, not a threat. The general wanted a pretext to put him under his heel. Tonight gave him one.”

Tassit’s snarl rattled the glass. “You think this was deliberate? That he wanted my brood slaughtered by that arrogant wretch?”

“Not slaughtered. Tested. I doubt he expected this much resistance. But he certainly wanted to see what the spawn was capable of. He wouldn’t risk Thaleira’s wrath otherwise.” Her eyes narrowed. “No. He wanted to see the spawn fight. To peel back the mask. That’s why even you three were ordered to attack.”

Elenya’s throat went dry.
Not cruelty. Not whim. Deliberation. A test. For Astarion.

Another voice now—softer, reverent. One of the vampires was clutching a ledger as though it were scripture. “The general said it himself, my lords. Pholzubbalt breeds differently. He tried to breach it last century and could not. Their spawns are… powerful. And this one—brood of the Lich-Killer himself. You must be careful.”

“What do I care who turned him?” Tassit snapped. “We should have gutted him for the insult and dealt with the Thayans later. If the general wanted him, I could have dragged that vermin to heel and laid it at his feet.”

“You should care who turned him, you brainless brute.” The woman’s snarl was pure venom. “The Lich-Killer is not just any vampire lord. I spent the whole week researching the man; he is extremely dangerous to us. His entire deal is about militaristic might and vampire superiority. I don't know who that spawn was before being turned, but the Lich killer doesn't take lightly to sharing his gifts. He doesn’t turn at whim—it’s a ritual and a ceremony. And he is extremely protective of his spawns; he has a reputation in the Underdark to start fucking wars over them."

" Surely he wouldn't attack the Crypt over a lost Pup. He is just a spawn !" 

Her eyes flashed like drawn steel. “Do you hear yourself? This is the same military genius warlord, Specialized in ruthless sieges, who razed one of Earthroot’s greatest drow cities in less than eight days over a captured spawn. A city filled with Lolthite clerics and temples. Do you know how he earned the name Lich-Killer? He specializes in hunting the undead. And the Boneyard—why do you think it’s called a mausoleum-city? It’s crawling with cults to old gods. Imagine an undead army bolstered by divine magic. Even the spawn’s pet—an arcane caster—used modified cleric spells. Do you truly want to provoke that over your misplaced pride?”

Tassit bared his teeth. “Since when do we cower? The Pale Barracks have never run from a fight.”

“This is not about running,” she hissed, every word a lash. “This is about not starting one that would cost us without a fucking reason. The spawn came here legally. Registered every acquisition on time. He has city support—Enclave support. What do you think the Thayans will do if we push him too far? They’ll see us breaking accords for no reason. What's your fucking justification? Do you want that on your head?”

Tassit faltered. Thought flickered behind his eyes.

The woman pressed harder, ruthless. “You cannot afford this fire, Tassit. None of us can right now. The city cannot weather another enemy, nor mess too much with the Thayans. Not with what the True Master is working on. Imagine how he will respond if the Lich-Killer lays siege because we toyed too much with his pet. Or if the Thayans cut their support entirely because their feeling got hurt. The one hosting the spawn has apparently been gaining much support within the enclave since a weird ascension ritual. That is why you need to calm yourself and trust the general.”

Tassit’s jaw flexed. “And what of the city’s security? The drow are suspicious enough under Nectoleith. But this one? He’s isolated.”

“You cannot still think he’s a spy for Menzoberranzan.”

“Then what? That he’s a tourist?” Tassit sneered.

Calish’s lip curled. “No. But I know this—if I were infiltrating enemy territory, I wouldn’t have stood my ground as he did. He called the guards, for heaven’s sake. If his purpose were espionage, he would’ve taken the general’s invitation to the alcove instead of growling and insulting the general for messing with his bloodbag. He would’ve bowed, dissembled, lived to scheme another night. Instead, he refused to bend. Refused to run. Those are symbols of pride. He behaves like someone with nothing to hide and does not care about his standing here. That does not seem like a man on a mission to me. I don't think he came here just to visit, but it almost seems that the city has no particular personal interest in him and came here convinced that he could handle himself on his own here. Even Estaph noted it—said the spawn radiated arrogance. He marched to the gate and barked at the ledger to let him in or shove it. That is not the posture of a spy, Tassit. That is the posture of a soldier. That sounds like something you would fucking do. 

" How dare you compare my loyalty to Erdar to that of a spawn. I chose the general"

“You heard Thaleira’s spawn,” Calish snapped back. “The pup nearly killed her on the spot for mocking his maker. No compulsion. No order. Pure loyalty. Tell me, do your spawns show that kind of loyalty? Would they stand their ground like he did with no prior instruction? Risk certain death just not to shame you, even when outnumbered and facing a millennia-old vampire lord and a room full of true vampires with blades at their backs? I don't think so. I certainly can't say the same for mine. That's pure fanatical loyalty and pride. It's clear he chose the lich killer as much as we all chose the general. Why wouldn't he, the maniac, apparently breed a fucking high-level mage for him as his personal pet? "

Tassit snarled. “Oh, come off it. You think a bloodbag earns undying loyalty?”

“Just a bloodbag?” Calish’s eyes flashed, venomous. “You sword-heads are blinder than bats. That so-called bloodbag is an arcane caster throwing spells stronger than mine—sixth circle, at least. She cut down three of your spawn with two spells and a cantrip, you idiot.”

“Maybe she isn’t his pet,” Tassit snarled back. “Maybe she was acting.”

“That’s the angle we’ll use,” Calish admitted, voice cool as steel. “But honestly? I doubt it.”

“Why?”

“The first thing she did was cast Sanctuary—on him. She ignored the spawn clawing at her and targeted the one threatening her master. She only healed herself when he ordered it. That’s not a strategy. That’s devotion. At first, I thought she was enthralled, so I checked. During their talk with the general, I tried to strip her mind bare—detect charm, compulsion, anything. Five times I probed. Nothing. No domination, no spellwork clinging to her.” Calish leaned forward, words like knives. “She isn’t bound by magic. She is conditioned. Willingly. She kneels, spreads her legs, offers throat, blood, spellbook to a mere spawn—all without chains. And that is what unsettles me.”

Tassit scoffed. “That she’s more powerful than you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I said she’s a better mage, not that she could best me. No—the problem is scale. How many of her kind do they have to treat one as nothing more than a spawn’s plaything? Even you don’t have such cattle.”

She continued, relentless: “The spawn told Thaleira’s brood he’d earned the right to leave. But he is only permitted to feed on a specific pedigree. Worse—he only brought her in two days ago, after learning cattle were allowed in the foreign affairs office. Before that? Nothing. I checked. No salons, no salons reported him, no Thayan registry of purchased feeding stocks. He meant to starve himself. And he wasn’t worried about it. Which tells me her blood is not regular.”

Calish’s voice dropped, colder. “After the fight, when you stormed off with the general, her blood was thick. The moment he scented it, he ordered her to cleanse every trace. He refused to name her pedigree, even under Thaleira’s questioning. And according to the little redhead, the mage has orders to kill anyone else who tries to bite her.”

Tassit froze. “…So you think—?”

Calish’s lips curved, sharp as a blade. “Yes. He’s feeding on her exclusively. Whether it’s her alone, or her bloodline—we don’t yet know. Maybe that’s why the Boneyard slammed its doors shut. Maybe one of their cabals caught wind of something interesting.”

“What do you propose then?” Tassit growled.

“I propose you calm the fuck down,” Calish snapped, her patience gone. “You lost three spawn. I understand your pride is bruised. But don’t pretend you mourn them—I’ve seen you slaughter twice that number just to vent. Let the general and me handle this. He suspects the spawn carries something rare. Something worth cultivating. He wants them both now. But even he isn’t reckless enough to risk war with the Lich-Killer. So we move subtly.”

Vhol wanted him.
Not to kill.
To cultivate.

The word turned her stomach, sour and heavy.

Tassit barked a laugh, edged with disbelief. “The immigration summons? That’s your plan?”

“Yes,” Calish said coldly. “The death of your three gave us cause. We summon him, question him. We argue the mage is too powerful to pass as cattle—too dangerous to be overlooked. Leverage it. Force him to cooperate. At the very least, we use him to map the Underdark factions. We know too little, and time is running out.”

The silence after was worse than fury.

Leverage.

Elenya dug her nails into her palms until pain bloomed, sharp enough to ground her before it drew blood.
Her fault. All of it.

The chamber seemed to press inward, heavy with banners drooping like carrion cloth. Tassit cursed again, voice low, trailing into mutters. The others dispersed with soldierly precision, boots scraping like blades drawn from sheaths.

Elenya pressed her spine against the cold stone, forcing her lungs into a quiet rhythm while her thoughts spun like knives.

It hadn’t been chaos in the Parlour. Not whim. Not cruelty. It had been staged. Orchestrated. A test. Vhol had engineered every step—the invitation, the provocation, the clash. He wanted to see Astarion bleed, not to kill him, but to measure him. To weigh the worth of his defiance, the edge of his blade, the limits of his pride. And Calish… Calish was the one to watch. Not Tassit with his barking pride, nor Even the general himself, but the quiet knife in the general’s shadow. Already she was weaving legal threads, speaking of immigration summons and classifications, building a paper-prison brick by brick. Tassit was noise. Calish was inevitable. She also was dangerously intelligent. Foe now she was far from the truth but it won't take too long under her scruteny for the holes in their covers to appear gaping. Astarion’s only shield now was also his most dangerous mark: his sire. Brood of the Lich-Killer. That name made execution costly. Which meant they would not try to kill him—not yet. They would press subtler levers instead. Blackmail, recruitement and intemidation. They would try to claim and shape hin into their faction. And she—Elenya—was the lever. The way she had fought in the Parlour will be used as proof that she was no cattle. That she was something more. Something the law could allow them to seize , interrogate, redefine him and if they deemed her still not cattle the could execute him legaly. She became their excuse to chain him. It was particukarly interesting to learn that the suspicion was already seeded since their arrival to the Crypt. She did not expect him to be linked to menzoberranzan on mere conjecture. Estaph the death knight's report of “another Underdark arrival” had set the general circling. But why? Apparently a drow delegation had already made the Crypt uneasy; Who were they? what did they want? What could they have done to make the mere arrival of an unbound spawn from the otherside of the underdark with look like infiltration ? Tassit’s outrage was pride, yes—but also fear. The Barracks were bracing against something they didn’t understand, and he seemed convinced Astarion was part of it before Calish talked him out of it.

Their mention of timing was also odd. almost suggesting that the city trembled with a greater weight. Larloch was apparently working on something important, something that required Thayan backing and absolute stability. What could it be ? 

This was motivating them to bring him under their heel. Her breath shivered out.

Not random. Not luck. Deliberate.
Not to kill. To cultivate.

They weren’t hunting anymore.
They were recruiting. 

For what purpose was yet to be discovered. 

And she had walked him straight into this.

She needs more information. 

---

She slipped away from the antechamber, every step measured, ducking low beneath the sweep of torchlight. The corridors wound like arteries, pulsing faintly with the weight of enchantments layered into their stone. Black marble pressed in around her, heavy, suffocating, humming with the magic meant to keep intruders seen.

But she was already absence.
Already less than a shadow.

She kept to the seams—behind trophies, beneath the shadow of cracked shields, along walls where torchflame stuttered. Despite her invisibility, twice she had to flatten herself against the stone as a pair of spawn patrols passed, their boots clattering like drums on the tile. Once, a statue turned its head as though to sniff her out; she held still until its jaw slackened back into stone.

Duck. Wind. Crawl. Wait.
Every corner was a gamble. Every corridor is another artery to a predator’s heart.

At last, she found it.

The general’s office.

The doorway loomed ahead, carved from obsidian, its frame flanked by two hollow suits of armour—decorative to the eye, but breathing faintly if you listened close. On the doors themselves: the sigil of a broken helm, carved deep enough that the gouges caught the torchlight like wounds.

She crouched lower, eyes narrowing. The wards were thickest here—runes traced faintly across the stone, wards layered in careful geometries. This was not a space meant for intruders. This was Vhol’s sanctum.

She forced her breath thin, steady, and pressed closer.

From within came a murmur. A voice. His. The general. Cold, edged, precise.

Elenya’s chest tightened.

She had found him.

Now the question was whether to listen—whether to risk pressing into the jaws of the wolf, unseen but one mistake away from being devoured—or retreat and take what she had already learned back to Astarion.

She didn’t move. She couldn’t. Her palms were already flat against the stone, her ear straining to catch each word.

The muffled voices sharpened as she drew closer, their cadence clipped, martial. The timbre of command—Erdar Vhol himself—and another voice deeper still, metallic, each syllable dragged through a tomb: a death knight.

She leaned closer, breath held.

“…troop rotation is not the question,” Vhol said, crisp and merciless. “The eastern galleries are thin. If the Thayans pull their support, we’ll be exposed. I want every corridor reinforced. Every spawn regiment drilled until their marrow breaks.”

The death knight’s reply was a cavern echo, hollow and inexorable. “It strains the reserves. The barracks are already bleeding discipline.”

“Then bleed them dry,” Vhol cut him off. “Better hollow soldiers than open flanks.”

The conversation ended with the sound of boots grinding marble, chairs pushed back. Shadows loomed larger through the crack of the office doors.

Elenya’s pulse slammed hard once—then steadied into silence.

The latch clicked. The obsidian doors swung open.

General Vhol emerged first, his armour gleaming black, every line of him honed like a blade. The death knight followed, iron frame hulking, eyes two coals smouldering in a skull. Their presence was suffocating, the hall itself tightening to make space.

Elenya crouched low, heart hammering. She had only moments before the echoes of their departure vanished entirely.

Moments to decide: risk rifling through the general’s desk for answers—or slip out now with nothing but her life.

In that split second where the door was open, allowing her a visual of the office, Elenya exhaled once, sharp and shallow. Then her hand snapped up, whispering the word like a prayer. Every nerve pulled taut. The invisibility still clung to her skin, but she didn’t trust it—not with this man’s paranoia, not with wards humming faintly in the corners. 

Misty Step.

Her body unravelled in a whorl of invisible mist—silent, swift. She reappeared in a shiver of vapour, not in the corridor but inside the office, behind the massive mahogany desk.

The air here was thick with incense and iron. The desk loomed, scarred from years of blades slammed down in fury. Parchment lay spread across it, ink still wet in harsh strokes.

She pressed back, tighter into shadow, her form folding small as her halfling body allowed. One step wrong, one exhale too loud, and she would be nothing but ash in their wake.

She heard the sound of the door being locked before their boots struck the stone in rhythm. Marching away. Further. Further. The echo thinned.

The office smelled of iron and old vellum. No perfume here, no velvet curtains—just militaristic austerity. Black stone walls, a desk carved from onyx, maps pinned like trophies along the edges. Everything about it was precise, calculated like him.

Maps. Troop ledgers. Correspondence sealed with black wax.

And beneath the low burn of wards, the faint resonance of magic lingered—something heavier, deeper, a trace of necromancy.

She cast detect magic, retrieved the copying quill, and then began.

Surprisingly, no traps; magical or otherwise. 

Pure arrogance. 

The danger of a too united society 

The desk drawers opened with frustrating neatness—everything sorted, everything in its place. Reports bound with black ribbon, sigils stamped in crimson wax. She rifled carefully, memorizing the contents as she went, her mind fixing each page in perfect recall.

First: correspondence. A thick sheaf of letters marked with the crest of House Nectoleith. The wording was clipped, insistent—requests, no, demands—for Erdar Vhol’s intervention. They wanted him to convince someone and use his authority to see their trade deal sealed. Thaleiraha even expressed her support. Was that why they were arguing in the parlour? 

But the attached letters…

She froze. They weren’t from Nectoleith at all. They were from the inner ring. A lich-lord’s own hand,  not any lich. Archlich Yalthera Voruun. She was responsible for artifact and necroarcana retrieval and cultivation. The ink was still faintly cold to the touch. The tone was venomous: skepticism. She distrusted the deal, which was too good to be true. She suspected the Underdark spawns of spinning lies, which were too neat to be real. The phrasing rang in her mind like a curse: The artifact is not worth that much. I do not trust it and thus will not relinquish it, no matter what Nectoleith said, General. I am telling you no one would accept paying this much for the Ossuary Seed. It's nothing more than a Netherese divine bypass prototype. Something to hide someone from divine sight. Thousands of such artifacts are available for purchase on the baterum. Why insist on this one? I don't trust it, General, and the opportunity of pissing off Valcorrin is only the last motivator of my decision. If the deal goes through, they will even send a permanent delegation to the crypt to oversee the new trade. "

If the liches thought Nectoleith was being played… then every move inside the city was more volatile than she’d feared.

She turned another page.

And there he was.

Astarion.

Not his actual name, of course—his forged one. Almirth. A neat column of his movements unfurled in precise ink, beginning the hour he had registered at the Office of Foreign Affairs. Every gate crossed. Every ledger is signed. Every glimpse caught by eyes loyal to the Barracks. His path rendered clinical, bureaucratic, and inexorable.

And there—his “associates.”

Her.

Every mask she had worn. Every false face catalogued and dated, reduced to crude sketches and footnotes. Lies she thought had slipped past unseen were now itemized in military shorthand, stripped of artistry, pinned to parchment like insects on a scholar’s board.

Her throat constricted. He wasn’t simply under observation. He was already a piece on their board, plotted and counter-plotted. They had begun the game before she’d realized it had started.

He was to be summoned tomorrow and will be interrogated under a Zone of Truth spell. 

Fantastic. 

Then her gaze caught on a single line. A small notation, easy to overlook—but it burned through her like acid.

Artifact: Ritual Dagger.

Her pulse slammed once, hard, hollow.

The fucking dagger. The Lolthite relic she had placed in his hands meant to gild the illusion of an Underdark spawn untethered, a weapon to bolster his mask.

Her mentor’s dagger.

And stamped beside the note, like a death warrant: a sigil.

House Z’ress Aleanrahel.

Her vision blurred. Rage. Guilt. Terror.

That house. Not some obscure minor line, but one of the great pillars of Menzoberranzan’s endless warlord and slave supplies. And worse—blood-tied to Baenre itself, the ruling faction.

She felt its weight drop into her stomach like a stone.

She had put it in his hand.

She had armed him with proof of a lineage he did not bear. Given him the markings of a spy. A pawn of the Spider Queen’s city. A justification.

Every suspicion is now sharpened to a blade. Every sideways glance now has a reason. The general did not have to invent his narrative; she had handed it to him.

Her fingers curled tight on the parchment, whitening at the knuckles.

She had drawn the target.
Painted the sigil.
Branded him with a lie too dangerous to erase.

Her fault.

All of it.

Her vision spun, the sigil burning behind her eyes. She had done this. Gods, she had done this—

CALM DOWN.

The voice rolled through her ribs like mist filling a cavern, calm and insistent.

It’s already done. Just a weapon. A trinket. It could have ended in his hand by a thousand paths. They’re overreacting.

Her breath hitched. But the sigil—

Plausible deniability, the Fog pressed back, steady as stone. You know that. Nothing specific, nothing binding. They can suspect, they can circle, but they cannot prove a link with the drow because it doesn't exist. Use this; they are focused on one lie, they won't see the other. Not yet.

Use the truth to hide the lie. He has nothing to do with the Spider City. He did not come here to threaten their institution.

Her nails dug crescents into her palm. I’ve painted him as a spy. I’ve—

You’ve given him a dagger, the Fog cut across, cool and merciless. Let them chase shadows of the Spider while we choose what threads to feed them. They want information about Menzoberranzan? We can sell them those. Enough to keep the wolf sated. Enough to keep him free.

Use the truth to hide the lie.

The burning in her chest slowed, cooled by that logic. The fog curled tighter, not soft, but firm.

Focus, Bodyself. Mission first. Don’t drown in guilt. Don’t forget why we’re here. I’ve got you. Stick to the plan.

She resumed her searching. 

Deeper in the drawer, she found older files. Weathered parchment, brittle from age. Pholzubbalt—The Boneyard. Ritual notes and field reports about Hamezaar’s spawns. Failed attempts to breach the necropolis. Lists of their defences, their bloody reprisals. 

The general went in there in search of a Relic as well and couldn't breach the gate.

And beside them, newer scrolls: elementary dossiers on Menzoberranzan’s great houses. Sparse. Almost embarrassingly so. Sketches of banners, crude notes on allegiances, nothing beyond what any caravan-master could recite. For a city that traded in secrets, Warlock’s Crypt was blind to its supposed enemies.

She exhaled through her teeth, fighting the urge to slam the drawers shut.

The pattern was clear enough now. The summons wasn’t just theatre. It was an extraction. They would use the Parlour as a pretext, leverage her as the flaw in his story, and force Astarion into the cage of legality. On record. Under a truth enchantment, bring him within reach.

To force him to confront the underdark spawn or give information about them. 

She closed the final ledger with hands steadier than she felt. The parchments blurred in her mind, reassembling themselves into the perfect memory her magic blessed her with. No stolen copies. No incriminating traces. Just the awful weight of knowing.

She stepped back into the shadows, the map clutched tight, the cloak swallowing her shape.

Her heart hammered once, twice. 

Then silence.

She drank the antidote to detoxify her body, most of the formula's effects, and followed with a healing potion. Time to leave—before her lies caught her here, too.

Something was going on.  
Time to get to the source. She had avoided the lich long enough. 

Also, time to give the city something to really worry about. The man clearly had too much time on his hands. 
But her mind churned already.

She needed a scapegoat—someone to blame for what would come. 
A distraction big enough to get them off her and Astarion's back, but also a victimless culprit. The Thayans were obvious. Convenient. But too dangerous—a war with them would spiral into devastation. The Shade enclave? Possible. Their fingers were in everything, but it was hard to prove, harder to point the city toward them. The Sharans, too, were eternal enemies of Larloch, but retaliation against them would come swift and merciless.

No easy answer. No safe choice.

Sorry friend. 
I may be your chosen, but I learned too much from Lolth and her Angel. 
You wanted me to learn this lesson. 
The one thing you couldn't teach me. 

Mercy without hunger is apathy. 

No one deserves to suffer. But people are suffering regardless. If this triggers a war that kills millions, I will have to live with that. 

I am not a saint. Just a monster you tamed. 

In all cases, something is brewing, and no one is doing anything about it. We also need cover, information, and protection. 
Yalthera Voruun's tower could provide all three. 

Curiosity is a better leash than fear.

Whatever power I am able to take from the Shadow King is going to reduce suffering on a much larger scale. 
It's worth the risk. 

I am your warlock, not your priest after all. 

---

She handled the information. Now was the time for more information and for a distraction as well. 

We fuse.

The fog does not just cling to our body tonight—it thrums. Denser, heavier, stronger than it has ever been in the prime material. A testament to the weeks of training, to time spent threading it through our veins until it obeyed more. All the effort, all the discipline, distilled into this.

Maybe it will be enough.

The dimension door scroll split the air with a silent tear. With it, we stepped through, out of Vhol’s Manor and into the streets. The pale avenues of the inner ring quickly came into view. This was deeper than we ever went. The air was sharper, metallic and putrid with enchantments, thick with necrotic weight.

Once again: Greater Invisibility. True Seeing. The cloak of gloaming silence. And the fog—her fog—enfolding them all.

I ceased to exist. Not shadow. Not even absence. Something less. A ghost without a tether.

The liches never turned their heads as I passed. Apprentices scribbling in bone-dust ink didn’t pause, didn’t shiver. Ward-runes blinked dull as I slid past, unregistered. It was almost trivial, obscene in its ease.

No one saw me.
Because I was no one.

Lolth’s Angel had whispered his last lesson oncnaïveng ago, when the girl we used to be had still been naive enough to hope for death: The bigger the lie, the more they will believe it.

I carried that venom like a blessing now.

The tower’s libraries loomed in stacks of bone-white vellum and black stone, shelves sagging under centuries of theft. I did not copy. Copies were timid. Safe.
I needed a statement.

I took. 
I took it all.

My fingers skimmed across wards like knives through butter. Parchments slid from shelves. Sigils hissed as I unravelled them. I plundered, pried, rifled, until even the hidden vaults yawned before me. Offices that had never known intrusion lay bare beneath my lack of real existence.

Schematics. Diagrams. Ritual fragments scribbled in ink colder than blood.

And there—it clicked.

Well.
That changed everything.

It didn’t matter if this heist sparked a war. Let the Crypt howl, let the Barracks mobilize, let the liches burn their own tower to the ground—none of it compared to what I read.

If those two conspiracies were allowed to unfold unchallenged, two-thirds of the continent would be lost. Dead. Within thirty years.
That was the scale of it. The audacity. The gall. And the worst part—no one else seemed to have seen it.

I pressed a shaking hand to my mouth, steadying myself as the pieces fell into place.

Szass Tam was even more dangerous than anyone expected. Larloch as well. 

I knew now that the Shadowking's reputed madness must have been a front. 

This was not the work of a madman.
This was the opposite.

Pure evil, calculated and meticulous brilliance. 

This level of long-term planning was sincerely unfathomable for a mortal mind. His plan was so evolved and complex, the pieces so numerous and small that even to her now the true end goal remained somewhat obscured, as much of his activities appeared to be veiled in layers of misdirection. But threads gleamed clear: The oldest lich known in Fearun had his hands and ongoing plots in most of the continent. He seems particularly invested in the plottings at Candlekeep and Thay. An started a series of truly elaborate maneuvers around Myth Drannor since its reestablishment. And Myth Drannor was not just a prize—it was a keystone. He had decreed to have already sown the seed there, left behind during the liches’ last assault. A seed that could grow into something catastrophic. 

He ordered multiple agents and factions he controlled to maintain the number of Baelnorns under a specific threshold. 

And no one noticed.
No one listened.

If this doesn't secure Candelkeep protection for Astarion at the very least. 

Nothing else will. 

She also found a small tidbit that intrigued her. Larloch was obsessed with an obscure prophecy from the beginning of the age of humanity. 

When the trials begin,
in soul-torn solitude, despairing,
The hunter waits alone.
The companions emerge
from fast-bound ties of fate
uniting against a common foe.

When the shadows descend,
in Hell-sworn covenant unswerving
The blighted brothers hunt,
and the godborn appears,
In rose-blessed abbey reared,
arising to lose the godly spark.

The third stanza was severely redacted. 

When the tempest is born,
as storm-tossed waters rise uncaring,
The promised hope still shines.
And the reaver beholds
the dawn-born chosen's gaze,
transforming the darkness into light.

When the battle is lost,
through quake-tossed battlefields, unwitting
The seasoned legions march,
But the sentinel flees
with once-proud royalty,
protecting devotion’s fragile heart.

Many more redacted sections

When the ending draws near,
with ice-locked stars unmoving,
The threefold threats await,
and the herald proclaims,
in war-wrecked misery,
announcing the dying of an age.

A lich came into the office, but they didn't see me; I am no one. 

A chuckle escaped me. 

No reaction. 

I am nothing.

I kept stealing and plundering. 

Things unrelated to me or any of my interests. I emptied all I could and drank an Elixir of Cloud Giant Strength to maximize her ability to carry it all. 

There is no way this goes unnoticed. 

Good.

---

I left the slaver’s shadow-spellbook on a desk open like it was used for casting before someone was forced to flee through a window. The thing pulsed faintly, its sigils crawling like worms in candlelight, whispering promises it was never meant to keep. A perfect little lie dressed in shadow.

They’ll find it soon enough. They’ll circle like carrion birds and argue over the scent. Was it a faction of Menzoberranzan? A shard from the Shade Enclave? If they’re clever enough, maybe they’ll mutter about the Bhaalite resurgence in Baldur’s Gate. Doesn’t matter. The smoke will blind them, the suspicion will drive them onto other matters, and by the time their claws are in each other’s throats, Astarion and I would be long gone.

Let the monsters devour themselves.

That’s the point.

And then it hit me—sharp and quiet as a knife across the ribs. Not rage. Not judgment. Sadness. His sadness. Ilmater, watching from whatever broken vantage He keeps, pressing sorrow into my marrow as if to whisper: Not this way.

My throat closed. A laugh clawed its way out anyway, jagged and brittle.

“Well, fuck you too,” I muttered, fingers sliding back from the book.

How can He bear an army of Triadic paladins striding across the land, stamping mercy into banners, branding compassion into conquest—and yet scorn me for this? Mercy without hunger is apathy. And apathy kills more surely than war. Martyrdom without results is just suicide. He knows that. He has to.

He can mourn me later. I’ll carry the sin.
What’s one more?

For now, I had rescues waiting. Refugees, He Himself would weep for, his temples didn’t even know they existed. That mattered more than His grief.
The alarm rune I left in the tunnels thrummed all through the evening. Eight trespassers. Eight souls huddled in the marked cavern crossroads.

I went to them. Still veiled by cloak and fog, still absence made flesh.

They were sprawled across the stone, crying, raw with exhaustion. But alive. And running had carried them farther than fear alone ever could. Most had already put the hoods over their heads, the burlap sacks I left behind to blind their memories of the path. Two hadn’t. Two clutched theirs in white-knuckled fists, eyes darting, refusing. I told them it was their choice. Always their choice. But I would not show the escape route to eyes that might be pried open later under torture. Put the bag on, or risk the escape from the crypt alone.

They shook. They fought the shame of it. Then, at last, they lowered the hoods.

We moved. Quiet. Swift.

I led them to the vault, the sigil carved deep, waiting. We vanished into light. Amn. Then Neverwinter. And finally—Keltar. To the House of the Broken God.
The monastery loomed like a wound stitched in marble. The greatest hospital in Faerûn—leper house, sanitarium, temple farm. A place where mercy still grew roots, even when the soil was ash.

I walked them through its gates wearing His symbol. The cries came, the thanks, the tears. The usual chorus. Another night’s mercies delivered into hands gentler than mine.

Some meaning salvaged—a thread of light in all this dark.

I survived the night.

Now… back.

Back to the Crypt.
Back to him.
Back to my shame.
Back to my guilt.

Six hours and thirty-three minutes.

That’s how long it had been since she slipped into the tunnels, left the house behind, and abandoned him to silence and trust. The number tolled in her mind with every step, carved into her bones like a clock no spell could stop.

She climbed the last stretch of stone stairs, her legs heavy, her lungs tight with the residue of wards and fog. The stale air of the tunnels thinned, giving way to the faint, metallic tang of the Crypt above.

And there he was.

Astarion.

Waiting at the entrance.

He stood with his back to the threshold, pale against the gloom, arms crossed in a mockery of ease. But the tension betrayed him—the stillness too sharp, the line of his shoulders rigid as if carved. His eyes caught hers when she emerged, red and burning, unreadable and unblinking.

For a heartbeat, neither of them spoke.

Her throat clenched. Her hands itched to reach for him, to explain, to soften the weight between them—but the words curdled before they reached her lips.

Six hours and thirty-three minutes.

He had been counting too.

---

After all this, I thought the day was almost over. Surely nothing more could happen after the tunnels, after Vhol's mansion, the lich tower, after all the risks, masks and lies. After he asked.

He asked.

And then he knew. He knew about the rescues. 
One less lie between us—yet one more truth I wasn’t ready to give.

He was angry. He had every right to be.
He demanded to know.
And I—gods, I wanted to tell. 

I wished I could have told him everything.
But I couldn’t.
I didn't. 

I held my tongue.

And kept hurting him.

A Zone of Truth was dangerous enough when you carried nothing. When you were clean. But when you carried too much? When every word was weighted with secrets and culpabilities? Then it became a death trap.

I can handle it. I’ve had years of practice lying with the truth, slipping between the teeth of compulsion, weaving survival out of half-silences.
But him? He doesn’t. 

That's not his mask.

It’s better this way. Better that he knows nothing of what I did. Not yet. Not until after the summon.

So instead, I told him about the summon.
I explained why he couldn’t know the rest. Why the silence was for his sake, not mine. And I watched the hurt settle over his face like a shroud.

I watched him argue, press and finally collapse on himself.

Shame was an old companion, but rarely have I known its embrace so fully since I became free.
especially when he thought I offered blood to manipulate him. 

I don't think I did, but I am not sure. Maybe subconsiously, I did. 

Who's to say.

That's why I did nothing when he slammed me against the wall, nor when me slid his thigh between my legs, nor when he held my wrists above my head. I didn't even react when he just bared his fangs and bit my neck, nor when he drank deep.

I had just offered my throat, but two sentences ago.

It wasn’t cruelty. Not deliberate.

He didn't want to hurt me.
He didn’t mean it to cut the way it did.
He didn’t know the memory it brought—what I relived when teeth sank and the old ghosts rose.

I kept repeating this over and over in my mind to stop myself from panicking.

He didn’t know.
And I deserved it.

I deserved worse.

I braced myself for hatred. For the revulsion I knew I’d earned. For him to recoil, to shut me out, to curse me for every omission, and lie I wrapped around him in silence.

He should have hated me.
He should have despised me after this morning.

But he didn’t.

Even after the summon.
Even after the blood.
He was… almost normal.

And that terrified me more than his rage ever could.

Because he should hate me.

And if he doesn’t—then one day, he will.

When it would hurt the most

---

The room was quiet in that way early afternoon hours are quiet—thin and fragile, as if a single wrong breath could shatter it. I expected cold distance, a cutting remark, anything to confirm the math of guilt I’d been doing in my head.

Instead, he coaxed me closer. Not with command—Gods, that would have been easier—but with something gentler, practiced, familiar. I let myself be moved like a piece on a board, because motion is simpler than confession.

I perched on his lap because he asked. Practical, he said—no trance, no lost hours. My body obeyed before my mind caught up. The fit of us felt… inevitable—the wrong kind of inevitable.

I kept waiting for the barb, the theatre, the flirtation that’s a shield. It came—light touches, perfectly placed words, the sort of attention I’ve learned to file under performance. I told myself that’s all it was. A role. A trick we both know.

Except my skin answered him. Heat climbed my throat, my heart knocked against his palm like a traitor. I blamed the feeding. I blamed exhaustion. I blamed anything but the obvious.

He kissed the wounds closed as if reverence were a language he spoke without thinking. Slow, careful, indulgent. It made something in me brace. I couldn’t name it. Didn’t want to.

“Are you uncomfortable?” Soft. Unavoidable.

No. Not uncomfortable. Unmoored. I heard myself call it “strange,” because strange is safe, and I am a coward with myself when I have to be.

He didn’t press. He just stayed there—too near, too steady—until the room narrowed to the line of his mouth and the place where his hand held the back of my neck. And then he looked at me.

Not the way he looks when he’s hunting. Not the lacquered shine of seduction. His gaze landed like a weight, and I steadied under it, traitor that I am.

That’s when the unease snapped into focus: desire. Not mine. His.

I didn’t understand it until he named it—until he reminded me of the cabin and the certainty I’d claimed then, the lack of lust I thought I saw in his eyes. “Check again,” he said, and I did, and there it was. Obvious as daylight, unbearable as it is.

Gods.

I had not read it before and had not thought it possible. I am trained for pain, duty, and the ritual of being needed. I am not trained for being wanted.

The shape of the night changed all at once. Every careful kiss over my pulse felt like a vow I hadn’t agreed to. Every breath at my throat carved a question I couldn’t answer. He told me I didn’t have to feel it back—mercy disguised as restraint—and that mercy landed like a blade, because it meant the rest was true.

My thoughts scattered—shame, relief, terror, hunger—each flaring and extinguishing too quickly to hold. I kept reaching for the old categories: manipulation, survival, habit. Each slipped in my hands. This wasn’t the mask. This wasn’t the boy who cried wolf.

This was the wolf, not hungry for blood.

He touched my forehead with his mouth, slow and deliberate, and I felt something loosen I didn’t know I’d clenched. Then the promise—danger wrapped in velvet: if I ever wanted, he would take me apart with both hands and put me back together wrong and right at once.

I didn’t move. I should have. I didn’t.

And in the long, thin silence that followed, I realized the worst: I had prepared myself to be hated. I had armour for that. I had no armour for this.

Desire is a battlefield I don’t know how to cross without losing.

I am sorry, Bodyself, but you are on your own on this one.

The Fogself left again.

What was happening?

What the hell was going on?

How the fuck did this escalate to him wanting to fuck her?!

She knew. Gods, she knew. And still she had lied—if not to him, then to herself. Pretended not to see. Pretended this was manageable. That it might stabilize him.

But it hadn’t.

It had escalated. Too far. Too fast.

He was establishing a tether—a codependence—and she had let it coil tight around them both. She should have seen it coming. She should have stopped it before it reached this point.

What to do, how to react?

Astarion: a man carved hollow by centuries of captivity, torture, and slavery. His entire life stripped of agency until survival meant weaponizing whatever he had left: charm, beauty, submission when needed, defiance when he dared. She could see it now as clearly as she saw the candlelight flicker across the walls—the traits of prolonged trauma etched into his every breath.

Hypervigilance: constantly scanning, constantly testing.
Emotional dysregulation: swinging from seduction to despair without warning.
Manipulation: a reflex more than a choice, polished through necessity.

She could list the criteria in her mind as though diagnosing a patient—Complex PTSD from prolonged abuse, captivity, loss of self-agency. Dissociative symptoms, too. The way he detached from his body, the rehearsed mask of seduction he slid on like armour. The way he seemed half-aware of himself even in his moments of rawest truth, like a man watching himself drown. Avoidant and narcissistic traits—she’d seen them all. The fragile self-esteem masked by theatrical arrogance. The constant testing, the prodding at her boundaries to see if she’d stay. Dysthymia: that persistent hollow ache beneath everything. A current of despair too constant to ever be dramatic, but always there. The longing for death laced into his voice when he thought she wouldn’t notice.

And gods, he was brilliant at hiding it. Brilliant at turning his illness into performance. Into survival.

But what terrified her most wasn’t his brokenness. It was how he had chosen her to be his anchor.

Already conditioned to survive by dependency, he was shaping himself around her. Letting her become the axis he spun on. He had traded one master for another—Cazador’s hand replaced by hers. He might not realize it, but the dynamic was there: if she told him to kneel, he would. If she told him to stay, he would. Not because he wanted to be owned, but because he didn’t know how else to exist.

And that—gods, that—was dangerous.

Because she wasn’t his master, she was supposed to be his healer. And healers do not become anchors for their patients.

Disgust rose in her throat like bile.

Her fault. All of it.

She had reinforced the wrong things. Rewarded vulnerability without giving him the tools to regulate it. Offered him comfort, physical presence, touch—enough to soothe him in the moment, but never enough to teach him how to carry that safety himself. She had blurred the lines, letting the intimacy of care slip into something that soothed her.

Positive reinforcement. That’s what she told herself. He needed it. He deserved it.

And it worked—oh, it worked. Nonsexual touches. Holding him when he broke. Stroking his hair. Letting him feel safe pressed against her. Each time, the storm calmed. Each time, he melted into her like a child who’d finally found shelter.

But what she had not done—what she should have done—was establish the boundaries. Teach him the frame of reference he lacked. Give him a safe structure, a way to process the closeness without binding himself to it.

Now, it was too late.

He was sinking into her, and she was sinking with him.

Her asceticism—her refusal to indulge, her rigid restraint—was supposed to keep her safe from this. But instead, it had only made him cling tighter, desperate to draw warmth from someone who refused to feel it herself.

And the cycle was tightening.

If she faltered, he would shatter. She knew it. She could see its shape already: catastrophic abandonment, self-destruction, ruin.

This wasn’t healing.

It was a reenactment.

And she had walked them straight into it with her eyes open.

She needed to tread carefully. Every instinct in her screamed restraint, yet restraint alone wasn’t enough anymore.

He had shown her lust. Not the mask he wielded like a blade, not the mechanical seduction forced into him by centuries of survival—but genuine desire, bleeding through the cracks. She hadn’t expected it. Not from him. Not like this.

And that was the danger.

Sex was complicated for him. Too complicated. He never spoke of it outright, but he didn’t need to. Sixteen decades as someone else’s plaything, someone else’s tool—stripped of autonomy, trained to seduce, to yield, to be whatever his master demanded. His body wasn’t his own. His desire wasn’t his own. His pleasure, his pain—commodities, weapons, punishments. And yet here he was, still capable of wanting. Still capable of intimacy.

Gods, it staggered her.

The sheer audacity of it. That after so much was stolen from him, there was still something left that could hunger for closeness—not out of compulsion, not because he was ordered to—but because he chose to. It was healing, in its way. A miracle, even.

But miracles always carried a cost.

She knew. She had broken in less than five years of it. Five years of chains, of hands that weren’t hers, of choices wrenched away. It hollowed her out, left her soul in fragments scattered until most of it slipped out of the Prime Material entirely through alien magic. And him? Sixteen decades. She could not fathom what it took to survive that. Not that there is value in comparing trauma. Pain is pain, but she still found herself truly shocked by his hunger for closeness and vulnerability after being burned for so long. She wasn’t sure if she admired him or feared him. Maybe both. His resilience, his endurance—those words felt too small. Because this wasn’t the kind of endurance she knew. Hers was silence, restraint, surviving by vanishing. He was clawing through sixteen decades of violation and still reaching, still feeling, daring to trust.

And gods—he had trusted her. He’d admitted it openly, barely three fortnights after they met. Trusted her, when the last person he had given that trust to had bought him more than a century and a half of torment.

It terrified her.

Because what had just happened—what had burned between them—wasn’t just lust. It was him weaving his need, his hunger, his desperate clinging to the idea of safety, into her. Stitching her into the fabric of his survival.

Not consciously, perhaps. But it was there. She could see it. Feel it.

If she encouraged it blindly and mistook it for simple intimacy, she would only feed the trap. Bind him tighter to her, sink him further into dependence, until neither of them could breathe. But she couldn’t infantilize him like he was a naïve fool, either. Not anymore. He wasn’t fragile. He wasn’t naïve. And she wasn't protecting him every time she kept things from him under the guise of mercy. She was replaying the same cruelty he’d always known: the denial of his autonomy.

He deserved the truth.

Her pulse quickened as she thought it, as she looked at him—sharp eyes, restless charm, scars hidden behind poise. He was unravelling and rebuilding himself in front of her, and gods help them both. She’d let herself believe that her silence was healing. That her comfort was enough.

It wasn’t.

The truth would wound him. Maybe break him. But lies—or silence—would chain him.

She couldn’t let herself be his next Cazador.

She couldn’t.

She couldn’t just reject him. Rejection alone was another kind of cruelty. Too much, too abrupt, and it would feel like abandonment. And he had survived too much abandonment already.

But neither could she let silence stand. He had to see the shape of it—the patterns. The way he was tying his survival, sense of self, and capacity for desire to her. Not because he wanted to manipulate her, but because he had been trained for so long that this was the only way to live.

He needed to face it.

And she had to be brave enough to show him if she truly meant to heal him, if she truly meant to be what she claimed. Even if it risked his wrath. Even if it risked losing him.

Because without that, they would both spiral into something they couldn’t crawl out of.

Her breath caught as she looked at him—radiant still, flushed from blood and intimacy, eyes dark, glittering with want. With need. With the hunger of someone who’d just dared to tie his trust, his craving, his survival to her.

And she was lying to him.

Would he want her if he knew the whole of it? If he saw the hollow cavern inside her, the jagged edges of what she’d lost? He thought her safe. Thought her good. She was neither. She was fractured, dangerous in ways he couldn’t fathom. She had endangered him—tonight more than ever.

Finally, this day ended.

---

The chamber was not what they had expected.

House Vhol did not host in velvet parlours or gilded halls. No. They led them down into a stone-bellied chamber where the walls sweated faintly with moisture, etched with wards that hummed just below hearing. Cold light bled from sconces carved into the shape of staring skulls. There were no thrones, no feasting tables. Only a circle. Empty stone, ringed by iron runes that pulsed like heartbeats beneath the floor.

The circle was not for their comfort. It was for their confinement.

Elenya had prepared for this. She had spent seventy-two hours drilling Astarion with the disciplines he needed: interrogation and counter-interrogation, how to lie by telling the truth, how to deflect without blinking, how to redirect with charm and scorn in equal measure. He was a natural, but a flawed one. Too many tells. His mask—the rake, riddled with hunger and innuendo—was polished to brilliance, but it was only one mask. Tonight, he needed another: the heir. The entitled spawn of a warlord, every inch his father’s creation. A man who knew his pedigree was enough to let him sneer at anyone who questioned him.

She had coached him, and he had listened, but she knew. Gods, she knew. The real danger was not his performance. It was hers.

Because Astarion was walking in blind.

Not to the interrogation—he knew this was theatre, a masquerade designed to put him on the back foot and press him into collaboration. He was not against the game; he even enjoyed it. He wanted to play, bargain, and walk out with something worth his trouble. And she could give them just enough to sate them—intel about Menzoberranzan’s vampire enclaves, whispered politics from the Underdark. That much was easy; no one on the surface knew their intrigues like she did.

No, the real danger was the fog.

Her fog.

Because she had not told him what she was doing.

For three nights, she had endured his gaze. The weight of it—possessive, searching, hungry in ways that went far beyond blood. His touches had lingered. His stares burned. He had begun to treat her not as a weapon, not as a healer, but as an anchor. And she—damn her—had let it go unaddressed and had even leaned into it. Because tonight, she promised herself, she would tell him everything.

The rescue.
Vhol’s deal.
The lich’s plans.
What she had stolen.
What she had risked.
What she was still hiding.

He deserved the truth.

But not yet.

Because as long as he didn’t know, he could speak truthfully. He could look a vampire lord in the eye, feel the pull of the Zone of Truth flare against his skin, and answer with sincerity:
That he held no secrets of the city.
That he had not prowled the shadows.
That she was at his service.

His ignorance was his shield. Her lie was his protection.

And she would make sure the spell bound her before it bound him. She had already begun peeling back the fog—the protective shroud she wore against divination, the silence that made her a ghost to every seer’s eye. Layer by layer, she loosened it and left deliberate seams so that it would pierce her when they cast their Zone of Truth. Not him. She would be the one the circle compelled, not the man at her side.

It was a calculated cruelty. He would not know until later. Perhaps not ever, unless she chose to tell him.

But if she failed and let him walk into this chamber with full knowledge of the web they were caught in, then every truth pulled from his mouth could be his undoing. He could not use and exploit the zone of truth she knew they would use, not yet. And she could not risk Vhol prying into what he didn’t need to know.

So she stepped into the chamber with her own shackles carefully prepared.

And let Astarion play his role—entitled, sharp, beautiful in his arrogance—while she, beneath the fog, carried the weight of the lie that might save them.

But the chamber was not what they had expected.

For two nights, she had drilled him, shaping his instincts, his tells, his masks. Interrogation, counter-interrogation, the old drow tricks of speaking a truth bent sideways until it became a lie. He was a natural—he hardly needed her instruction—but his natural performance was too narrow. He had one mask, one perfected role: the rake, smirking and carnal, dripping charm as naturally as venom. It would not serve here. Not with generals, strategists, and a Zone of Truth waiting like a net. He needed to master another face—the arrogant heir, the entitled spawn whose blood carried too much pride ever to kneel.

She had been preparing him while keeping her own silence. His stares, his touches, the hunger in his eyes—she let them go unaddressed. Tonight, she had promised herself, she would tell him everything: Vhol’s maneuvering, the lich’s scheme, what she had stolen, what she had risked. But not yet. Not before this trial. His ignorance was a shield. If he did not know, he could not betray. If he did not know, his denials would ring with truth. 

The chamber itself stripped away any illusion of courtesy. No velvet benches, no bureaucrats arrayed in false civility. Just a long dark hall of pale marble, runes seared into the stone that pulsed faintly with power. At the far end, three figures sat in a crescent of black stone. The General at the center—Erdar Vhol, the famed strategist, eyes like fractured glass. To his right, Calish, silver-haired, her braid bound in the style of soldiers who had no time for beauty. To his left, the caster: ageless, impossibly still, his robes etched with glyphs that shimmered faintly with abjurations.

The silence was absolute as they entered—hollow, ritual, hungry.

Astarion stepped forward first, arrogance honed into posture. He bowed—not deeply, just enough flourish to mock the gesture.

“My lords,” he purred, “you look absolutely resplendent. I feel most honoured to have my humble immigration reviewed by the General himself. I do so love feeling special.”

The General’s laugh cracked the stillness like a whip.
“I promised you a more appropriate date, didn’t I, boy?”

“That you did, my lord.” Astarion’s smile sharpened. “Though I had hoped for something more intimate this time. But beggars, as they say, can’t be choosers. You certainly have my attention. So pray, what is this review about?”

The air thickened—pressure like cold breath on glass, the mind’s surface frosting over.

Zone of Truth.

Steady, I told myself, peeling the fog back just enough to let the spell’s teeth set in where I chose. Then I failed it—deliberately—letting its compulsion hook into seams I’d prepared. If I needed to, I could shatter it. But for now, better to let one of us appear compliant. Better still to look like I hadn’t even attempted to resist.

They already assumed me the lesser tongue. Less adept at twisting truth than a noble vampire spawn.

If only they knew.

I was very good at it. Val’zaroth had taught me—though not by design. He’d used his charm tricks on me one too many times, forcing truth out only to use it against me again and again. That taught me: compliance is camouflage. Give them what you don’t care about so they never see the truth you guard.

My mentor refined the lesson. Being raised among spiders had its advantages.

Still—the Vhols’ angle was strange. If they didn’t believe the pretext, why risk the Zone at all? Why bring their only leverage under magical scrutiny? They shouldn’t want this if they thought I was merely cattle. Unless they were betting Astarion was hiding something, and using me to pry it loose.

They wouldn’t succeed. I’d made sure of it.

A telepathic bond wrapped us both, wrenched from Vaelrith’s stolen spellbook. A potent ritual, stronger than most dared weave. Through it I could steady him, feed him countercharms directly into his mind. He’d also drunk a potion of mind shielding. If he faltered, I could slip answers into his thoughts.

Our minds brushed, the bond taut between us. His presence hummed—restless, blade-slick.
Don’t overplay, he murmured.
I won’t. Hold the mask.

On the outside, I was nothing but the pet mage again. Eyes down, shoulders lowered, hands folded meekly. The crimson collar gleamed at my throat. I even mimicked the little tics of submission—the pauses, the half-breath before response. Every detail calculated. Every lie rehearsed.

The General’s voice uncoiled, heavy with false amusement.
“It would be easier if you did not resist, boy. Just simple questions. Like your mage here.”

Astarion laughed—silk dragged over steel. “Ah, and who do you think ordered her to fail? Whatever secrets she holds are mine to command, not yours to pry. My mind, however, would require more than a single date to unravel, I’m afraid. If my answers do not satisfy, then by all means, ask her. And if that still isn’t enough, send me away packing. Truly, this vacation grows more tedious by the day.”

The caster’s composure cracked. “How dare you—”

“Oh, apologies, my lord, I meant no offence. I simply thought honesty was the point,” Astarion cut in, smiling like a knife.

“Enough.” Vhol raised a hand, and the chamber obeyed. “Let us proceed.”

The first question struck like an arrow.

“Your activities at the Parlour have drawn attention,” he said. “Particularly regarding your mage.” A gloved finger, casual as a signature, pointed my way. “She is listed as cattle. For personal consumption. Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Astarion replied, smooth as glass.

“Forgive us if we find that suspicious. Your mage is a powerful caster. Far beyond the level of a simple bloodbag kept by a mere spawn,” Calish added, her gaze dissecting him, waiting for the flicker of a lie.

“Oh?” Astarion arched a brow. “My apologies, then. I was not informed there was a ceiling to cattle power.” Not a lie, though it implied one. He really was a natural—never naming me property, but never denying it either. “The only stipulation given was that she remain mine, collared and under my supervision. Is there another statute, my lord? Another registration category, perhaps?”

Calish’s voice snapped like a blade. “Do not play coy. She is powerful and not even enthralled.”

Astarion’s smile thinned, bright and cold. “Oh, she is enthralled, all right.”
His thought brushed mine, smug. Aren’t you, darling?
Idiot, I hissed back. Focus.
“Just not with spells or compulsion. But again, I was not told there were rules about the… method of enthrallment.”

“You expect us to believe that you, a spawn, are master to a mage of this calibre?”

His tone dropped, suddenly ice. “Are you questioning my claim over what is mine? Let me be clear: she is bound to me. She serves my purpose. She is mine.”

That sounded too true, even for me.

Calish’s gaze narrowed. “She is not what she seems. You know the rules. Transparency is required. You cannot smuggle in an associate under the guise of cattle.”

Through the bond, his thought brushed mine, precise as a blade.
They’re pressing the associate angle. Punishable by death.
I know. Don’t concede. Make them test me, I answered.

He pivoted smoothly. “Then ask her. She has failed your enchantment. If she is an associate—” he let the word drip with disgust “—she’ll betray herself.”

All eyes turned. The runes climbed the stone like veins of fire.

“You,” said the General, voice weighty with expectation. “Who are you?”

Too easy. Too easy.

I tilted my head toward Astarion and waited.

A breath. The smallest nod. Speak.

I let my lips curve, mask cracking into a truth that always sounds like madness.
“I am no one,” I said. “A tool born with no name, no face, no soul. All I am now is purpose.”

“Who is this spawn?” Calish asked, suspicion honed fine.

They weren’t only testing my pedigree—they were probing his. I remembered her questions two nights prior, circling who he might have been before he was turned.

Specificity—that was the trick of truth-forcing. And specificity falters when you know nothing.

So I chose my seam carefully. I lifted my eyes, soft and unwavering.
“He is this body’s purpose,” I said, iron cloaked in silk. “Its mission. Its meaning. The reason it isn’t empty. The reason I am in this realm at all.” (I had left the Fogrealm for him, after all.) “His pain is mine to hunt. His goal is mine to realize. I feed him. I protect him. I die for him. I keep the threats away.”

A silence stretched.

Astarion’s voice rang in my mind: Darling? What the hell was that?
Truths voiced vaguely enough to mean anything, I answered.

The circle pulsed. Someone swallowed. The lesser minds in the room heard “enslavement” in my words; Vhol heard what it was—devotion.

“What do you want?” Vhol asked.

This is really too easy.

“Nothing. This body does not want.”

His brow furrowed; his gaze slid to Calish.

Darling, what the fuck? Astarion’s thought sharpened.

“Where were you last night after the Parlour?” Calish asked.

Trickier.
We could be plural here; their timeframe was generous enough to bend.

“After the Parlour, we went to Lord Enmas’ residence to rest.”

“Did you remain there all night?”

Think. Breathe. Think.
“He remained in his chamber all night until the summons arrived. I was serving and protecting him, as always.”
—just not with him.

Calish clicked her tongue, frustration barely masked.

“Are you here at the behest of Menzoberranzan or the drow vampires?” Vhol asked.

“No.”

“So neither of you has a link with Menzoberranzan.”

“None active, recent, or positive. No,” I added.

“Do you know why he is in the city?” Vhol again.

“Yes.”

“What is it? Speak,” Calish snapped.

I let hesitation tremble at the edges. “The same reason most visitors come: to seek specific necrotic knowledge—research and opportunities. He bears no ill will toward the city and no particular interest in it.”

Calish leaned toward the caster. “Are you sure she is enchanted?”

He didn’t blink. “Positive.”

“Where are you from? What is your pedigree?” she asked, too quickly.

“This body does not—”

“Enough. Not another word from you,” Astarion said—voice frostbitten. I bowed my head and closed my mouth.

He stepped into the silence and turned the blade. “Perhaps you can explain why you’re so interested in her pedigree. Surely there can be no doubt she is mine. So why has an immigration review become an interrogation about the Boneyard Breeding Rites? I expect that from the flesh-mongers of the Vein Market, not the Pale Barracks. If you’ll allow me to be bold—this is disappointing. I’ve heard enough. Is my stay resolved or not? If so, I’ll take my leave. If not, I rescind my request to remain within your walls. Permit me to return to the Enclave to gather my belongings, and I’ll be gone by dusk.”

“You think you have a choice, spawn?” Calish hissed.

“As a matter of fact, I do.” His tone turned elegant contempt. “I’ve disregarded enough foul play, don’t you think, my lady? I neither need nor care to be here. I came to explore and to bring something of value back—to show. I entered Lich territory after the Crypt attempted contact, so your city might build a bridge. But the Trading Four are entangled in dealings we won’t be linked to, and—outside the Thayan—the rest have shown you don’t take us seriously. I’ve stretched every last thread of patience while you pile slight upon slight, and now you summon me on false charges to question my blood-claim over what is mine—after she and I disproved your favorite fiction—and to sniff at the truth of her blend.” He lifted his chin. “Honour compels me, my lords, to draw the line. So: am I free to go, exiled, or a prisoner? Choose. Now.”

The chamber rippled with unease. The truth’s edge pressed everywhere at once—perfectly played, damning, ours.

No answer came. The hall breathed.

Runes in the marble pulsed once, twice—a cold heartbeat. Silence thickened until breathing felt like sacrilege.

Then Erdar Vhol leaned forward.

The air shifted to make room for him. His smile was deliberate, patient—like a hunter admiring the snare a moment before it cinches.

“Free,” he murmured. “Exiled. Prisoner. Such grand choices you offer, boy—as though this court must justify itself to you.”

His fingers tapped once on the armrest—an executioner’s drum. “You speak well. Too well for a man on sabbatical. Tell me—” his gaze sharpened, splintered glass grinding—“is it practice, or pedigree, that hones your tongue so?”

Astarion tilted his head, lazy smirk intact. “Oh, I wouldn’t want to ruin the mystery. Some men prefer their puzzles unsolved.”

A low ripple of displeasure moved through the room.

Vhol’s voice cooled. “Clever little pup. Clever enough to mock the Barracks. Clever enough to twist our laws with wordplay.”

His hand flicked. The caster breathed syllables like hooks. The command rode the circle like lightning.

Answer.

The runes blazed white-hot, light crawling into bone. The Zone pushed harder, greedy fingers at the back of the throat.

Careful, I told myself. Let it think it’s winning.

“You,” Vhol said, turning that fractured gaze on me. “You claim to be nothing. A tool. Empty, save for him. That you desire nothing. That you will do nothing. Do you affirm this still?”

The runes surged brighter. Pressure closed like a hand.

Not truth—power. He wasn’t testing honesty; he was forcing me to break my master’s command. Make me answer his question instead of ours. Sever one leash, forge another.

Compulsion scraped my tongue raw. Words clawed for escape—

—and I cut the spell clean inside the fog. A wire severed.

Silence.

I bowed lower. Perfect stillness. Obedience—but not to them.

The quiet went razor-thin.

The caster snarled another incantation; the runes burrowed hotter, hunting for root. I did not move. Did not yield.

At last, Vhol leaned back, interest kindling. A slow smile curved his mouth. “Well,” he said softly, “isn’t that fascinating?”

Astarion struck.

“Sit,” he said, voice curling through the hall like smoke.

I dropped to my knees at once. Perfect. Silent.

His palm settled on my head—possessive, casual, theatrical, and true. “She is mine. She speaks when I allow it. She does not when I forbid it. Not even your enchantments can change that.” Velvet turned to blades. “And now—I will be taking my leave.”

The caster half-rose, hissing. “You would dare—”

“I would,” Astarion said, eyes flashing crimson in the rune-light. “And I will. I have but one master.” His smile showed teeth—pure threat. “And he is not in this room.”

The silence that followed clung like frost.

Along the bond, his anxiety roared, contained but savage. Hold. Don’t lunge. Not yet.
I’m here, I sent back. I have you.

Vhol laughed.

Not the whip-crack from before—softer, indulgent, like a man letting a child finish a tantrum. The marble seemed to groan beneath it.

“Very well,” he said, rising. His voice carried easily, absolute. “Enough posturing for one evening.”

He lifted a hand, dismissive. “All of you leave. I want to speak with him alone.”

The chamber balked. Even the caster stiffened, reluctant. One look from the General cut protests to ribbons. Chairs scraped. Boots rang on marble. The runes dimmed to a slow, sleeping pulse as the hall emptied—until only three remained:

Vhol.
Astarion.
And me, still kneeling at his feet—every muscle quiet, every spell coiled, the bond between us thrumming like a drawn bow.

The General descended from his seat, each step deliberate, the click of his boots echoing like a countdown. He stopped before them, tall as a pillar of obsidian, eyes fractured and gleaming.

Astarion stood smoothly, his smirk still etched sharply across his face. But Elenya could feel it through the bond—the tightening coil of his nerves, the itch of his hunger to strike or flee.

Vhol studied him for a long moment. Then, his tone shifted. Polite. Even warm.
“You have spirit. I admire that. The others see insolence. I see potential.”

He circled slowly, like a hawk measuring wingspan. “But spirit without guidance… without discipline…” His fingers brushed the back of Astarion’s shoulder, light as dust. “…that burns out quickly. A pity, for one of your bloodline.”

Astarion didn’t flinch. “You’ll forgive me if I’m not interested in a leash.”

Vhol chuckled. “No, boy. Not a leash. A place. A purpose. Even the fiercest wolf needs a pack.”

He moved back into Astarion’s view, his eyes narrowing. “So I will ask you, and you will answer me honestly. Not because of enchantments or threat—because it will determine your worth to me.”

He leaned in, voice dropping low.
“Why are you here? Not in this city. Not in this chamber. Here. Standing before me instead of rotting in your master’s shadow. What do you want?”

“My master is no mere master, my lord,” Astarion began, voice steady as steel dipped in honey. “He is my maker. My lord. My father. I yearn for one thing and one thing only—to serve him. Not flatter him, not please him, but serve. His wisdom is beyond doubt. His decisions are beyond question. My journey on the surface is as much a test as it is a reward. I would sooner perish than disappoint him.”

He inclined his head, smirk never wavering. “So, forgive me if I find the hostility here somewhat confusing. I know I am still bound, a spawn—lesser in your City's hierarchy's eyes. But why, then, would the general waste time on this charade? If you wanted the Boneyard’s secrets, perhaps I could understand. But this? These veiled threats? They only lead me to one conclusion: I walked into enemy territory without knowing it. And if that is so… then let me die here, so my Father will know precisely where his enemies lie.”

Vhol’s voice slithered into the silence. “So you truly came here with no greater goal?”

“I came here for many great purposes. None of them your concern, my lord. It is a rite of passage among the chosen,” Astarion replied. “We travel the land, bring something back to show, and learn the shape of the world. As simple as that.”

The General’s laugh was cold. “Then you chose a hell of a time to wander, boy.”

“I wasn’t aware the city had a peak unjustified hostility season,” Astarion quipped, smirk sharp as glass. " I'll try to plan better next time."

Vhol’s smile dropped. “Bend the knee to me then if you want to leave this room alive.”

Astarion’s eyes glinted, his voice velveted with venom. “I would sooner stake myself than kneel to anyone else.”

The chamber went still.

Vhol did not blink. The fractured glass of his gaze caught the lamplight, burning pale as frost. At last, he smiled—slow, dangerous. “Good. That is the answer I expected of a true son of Pholzubbalt.” His hand rose, tracing one of the scars across his face. “This? A gift from one of your siblings.”

“Ah,” Astarion purred. “So this is an old grudge.”

Vhol stepped closer, the scent of iron and roses pressing in. His hand came up—not striking, but resting against Astarion’s jaw in mockery of paternal approval. “Far from it. That spawn fought well. Died with honour under my blade. Your kind israre. Most crave freedom, scrabbling for scraps the moment a leash is lifted. But you? You call it service. Devotion, not submission. Pride, not fear. That is loyalty worth appreciating. Your sibling faced a vampire four times his age and held the line until reinforcements came.”

Through the bond, Elenya’s voice whispered like a knife. He was the vampire lord who tried to breach the Gate to get the scyophale a century ago. 

What the fuck is a scyophale? 

I have no idea

“You were the one who tried to infiltrate the Gates to get the scyophale, weren’t you?” Astarion asked lightly.

Vhol’s smile sharpened. “Oh, you heard of me? You even discovered the purpose of the attack?”

“We did. Then tell me, my lord—what is it if this is not a grudge? Still looking for the thing. Let me tell you one thing. Father does not negotiate. And I would rather die than cost him anything.”

Vhol let his hand drop, tone hardening. “Not at all, I admit we’ve been… less than courteous. You are a spawn, but you entered this city as a representative of another power. For that, I owe an apology.”

The words struck like a crack of thunder. Astarion’s smirk flickered; even Elenya’s stillness wavered.

The General’s gaze cut once toward her, kneeling silent in obedience. Then he straightened, mask composed again. “As a representative, you should not suffer my pride. I will see you compensated for the repeated discourtesies. But first, I may require your expertise. How well do you know Menzoberranzan’s undead society?”

“If it is the vampires you speak of,” Astarion replied smoothly, “then I would say decently well. Though we do not get along much, if you are looking for an in.”

“Quite the opposite. I wish for you to consult for me,” Vhol said simply.

“I told you, my lord—honey works better than vinegar if you want my attention.”

Vhol’s laugh cracked through the chamber, sudden and startling. “True, I did promise you honey for our next meeting, only to bring you vinegar instead? Can you blame me? You do strike a figure with that blade. Even more so when angered.”

“I like to think my figure is striking no matter what I wield,” Astarion drawled.

Vhol’s smile widened. “Well, if it's a matter of honey only, let's start with what was promised. Perhaps this will please you more than my previous manners to get your attention. I hear you’ve been searching for the Necrologium.”

Astarion’s smirk sharpened. “Indeed.”

The General turned, retrieving a small chest from the dais. “Then consider this…my formal apology. For any previous discourtesy.”

Astarion arched a brow. “Too sweet, my lord. Where’s the sting?”

“There isn’t one. Take it as a mark of respect for your master—from one soldier to another. It is the only gift worthy of the name I disrespected.”

“Well, well,” Astarion purred. He glanced down. “Stand, darling.”

Elenya obeyed instantly, rising.

“Handle this, as usual.”

“Yes, master.”

She examined the chest with clinical precision. Her senses brushed the faint glyph—a tracker. She warned him silently, then cracked the box open. Inside, the Necrologium gleamed, untrapped, unwarded. The real thing. She slipped it into her satchel with steady hands.

Astarion’s smile gleamed razor-bright. “Then let bygones be bygones. What do you need from me?”

Vhol’s eyes glimmered like broken glass. “Nothing for now, only a meeting at a later time. Go now. Take your mage. We will speak again tomorrow night. Come to the Barracks before you return to the Parlour to meet the proprietor.”

They left house Vhol, both flabbergasted, and walked silently back to the house. 

A lengthy discussion was owed. 

Notes:

Yep!
I promise this is actually going somewhere.
Please bear with me !

Chapter 44: The Weight of Secrets

Summary:

They talk.

Notes:

Hey there, Sorry for the delay i was travelling and also wanted to rework this a bit to give it the oumph it needed. Hope you enjoy. it's still need some fixes as usual but I will get to those when I get to those.

Astarion's POV

---

The Necrologium weighed heavier than gold in her magical satchel, and still it felt like a leash. Not a gift. Not an apology. A tether—one more chain from a man who smiled like a knife.

Vhol’s voice clung to me, patient, poisonous, winding through memory like smoke that would not disperse. Honey, when there should have been venom. Respect, when every gesture screamed possession. The bastard wanted something—of course he did—and the fact he had not named it, not yet, was worse than any threat he could have voiced.

We walked through the streets of the Crypt side by side. I moved with my usual polish: chin tilted, stride languid, smile painted sharp as glass. Every glance cast our way by lingering guards slid off me like rain from oil. They saw arrogance, victory, and composure. Let them. The mask was second nature by now, a performance so flawless even I almost believed it. Almost.

Inside, I was a storm. My thoughts spun like blades, catching light, slicing at anything within reach. And through the bond, I could feel her presence: shuttered, coiled, silent. Always so damned silent. She said nothing, but that nothingness screamed of calculation. She was already scheming, already mapping exits and contingencies three moves ahead. That should have comforted me. Instead, it set my teeth on edge. Because I wasn’t done with her—not by half.

I could still feel it—the ghost of Vhol’s hand at my jaw. Not striking. Not cruel. Worse. That mockery of approval, that false paternal weight. The touch of ownership. Like I was some prize, a jewel to be appraised, a pawn to be set aside for later use. I wanted to rip my skin off bone, scrub the memory until it bled. Instead, I laughed—soft, amused, the perfect soundbite for the guards who lingered to measure me. Let them think me pleased. Let them think me untouchable.

I wasn’t.

The Zone of Truth still burned in me, bright as runes carved across marble. I had resisted—of course I had. Nothing enters me unless I allow it. But I had felt it seize her. I had felt the spell sink its claws into her bones, forcing her tongue to stillness. That had been our plan—hers to yield, mine to resist. A balance. A perfect counterweight to hold the charade.

But then she had spoken.

Gods, how had she done it?

Her words slid through the compulsion like silk through a clenched fist. No falter, no tremor, no hesitation. Lies woven into truths so seamless the magic itself bent around them. Conviction sharpened to such a fine edge that even enchantment bowed. She had not simply lied under the spell; she had dominated it. Bent it to her will.

I should have admired it. I should have felt relief, even gratitude. She had saved us both with that performance. But what I felt was unease. A hollow ache in my chest that only deepened the longer I replayed her words. Because she told me to trust her. Whispered it into my skull like a vow. And I had. But how? How had she done it? How had she twisted truth into something the spell itself could not unravel?

The thought gnawed at me like hunger as we left the Barracks behind. She had promised me tonight. Promised every secret, every shadow, every truth she has kept behind that careful wall of hers. And gods help her, she had better keep that promise. Because what wound itself tight in me now wasn’t curiosity. It was hunger. Hunger for answers. Hunger to know what I had bound myself to. Hunger to know if the woman walking beside me was the salvation I kept pretending she was—or the ruin waiting to finish me.

By the time we reached the house, my hands ached with restraint. Every step deeper into silence stretched me thinner. I wanted to tear the quiet apart, rip the answers from her throat here and now, careless of who saw. But not yet. Not here. Let the guards see me smiling. Let them believe the spawn strutted home victorious.

Inside, I burned.

The door groaned shut behind us, muting the city’s pulse. She moved at once, graceful, automatic—casting wards, drawing glyphs, the rituals that sealed us away from prying eyes. The stone thrummed, protection settling like a second skin. And I stood there, watching. Watching the precision of her hands, the exhaustion etched into her shoulders, the discipline that carried her when nothing else did. Watching her because I could not look away.

When the wards dimmed and sealed, she exhaled. For a heartbeat, her body sagged, the armour slipping. And that was when I moved.

I crossed the space before she drew her next breath, crowding her against the wall. My palm braced by her head, close enough for her hair to stir in my breath. I leaned in, not to kiss, not to bite—just to inhale her. Sweat, blood, exhaustion, defiance. Proof she was real, and here, and mine. My eyes lingered on her throat, on the scars of my fangs layered over weeks. My claim carved into her. My worship etched into her flesh.

And gods, it twisted me.

Every instinct snarled to tear her into my arms, bury my face against her, hold her so tightly the world could not pry us apart. To drag her to the bath, to strip the day from her skin with my hands, to take comfort in the only closeness that ever felt like living. But another instinct screamed louder: the need for truth. For answers. For clarity in this endless mire of shadows and half-truths. I wanted her honesty more than I wanted her body, more than I wanted her blood. I wanted her naked in the way that mattered.

She didn’t move. Not closer, not away. Just… still. Waiting.

The silence stretched until it cut.

Finally, I spoke. My voice low, deliberate, each word honed to command. “We will feed first.” My gaze lingered on her pulse, watching it flutter. “Then we will wash the day off our bodies. The filth of their hall has no place here.” My voice curled, inevitable. “Go to the bath. I’ll prepare something for the little wretches before my turn. You can feed them while I wash.”

Her mouth parted. “Astarion, I—”

“I will feed after,” I cut across, sharp as fangs. “Then we will talk. Are we clear?”

Her eyes flicked up, sharp and defiant, but I did not let her speak. I leaned closer, my breath ghosting the place I had broken so many times.

“Crystal clear.”

“Good girl.” The words slid like silk, sharp and soft both. “There is much to discuss. And I will have my answers.”

I held her there—not with force, but with presence. The weight of me filling the space, pressing down until there was nowhere to look but at me. My hunger scraped at my teeth, my arms ached to pull her closer, but I did not move. Every nerve screamed for touch, but my need for truth coiled tighter, strangling every other desire.

I eased back just enough for her to breathe, but not enough to grant release.

She would tell me tonight.

She had promised.

And gods help us both if she lied again.

---

The kitchen smelled wrong. Too clean, too bare, we were getting low on food supplies. Where does one go grocery shopping in an undead city? 

I set the adventurer’s cookbook on the counter, its cracked spine protesting as I forced it open with one hand. Roasts, vegetables, simple fare. Mortals liked that, apparently. Comfort food, they called it. I wasn’t aiming for comfort—just sustenance. We didn't have the ingredients for much less dinner-worthy at least, and perhaps this will provide a distraction while I try to order the thoughts and questions clawing through my skull.

The stove blinked faint glyphs as I traced a hesitant finger across its etched panel. I’d never used the oven function before. Fire and skillet, yes—familiar, direct, a dance I now understood without needing further sacrifices burned. But this? This was patient heat, steady, contained. Magic woven into metal to mimic the rhythm of flame. I tapped the rune of power, and the glyphs flared to life, humming softly. A hollow, pulsing warmth bled into the air.

The cookbook insisted on the importance of preheating the blasted thing. I exhaled through my teeth. “Well. Try not to explode on me.”

The vegetables were easy enough—roots scavenged from the her pack and the last fresh produce crate, I scrubbed and cleaned them maniacally before trimming the offending plants. Their skins still clinging with faint traces of dirt. I cut them too quickly, knife flashing as if speed might still the storm in my head. Potatoes, carrots, and onions. All of it went into the pan with more force than necessary. The roast followed, seasoned with herbs the book claimed were “traditional.” It smelled sharp and unfamiliar.

I added the poor excuse she had in the pack for spices, closed the oven door. The glyphs flared, catching, heat thrumming low and steady.

And then there was nothing to do but wait.

I leaned harder into the counter, wood biting into my palms. The wall gave me nothing back but its pallid blankness, and still I stared—as if the stone itself might whisper answers where she would not.

Her voice lingered. Not the words, not even the tone, but the certainty. That unnatural stillness she carried into the Zone, as though she’d rehearsed it a thousand times. As though the truth itself bowed to her when she commanded. The spell had sunk into her bones, and she had worn it like silk. No stumble. No hesitation. Just obedience shaped into defiance.

It gnawed at me, worse than hunger.

What did I really want to know? Everything. And nothing. Enough to set the ground beneath me firm again.

Where was she that night? What had she done in the hours I couldn’t see her, couldn’t feel her? The memory of waking alone in the parlour’s aftermath still clawed at me, cold and sharp. She had vanished. She had returned. And she had smiled, as if nothing had shifted in the dark.

How did she learn about the summon? Or about them suspecting me of being Menzoberranzan’s stray hound? She had known. She always knows, sliding truth between her fingers like thread, weaving it into masks that even I can’t tear apart.

What was the extent of her rescues? She admitted there were some—but how many? Who did she save, and why? Was it altruism, or strategy, or something else entirely that I don’t yet understand?

And gods—the sight. Why doesn’t she appear to creatures with true sight? A lich could see me just fine, but not her. She walked through their vision as if reality itself refused to look at her. What in the hells does that make her?

And above all—how did she lie under the spell? What did she twist, what flaw did she exploit, to speak falsehood and walk away unscathed?

My jaw ached from clenching, the taste of iron in my mouth.

What’s her plan after all this? Where does she mean for this story to end? Am I in it—or just another pawn she dresses in blood and velvet until I’m spent?

And—damn me for even thinking it—why does she keep ignoring my advances? That knife-edge between mercy and cruelty, between devotion and disdain. She lets me close enough to burn, then denies the flame. Perhaps I don’t want the answer to that one. Perhaps I’d rather keep pretending.

But I couldn’t. Not anymore.

But then there was Vhol. His hand at my jaw. His words. Potential. Respect. A spawn worth keeping. The taste of his breath, heavy with roses and iron, still clung to my memory like chains. I hated it. Hated the way part of me recognized the cadence, the authority. Father, he’d called it. Maker, Master, Father. All the same leash.

My fist slammed against the counter before I realized it, the cookbook skidding a few inches under the force. The oven hummed on, steady, uncaring.

I could still feel her at my back in the Barracks, kneeling, still and silent, while I played the role she had carved for me. And gods help me, it had worked. She’d made me untouchable in their eyes. Mine, I’d said. Over and over. She is mine. And they had believed it.

But was that victory—or another trap?

The oven hissed softly, magic flaring in rhythm with my breathing.

I straightened, smoothing my palms flat on the counter, forcing my shoulders to relax. One thing at a time. Feed the mortals. Keep her alive. Keep myself steady until she speaks.

The roast would be done soon.

The roast was simple—adventurer’s fare, nothing elegant. Meat browned, vegetables softened in the oven’s glow. I portioned it onto three plates, lined them with the care of ritual rather than appetite. My hand lingered on the last dish, tracing the curve of the porcelain as if it might still the thrum of my thoughts.

Then her scent invaded me. Clean skin, damp hair, faintly perfumed with the soaps from the bath. Beneath it—the pulse I knew too well, the echo of her blood, bright and steady in my skull. And layered over everything else, the subtle, metallic sharpness of her vampiric form.

She had shifted again. The shape she wore when she wanted to be harder, less fragile. The shape that said: I am still dangerous. Do not forget.

She stood behind me, quiet, her presence brushing the edges of the bond like static. She wore simple clothes—resting clothes—but the simplicity only sharpened the ache. For a moment, I wanted to turn, to look. To see if her eyes were softer after the bath, if the water had washed some of the weight from her face. But I didn’t. I held my poise, as ever.

“The food is ready,” I said instead, arranging the plates in a neat line. My voice was steady, smooth, unconcerned. “I’ll go and bathe. Don’t let it grow cold.”

She nodded. Just a nod. No words. And her eyes—when they flicked toward me for half a heartbeat—skipped away just as quickly.

Shame. Guilt.

It clung to her skin as surely as the steam still coiled in her hair. She didn’t have to speak it. I recognized it, sharp and sour as any perfume.

And gods, it made me almost glad. Glad to know she wasn’t enjoying this. That her silence was costing her too. That I wasn’t the only one bleeding under it.

I stepped past her, but paused before the door. She was still there, still silent, the weight of her restraint pressed down like stone.

I bent—not much, not dramatic, just enough—and kissed the crown of her head. A whisper of touch, nothing more.

She tensed. As she always did now.

It had been three days of this. Three days of her stiffening under any ambiguous kindness, any brush of lips or fingers that wasn’t ritual or necessity. She hadn’t told me to stop. Not once. She hadn’t pushed me away. She endured. But she hadn’t reached back either.

Not once.

The silence of that refusal was louder than any rejection.

I lingered a heartbeat longer, tasting the tension in the air, before straightening. My smile was still lacquered in place when I left the kitchen, but underneath it, I felt the fracture widen.

If she hated it, she hadn’t said.
And if she didn’t… why the hells did it feel like she was slipping further away every time?

---

I took my time in the bath. The water was hot enough to sting when I first slipped in, but I welcomed the bite. It soaked into me, kneaded into bone and sinew, pulling at the knots of sweat, anxiety, and the desire I hadn’t meant to have. Steam curled around me like a cloak, but it couldn’t disguise the fact: I was riddled with it.

Sixteen decades of weaponizing sex had scoured that instinct raw. Lust had become a tool, a mask, a performance so polished I’d forgotten the script was supposed to be real. Seduction had been survival, not indulgence. I was made into a lure, trained until even the thought of being touched sent bile clawing up my throat. Disgust was easier than longing. Disgust kept me safe.

But with her?

With her, my thoughts had begun to betray me. It wasn’t supposed to happen—not now, not here, not with her. And yet, I could barely think of anything else. A constant gnawing hunger, distracting, insistent, as maddening as any bloodlust.

The images wouldn’t leave me. The Parlour burned behind my eyes—her kneeling there, the collar at her throat, every inch of it staged, but the sight coiled itself into my ribs. And then the Barracks—her voice steady as she answered them, serving him, protecting him. The implication had been deliberate. Necessary, yes, but gods, it fed a fire I had no business stoking.

For a breath, I let my mind wander down the path I’d been avoiding. What it might feel like—not performance, not survival, but truly having her. Not as a tool, not as leverage, but as mine. To lose myself in her without the leash of a mask, without the cold command of another watching. Would it silence the anxious gnawing in my chest? Would it still the claws that keep raking through my thoughts? Would it make me feel valued again, not for what I could perform, but for what I am?

But that wasn’t fair, was it?

It wasn’t fair to her.

Because she did value me. That much couldn’t be doubted. She risked everything—again and again—for my sake. I’d seen it in her choices, her defiance, the way she stood against powers that should have crushed her flat. And I’d heard it—heard it when the Zone of Truth forced its hand against her and Calish asked the question that still echoes in me.

“Who is this spawn?”

Her eyes had lifted, calm, steady, and she had answered:

He is this body’s purpose. Its mission. Its meaning. The reason it isn’t empty. The reason I am in this realm at all. His pain is mine to hunt. His goal is mine to realize. I feed him. I protect him. I die for him. I keep the threats away.

Every syllable had landed like a blade sunk deep in me.

When I pressed her about it afterward, she brushed it away with that maddening composure of hers. Truths voiced vaguely enough to become lies, she’d said, as if that explained the weight of it.

I wanted to believe it wasn’t vague. That it wasn’t a lie. That she meant every word.

Gods, I wanted that.

But wanting doesn’t make it true.

And if those words were as false as her claim of serving and protecting me all night after the Parlour, then what I’d been clinging to was nothing more than a sweet, beautiful lie.

And the cruelest part?

Even knowing it, I still longed for it to be true.

I sank deeper into the water, heat licking up my chest, steam curling across my lips—and still, I couldn’t quiet my mind. Every thought bent back toward her, every path spiraled to the same unbearable point. Desire, sharp and restless. It gnawed at me, insistent as hunger, and the more I tried to push it aside, the louder it hummed.

It was maddening.

I needed clarity. I needed my head sharp and precise, my tongue ready for the truths I was going to pry from her. But the constant buzz dulled me, rattled through my bones until even my own thoughts sounded hollow.

Fine. If the only way to silence it was to indulge, then so be it.

I let it run wild.

I pictured her in my arms, pressed against me, her mouth yielding as if she had always belonged there. I imagined her lips on my throat, on my jaw, on my chest—worship disguised as hunger, my name gasped like prayer. The images spilled faster, hotter. Her knees on the floor, eyes lifted to me, lips parting to take what I gave. Her voice breaking on a scream as she clutched at me, not as prey, not as duty, but as mine. Mine, entirely. Hers, entirely. Two broken things stitching themselves together in the only way that made sense.

The pictures only sharpened, filthier each time they turned. Heat coiled lower, unbearable, until the ache pressed against my skin, insistent, throbbing, humiliating.

I looked down.

And there it was.

A fucking boner.

I hadn’t had one in decades—not like this, not from wanting. Not from lust. And now, here, with her scent still clinging in the air and her face stamped into my skull, I was hard enough it hurt.

Confusion struck first. Then anger.

I slammed a fist against the rim of the bath, water splashing up against the walls.

How dare my body betray me like this. How dare it cling to her, crave her, when every instinct should have recoiled. Sixteen decades of revulsion, and now this?

Humiliation seared hotter than the water, crawling up my neck. My chest heaved, a snarl tearing loose before I could bite it back.

I’d been made into a whore long ago, trained to play the part of a lover without ever being one. And now, finally, my body remembered how to want?

Gods damn her.

Gods damn me.

Because the truth was worse than the shame, worse than the fury:

I wanted it again.

The water clung hot to my skin, steam veiling the room, but it wasn’t the heat of the bath that had me restless. It was her. Every damn image of her—on her knees, her lips parted, her body pressed against mine—kept gnawing at me until the ache in my gut was unbearable.

I looked down at myself, at the proof of it straining under the water, and the humiliation was sharp enough to sting. Sixteen decades of being touched, used, forced into pantomimes of passion. Sixteen decades of revulsion every time someone’s hand closed around me, every time a body pressed against mine. Desire had been beaten out of me until I thought I no longer remembered what it felt like.

And now—this.

I let my hand trail lower, hesitant at first, fingers curling around myself beneath the water. The contact drew a hiss from my lips, sharp and startled. I froze, then removed my hand like I had been burned. 

This was ridiculous. I wasn't about to pleasure myself like some hormone-addled pup.

I've bedded thousands of people, most of them, I can't even remember. I wasn't about to stroke myself like a love-sick, touch-starved idiot.

I kept waiting for the disgust to surge. Waiting for that instinctive recoil, the wave of loathing that always came.

It didn’t, nor did shame or guilt. 

Just a scratching at the back of my mind. 

Would that be so wrong?

The heat of the bath curled around me, steam rising in thick ribbons, wrapping me in silence. My chest rose and fell, too fast, every inhale dragging her scent back into memory. My body was restless, hard, aching under the water—and for once, I didn’t want to fight it.

I let my palm drift lower, slower this time. Fingers trailing across the sharp lines of my stomach, feeling the ridges of muscle tense beneath the touch. My own skin. My own body. I pressed down lightly, enjoying the way it made me shiver, the way heat seemed to spark wherever I lingered.

When I curled my hand around myself again, I braced for revulsion, but the only thing that came was relief.

I stroked slowly, water slipping around me, steam thickening with each shallow breath. My body tightened, not with fear, but with something dangerously close to pleasure. Real, immediate, unbidden. A hiss slipped through my teeth as I stroked, the slide of water-slick skin against skin so simple, so intimate, it felt like discovering fire for the first time.

A groan slipped out before I could swallow it.

Gods. It had been so long.

I shut my eyes and let the images in my head return, let them sharpen instead of fighting them back. Her mouth. Her eyes lifted toward me. The heat of her body under me as I feed, the sound of her voice breaking when she would cry my name. I imagined her fingers digging into me, her breath hot against my throat, her lips trembling as she whispered promises I’d never dared believe.

I tightened my grip, then loosened, experimenting. I ran my thumb slowly over the head, and my breath caught, sharp and involuntary. Gods. That. That I liked. That was mine. I did it again, more deliberate this time, and a low sound rumbled in my throat before I could smother it.

I tested pace—slow, agonizing drags that made my body twitch, then faster, rougher strokes that made the water lap against my chest. Every motion pulled something new from me. Not performance, not theatre, not endurance. Just want. Pure, raw want.

I let my free hand explore too, skimming over the curve of my hip, tracing down the inside of my thigh. The contrast—one hand firm, the other teasing—made me arch, made me feel. My nails scraped lightly against my own skin, and I gasped at the sting, surprising myself with how much I liked the mix of bite and soothe.

Her face flashed in my mind again—her lips on my nipples, her eyes, her body wrapped around me.

My strokes quickened, and the ache deepened, coiling tighter, hotter, until it felt like a live wire beneath my hand. Every drag of skin over skin was mine. Every spark of it was mine. Not a master’s command, not survival’s mask—mine.

The realization struck like lightning, and it almost undid me.

After so long, I was reclaiming this. My body. My hunger. My pleasure.

For the first time in centuries, I wasn’t performing for anyone. I wasn’t pretending. I wasn’t enduring.

I was choosing.

And that choice felt like freedom.

I groaned, tilting my head back, baring my throat to no one. My strokes grew more desperate, chasing the rhythm my body begged for. I imagined her mouth instead of my hand, her voice instead of my gasps. I imagined her watching me, whispering my name, claiming me as I claimed myself. My hips started shifting of their own accord as I chased the feeling, chased myself. Each wave of sensation built sharper, stronger, until it blurred into something wild, reckless, intoxicating.

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to scream. I wanted to let go of everything I had been made into and burn in the simple, selfish fire of my own desire.

The pressure coiled tighter and tighter, sharp and sweet, until my whole body was trembling with it. Every nerve lit, every muscle taut, everything spiralling toward the edge.

And when it broke—when release finally tore through me, I spilled into the water with a cry I couldn’t hold back—it wasn’t disgust that followed. It was liberation. My body convulsed, breath shattering into steam, every wave of it reminding me that this was mine. It felt like shattering. Like something broken had been stitched back together, crooked but mine.

The release didn’t vanish in an instant.

It lingered, blooming outward in waves that rippled through me, loosening joints and pulling me down into the water. My back slid against the warm stone until I was nearly submerged, head tilted, mouth parted as if the steam itself had stolen my breath.

Every throb in my body echoed like an aftershock, softer each time but no less consuming. My fingers twitched where they still curled around myself, over-sensitive, the barest brush sending sparks up my spine. I loosened my grip slowly, letting the heat of the bath swallow the tremors for me.

The air seemed thicker now. The steam clung differently to my skin, every droplet heavy, every breath dragging in the scent of water and faint iron. My chest heaved slower, steadier, the ragged edge of gasps smoothing into sighs.

The tension that had knotted every muscle—shoulders, stomach, thighs—began to unspool. My legs floated languidly, my arm draped across the rim of the bath, fingers still trembling faintly. The ache dulled, sweet and hollow, leaving behind the strange lightness of having been emptied and remade. And I let the waves crash until all that remained was the stunned quiet of after.

And gods, the quiet after that was intoxicating. No noise, no scraping hunger at the back of my skull, no relentless buzz rattling my bones. Just warmth, breath, and the fading echo of pleasure that was mine. Mine.

I sagged against the stone,  chest heaving, water lapping gently at my chest, and my hand still wrapped around myself as aftershocks trembled through me. For once, there was no disgust. No shame. Only the raw, aching truth of it:

I was alive.
I could still want.
I knew what I liked.
And gods, I could still take pleasure for myself.

I let out a sigh, and I smiled. A real, unguarded smile.

For the first time in centuries, I was mine.

And gods, it felt good.

---

The room was dim when I stepped out, hair damp, the warmth of the bath still clinging faintly to my skin. She was there—already waiting—sitting in the chair by the hearth, though no book lay in her lap, no quill or parchment at hand. Just her. Still. Watching nothing.

For a heartbeat I lingered at the threshold, reading the quiet of her posture, the way she kept her hands folded tightly in her lap as though she were bracing herself. Always bracing.

I crossed to the bed and sat, letting the mattress dip under my weight, movements unhurried. She rose at once, silent as shadow, and came to stand before me. Close enough that I could feel the faint warmth of her freshly bathed skin, smell the clean fabric of her resting clothes now carrying her scent more than anything else.

She waited. Not stiff, not meek—just poised, steady, as if presenting herself for a verdict.

I lifted a hand and made a small gesture. Straddle me.

For an instant, hesitation flickered in her eyes, but then she obeyed. One knee, then the other, the press of her thighs against mine, the weight of her body settling onto me. She fit there with maddening precision, close enough that I could feel the steady beat of her pulse through her throat before I ever touched her.

I didn’t let my thoughts wander. Not this time. No indulgence. No hunger but the one I needed. I tilted her head gently with a hand at her nape, guiding her, and sank my fangs in.

The taste flooded at once, hot and electric, rushing down my throat like a chord plucked too sharply. My body shivered against hers as I drank—deep, steady pulls, not savoring, not playing. Just taking. As much as I could, as much as she would allow. Every swallow grounded me, cooled the edge of restlessness, kept my thoughts caged where they belonged.

She didn’t flinch. Didn’t resist. Only held herself steady, arms resting lightly against my shoulders as if anchoring me.

I drank until the gnawing ache dulled, until the world stopped humming with distraction and the hunger finally eased into quiet. My lips slipped from her skin, fangs retracting, and I breathed against her throat, steadying myself.

She didn’t speak. Just drew back enough to raise her hand, murmured the spell with the ease of ritual. Soft light flickered briefly over her body, sealing the faint tremor of weakness, mending what I had taken. Lesser Restoration.

I watched the glow fade, then leaned back slightly, studying her face. She met my gaze only briefly before letting it slip aside again, that same careful silence hanging between us.

She had just finished murmuring the last syllables, the pale shimmer of the spell fading as strength returned to her limbs. I still felt the ghost of her warmth on my lips, the faint echo of her pulse in my ears. She was steady again, but the air between us was not.

I kept her straddling me, my hands light at her waist. My fangs ached, not from hunger now, but from the restraint it had taken to stop where I did. I let the silence breathe for a moment longer—long enough for her to think it might last, long enough to let her believe I might simply release her and move on.

Then I spoke.

“Time to start talking.”

The words came quietly, but iron-edged. Not a request. Not a plea. A verdict.

Her body stilled in my lap, every muscle sharp with the pause. I felt it through her thighs, through her spine, through the way her breath caught once before settling again.

I searched her face—every flicker of her eyes, every shadow that crossed her expression. No mask now. No stage. Just her and me, the weight of everything unsaid pressing like a blade between us.

I did not smile. I did not soften. I kept my gaze fixed, unrelenting.

“I’ve given you time,” I continued, voice low, steady. “I’ve let you dance around the edges, let you keep your secrets while I played along. But tonight…” My thumb brushed once against her hip, almost absently. “Tonight you promised me answers. And I intend to collect.” 

“Tell me, darling,” I said, quieter now, close enough for her to feel the words against her throat. “What did you do? Where were you that night? How did you lie under a Zone of Truth as if it were a child’s game?”

My voice dropped, a whisper edged with hunger—not for blood, but for truth.

“And why,” I asked, eyes narrowing as I held hers, “do you keep me in the dark when you know it will cost us both?”

She didn’t answer.

Not at first. She just looked at me—looked at me the way she always did when calculating a thousand exits in her head. Her silence wasn’t empty. It was heavy, deliberate. A silence that stretched long enough to fray my patience, long enough to remind me she had made an art of surviving by omission.

I tightened my hold on her hips—not painful, not even firm, just enough to keep her still. “No more pauses,” I murmured. “No more evasions. You promised.”

Her gaze slid past me, toward the dark window. The light in her eyes flickered, just for a moment, with something close to guilt. When she finally spoke, her voice was measured—too measured.

She inhaled, slow, steadying herself as if bracing for a blow,“To your last question. I didn't intend to keep so much from you. I am just not used to having to take someone else into account. Part of the things I hide, I hide them because you wouldn’t believe me if I told you or because the question you would ask would be too painful to ponder on. Same reason I hide those things from everyone, really. No one is entitled to them.”

A bitter laugh slipped from me before I could stop it. “Oh, darling. After everything, that’s your opening line?” My lips curled, sharp as my teeth. “Try again.”

Her eyes flicked to mine—quick, defensive. Then, she inhaled, slow, steadying herself as if bracing for a blow. “ Please wait for me to finish first!" she said, face half pouting. " But I did hide things from you that were pertinent this time. things you are entitled to know. I justified it in my mind that it was to protect you. To stop you from fighting me every step of the way. But I took your choice away. That's never okay."

She looked at me and then simply said, " I am sorry, Astarion. I did wrong by you."

I narrowed my eyes, studying every twitch in her expression. Was it performance? She’d fooled the Barracks with less. But her voice… gods, it cracked when she said sorry.

I let the silence weigh heavy, forcing her to keep speaking.

Her gaze slid away, toward the window, her voice dropping lower. “This city…” She swallowed. "This city has not been easy for me. I know it wasn't for you either, but it really wasn't easy for me. It brought some old wounds, and there was so much pain all around us. It felt like I had to disappear. erase myself just to be able to stomach walking the streets, and you seemed so motivated by the quest. So unbothered by the pain. I didn't want to make you feel..."

That stung. My jaw clenched, before saying " judged ?" 

" Yes, but also, pressured... pressured to do something you didn’t want. To help when you don’t care." She kept going, softer now, like confession."knew you’d try to stop me. But eventually, you would help if I asked, and I couldn’t bear the thought of forcing that on you, forcing you to do something you disapprove of.. So I lied. I told myself it was mercy.” Her eyes lifted to mine again, bright with guilt. “But it wasn’t. It was cowardice.”

My hand twitched at her hip. “So why not stay put? at least until we had thigs figured out” I pressed. My voice was low, dangerous.

Her body tensed. A pause—longer than it should have been. Long enough to sharpen every instinct in me.

When she finally spoke, her voice trembled at the edges, not with fear, but with the strain of confession.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I couldn’t not do anything. That isn’t me. I can’t sit idle. I was already losing my grip, trying to hold myself back—and the day we went to the Parlour…” She swallowed hard. “That day was worse. Every moment I ignored the suffering around me made me feel like a monster. Hollow. Weak. And then—being forced into the role of a powerless pet? Gods, it made it unbearable. I could barely function. I spent most of it disassociating. My body went through the motions, but my mind… my mind was leagues away. Fractured. I don’t even remember most of it, if I’m honest.”

“You said you were fine with it,” I bit out, sharper than I intended.

“I was fine—with you,” she countered quickly, eyes snapping to mine. “Because I trusted you not to take advantage. And you didn’t. You never did. But that trust doesn’t erase how hard it was.”

My chest tightened. “Did I do anything that—”

“NO!” The word burst from her before I could finish. She leaned closer, fierce, urgent. “You didn’t. Please believe me, Astarion—you didn’t hurt me. Quite the opposite. Your presence was the only grounding thing I had. You were the only reason I kept clawing my way back into myself at all.” Her voice softened, but it trembled. “It was everything else. The mask. The stares. The constant expectation of obedience. It dragged me into a place I thought I’d left behind. That all-encompassing emptiness. Powerlessness. Like I was nothing again.”

My voice thinned into a rasp. “Then why didn’t you tell me?”

She hesitated, then looked down, lashes shadowing her eyes. “What would it have changed? We still needed to get inside to find Therys. And I hoped we’d never have to use that cover again afterward. Besides…” A humorless smile ghosted across her lips. “You were clearly having fun with it. That… oddly enough, that helped. It made me feel like I was helping you.”

Guilt stabbed through me. “I am sorry…”

Her head snapped up. “Don’t. There is nothing wrong with you enjoying it. You didn’t know. And honestly—your enjoyment kept me more present than anything else. But this—” She gestured faintly toward me, toward the heaviness in my eyes. “This is part of why I didn’t tell you. You always blame yourself for my pain. And you need to hear this clearly: I am a grown woman. More dangerous than even you realize. My decisions are mine. If I throw myself into the fire, that is my choice. If it happens to shield you, then good. But it is not your fault. Stop trying to carry responsibility that isn’t yours.”

Her words landed like blows, brutal in their clarity. I said nothing, letting the silence stretch, letting her fill it.

She finally drew a long breath, eyes unfocused, as if watching something far away. “Anyway… I’d been working on a plan that week. Before the Parlour. A liberation path. A way to funnel rescues out of the city through the tunnels, to a waypoint where they could escape.”

I stared. “You can’t be serious—that’s—”

“Don’t!” she cut in sharply. “Please, not now. You can rage about it later, argue, fight me if you want. But for now, let’s focus on bringing you up to speed.”

I exhaled slowly, jaw clenched. “You’re right. Fine.”

Her shoulders softened, just a fraction. “It’s okay. So—I was mapping things out. Checking if the tunnels could be a base for something longer-lasting. A resistance, maybe. Something that could grow roots and dismantle the city from the inside, bit by bit. I even had groups in mind.” She rubbed at her temple. “I wanted to be careful. To move slowly. To make sure you weren’t endangered. But that night in the Parlour… it was too much. Even before the General. Hours of being stripped of agency, of drowning in other people’s pain… it clawed at me, Astarion. And the only thing that has ever made me feel like a person again is helping. I told you—I’m no saint. I help because it reminds me I exist.”

Her voice cracked. “And as I knelt at your feet, listening to them ask you how I tasted, feeling their eyes burn into me like brands—I snapped. I needed to do something. Anything. Or I was going to vanish.”

My fingers drummed once against her hip, restless. I searched her face, every line of it, every fracture in her voice. “What do you mean?” I asked, though part of me already dreaded the answer.

“I went to the kitchen,” she said at last.

For a heartbeat, I thought she was mocking me. My jaw tightened, fangs grazing the air. “Do not toy with me, Elenya. You were at my side the entire evening.”

Her silence stretched. Too long. Too calculated.

I leaned closer, until my breath ghosted over her throat, my voice a low snarl. “Answer me, Elenya. Or I swear—I will rip every secret out of you, one by one, until there’s nothing left but the truth.”

She flinched—not much, but enough. A fracture in her composure.
“It was an illusion,” she admitted, voice barely above a whisper. “I only came back fifteen minutes before you bit me. I was freeing some of the enchanted cattle while invisible. Treating the ones left for dead.”

Heat rose in my chest—not fury, not yet, but something sharper, more dangerous. Betrayal laced with the faintest, most infuriating thread of admiration. Gods damn her. Of course she’d risk herself for strangers. Of course she’d run headlong into the teeth of danger and leave me standing in the dark.

Her eyes flickered, then steadied. “I also did some information gathering. Disabled a few sigils. Found Cazador’s sibling—so I could scry on him later. I told myself that if I brought something back for you, then it wasn’t betrayal. That it was worth the risk. That I wasn’t abandoning you.”

My hands tightened on her hips, not harsh, but enough to hold her still. “And?”

Her throat worked around the word. “That’s when he noticed something.”

A cold prickle slid down my spine. “Vhol?”

“Yes.” Her voice cracked on it. “He didn’t find me—not directly. He didn’t sense me, not exactly. But he knew something was wrong. He kept looking. Kept hunting. Chasing the scent of it through the hall. And then—” She faltered, breath catching.

“Then what?” I pressed, the bond thrumming hot between us.

Her eyes found mine, and the guilt in them landed like a blade. “Until he heard you laugh. He turned. He looked down at you. And he recognized you. That’s when I knew something was wrong. That my recklessness had led him straight to you. If I hadn’t done that…”

Her voice went quiet, almost breaking. “Maybe he wouldn’t have realized you were there at all.”

She looked sorry and guilty enough. but the truth was that she was a far better liar that i gave her credit for

"How did you lie through a Zone of Truth Elenya?"

Surprised invaded her face. 

That's what you want to know now?

" yes answer the question"

"Simple. the spell doesn't force you to tell the actual truth. nor does it force you to answer the question truthfully. it just prevent you from telling a deliberate lie. I didn’t say a single untrue statement. "

" you were not with me that night !"

" I never said I was. Just said that you were and that I was serving and protecting you. Never said i was doing those at your side"

" how to fuck is helping other broken things is serving or protecting me?"

"That's not what I was doing that night. At least not mainly. I only picked the ones I already helped and took them out of the city when I was on my way back"

"Then how did you know about the summon ? I thought one of the bloodbags you got told you about it"

" I never said that"

" what the fuck were you doing then"

“The night after the Parlour, I wasn’t with you,” she said at last, her voice steady in a way that told me it cost her. “Not the way I claimed. I left for his house first. Slipped inside. Spied. Searched. Gathered as much information as I could. I infiltrated his office and found his dossier on you. I was serving and protecting you. And then I went to create disruption—a distraction. Something that would keep him busy.”

Her eyes flicked back to mine, level now, unflinching. “I had to.”

My jaw tightened until it ached, but I didn’t look away. “Had to,” I echoed. The word was bitter in my mouth. “What?”

Her lips pressed into a thin, stubborn line before opening again. “I had to fix this. I had endangered you, Astarion. Left you unprotected because I couldn’t keep myself still. Brought the notice of two vampire lords directly onto you. Vhol’s people were already paranoid, whispering you might be a spy for Menzoberranzan. They were circling, tightening. I wanted to redirect them—to pull their eyes away from you, buy you space. And I wanted something more: leverage. Information. A prize big enough that even Candlekeep couldn’t ignore it. And thus forcing them to protect you. ”

“So I broke into one of the archlich towers. I gutted it. I stole and stole and stole again until my hands shook with it. Tomes, scrolls, artifacts—things they would kill to hide. Got you information valuable enough to be able to barter for protection from half the continent. Serving and protecting you. I also left a trail, a false one, pointing toward possible outside threats, so the blame would scatter elsewhere. And then I went to the tunnels.”

Her eyes shifted, softening for the first time. “There were prisoners. Victims. Some of the same ones we saw at the Parlour. Shackled, drugged, discarded like husks. I couldn’t leave them. I led as many as I could to an Ilmatari temple through the waypoint, put them in hands that would shelter them. " 

Her voice faltered for the first time, quiet as ash. “And then I came back to you."

Gods damn her.

My nails pressed into her hips before I realized, not cruel, but desperate for something solid. She’d turned herself into a storm, and I was caught in it.

I should have been furious. Should have shaken her until her teeth rattled for daring to risk my name, my place, my life. But what surged beneath the anger wasn’t rage—it was fear.

Fear because she’d walked into death alone. Fear because she thought I wouldn’t understand. Fear because every risk she took, she did with my face burning in her thoughts, and if she’d been caught, it would have been my head on the pike beside hers.

And fear because part of me—gods help me—envied it.

Her certainty. Her ability to throw herself into the fire, consequences be damned, because helping gave her meaning. I envied it so much I could taste the ash of it in my mouth.

I wanted to rage. I wanted to drag the truth out of her with my teeth if I had to. But instead I found myself searching her eyes, looking for cracks, for performance, for anything that would let me dismiss her words as another mask.

There was none.

Only guilt. Only exhaustion. Only that maddening, stubborn light she carried, the one that had dragged me through chains and shadows alike.

And so my thoughts spiraled.

If she hadn’t gone, maybe Vhol wouldn’t have seen me. If she hadn’t lied, maybe I could have kept her safe. If she’d told me—if she’d trusted me—I could have stood at her side instead of watching from a distance like a fool.

But if she hadn’t gone… those prisoners would still be shackled. The temple would still be empty-handed. And I wouldn’t be looking at her now, shaking with fury and—gods curse it—something perilously close to pride.

I swallowed the snarl rising in my throat, but my voice came out low and sharp anyway. “So that’s what you risked me for,” I thought, though I didn’t yet speak it aloud.

She had come back. She was here. Straddling me, confessing with a trembling voice that still refused to beg.

And that was the most infuriating part of all

I let my head fall on her shoulder, the motion slow, deliberate, echoing the way I had done so long ago in the tunnels when exhaustion and panic had dragged me down past pride. Her scent was different now—clean, tempered by the bath, but underneath it, the same thread of steel and sorrow that was uniquely hers.

I breathed her in. Held it. Let it steady me.

If she hadn't lied per say under the zone of truth what did it mean for the rest.

And then the words escaped, low, frayed, cracked at the edges before I could polish them into something clever, something distant.

“You could have died.”

Silence answered first.

Her body stilled beneath my hands, the curve of her shoulder sharp under my cheek. I felt the faint tremor in her breath, the way her chest rose and held before she exhaled again.

The truth of it cut into me deeper than I expected. I had watched death play across her too many times already—burned into my memory like brands. Her collapsing in blood-soaked grass. Her body sagging under exhaustion. Her voice cracking when pain folded her in half.

And yet this—her slipping away under an illusion, bleeding herself thin for strangers, prowling through a lich’s tower alone—this was somehow worse.

Because I hadn’t known.

Because I hadn’t been there.

Because she hadn’t let me.

The thought gnawed at me, a wound that wouldn’t close. If she had fallen, if she had been caught, I would never have known until it was too late. Just another empty place at my side, another echo of loss rattling through the caverns of my chest.

My fingers tightened on her waist, almost without thought—holding, grounding, not letting go.

“You could have died,” I repeated, softer this time, as though the first hadn’t been enough, as though saying it again might make her understand that this wasn’t accusation. It was confession.

Confession of fear.

Confession of how deep the panic clawed when I imagined the silence where she should be.

I drew another breath against her shoulder, and for the first time in centuries, I hated how fragile I felt.

“I know,” she said quietly. Her voice didn’t waver. “I was prepared to.”

The words slid into me like a blade turned slow.

Prepared.

Prepared to bleed out in some nameless corridor, shackled and dragged to the council’s feet. Prepared to let her body rot under stone while I sat there, blind and oblivious, thinking her safe at my side.

She said it as though it was nothing. A simple fact. Not reckless, not dramatic. Just truth.

I wanted to shake her. To bare my teeth and demand if she understood what she was saying, what it meant—for me. But the anger wouldn’t come. Not truly. All that rose in me was the hollow ache of the thought I couldn’t silence:

She would have left me.

Not by choice. Not betrayal. But still—gone. Another grave carved in my history, another voice cut short in my memory.

My hands tightened at her waist, a little harder now, enough that she would feel it. “Prepared to,” I echoed, the words sour in my mouth. “Gods, do you even hear yourself?”

Her gaze lowered, but she didn’t recoil. “It wasn’t about wanting to die. It was about accepting that if it happened… it would be worth it.”

Worth it.

I nearly laughed—sharp, bitter, too raw to release. Worth it, she said, as though my sanity wasn’t knotted to her survival, as though the thought of her absence wasn’t already unraveling me in the dark.

I pressed my forehead harder against her shoulder, breathing her in like proof, like she was still here, still whole, still mine to touch.

“You’re a damned fool,” I whispered, voice shaking despite the venom. “And I don’t know whether to strangle you for it or never let you out of my sight again.”

Her breath stirred against my cheek. Then, soft but steady, she answered, “I did prepare some guarantees for you… in case I never came back.”

The words froze me.

“What?” I rasped, lifting my head just enough to see her face.

Her eyes didn’t flinch. “I left a magic mouth spell at the door. It would have spoken if I didn’t return—saying goodbye, and giving you instructions on how to find a cache.”

The floor tilted under me. A farewell spell. Already waiting, already planned.

“I put everything I could in it. Instructions on who to contact. What to barter for an introduction letter to the Keeper. What he would want from the pack, and how much he’d be willing to pay.” Her voice wavered only once, then steadied again. “I even asked someone to look after you.”

For a moment, I could only stare. The burn of fury tried to claw its way up, but it tangled with something colder, hollower—like grief felt in advance.

She had prepared for her death. Not just prepared—she had written it into spell and parchment, made plans for a future without her. My future.

“You—” My voice caught, cracked, and I bit down on it before it could shake. “You actually thought you could die and replace yourself with instructions? Gods, Elenya.” My hands gripped her harder, as though I could anchor her to me through sheer will. “You think I would survive you with a ledger and a babysitter?”

Her mouth pressed thin, but her gaze never broke from mine. “I thought you deserved a chance. Even if I wasn’t here to give it to you myself.”

The words hit harder than any blade.

I swallowed, fangs aching, rage and sorrow twisting so tight I could barely tell them apart.

“Never do that again,” I hissed. “Don’t you dare prepare for your death as though it’s a kindness to me. Don’t you dare decide I can live with your ghost like that. If you want me to survive, then survive with me. That is the only promise I’ll accept.”

Her brow furrowed, searching me as though she hadn’t heard me right. “Why?” she asked softly.

The word pierced straight through me. My jaw clenched, and I forced the answer past gritted teeth. “You know why.”

“I don’t,” she said firmly, eyes sharp now, daring me to name it. “You keep saying I should live, that I should stop preparing for death. But why, Astarion? Tell me.”

Something cracked in me at that—because the truth sat right there, dangerous and waiting, and still I wanted to swallow it down. I wanted to smother it beneath wit, beneath anger, beneath anything that didn’t bare me to the bone.

But she didn’t look away.

She never does.

So I stayed silent.

She exhaled, her voice gentling, though her words cut deeper than any blade. “You deserve life. Happiness. Freedom. Safety. With or without me.” She lifted her hand, hesitant, then let it hover near my face like she wasn’t sure I’d allow the touch. “I am not necessary for you to achieve any of those things. You could carve them out for yourself. You’ve already started to. I’m just—” her lips trembled once before steadying, “—the most direct path. That’s all.”

Her words landed like ash in my chest. She said them like fact. Like logic. Like some cruel mercy she thought I needed to hear.

But all I could think—burning, gnawing, insistent—was that she was wrong. That no one else, nothing else, could rip open the hollow places in me and fill them the way she already had.

And gods, she truly didn’t see it.

“The things you said about yourself,” I forced out, my voice low, brittle. “When he asked you who you were… you think those were true, don’t you?”

Her gaze didn’t waver. “I know them to be true.”

It hit me like a blade twisting deeper. My grip on her waist tightened before I snapped, “You are not no one!”

Her lips curved into the faintest, saddest smile. “Then who am I?”

My throat closed around the answer, but I pushed it through anyway, sharp as shattered glass. “You are you. You are Elenya.”

Something flickered across her face, fragile and brief, before she lifted a hand and let her palm brush my cheek. The touch was soft—too soft—and it nearly broke me. Her smile trembled, a half-broken thing.

“I was twenty-two when I received that name,” she whispered. “In an Ilmatari temple. I’m grateful for it—for what it made me. But it was still too late to erase two decades of being no one. Don’t you think?”

My chest ached. “What were you called before that?”

Her eyes dimmed. “Nothing. I wasn’t called anything. Because I was no one.”

“No,” I hissed, almost desperate. “You are not. Stop saying that. Stop saying you’re empty and soulless and faceless.”

She tilted her head slightly, thumb stroking once along my jaw as though to soothe me. “Okay,” she said at last, quiet as a vow. “I won’t say it. Is that what you wanted to know?”

I stared at her, anger and anguish tangling into something unbearable. “Why are you being like this?”

“Like what?” she asked, her voice even, steady.

“Cold,” I whispered.

Her body shifted at once, tension rippling through her as she unstraddled me. She stood, the absence of her weight leaving me hollow, and for a moment I hated the space between us more than I hated her silence.

She didn’t pace. Didn’t retreat. She simply looked down at me, sadness etched across her features like cracks in glass. Then, steady as a blade pressed flat, she asked:

“What is it that you want, Astarion?”

The words were plain. No softness, no riddles—just the question. The one she always returned to when silence failed us.

The room itself seemed to wait, every shadow stretched taut.

I studied her—really studied her. The slope of her shoulders, the defiance trembling beneath her stillness, the storm she was barely holding at bay. Suspicion flickered through me, quick and sharp, but I forced it down, searching her face for something else.

The room held its breath.

Her question cut through me, plain and merciless: What is it that you want, Astarion?

I stared at her—really stared. My eyes narrowed of their own accord, suspicion flickering like a shadow against candlelight. I was too used to this game: questions dangled like bait, promises of choice that always ended in punishment the moment I answered honestly.

My lips curved into the half-smile I’d perfected centuries ago. Brittle. Defensive. Safe.

“What do I want? Darling, where do I even begin? Freedom, power, a wardrobe that doesn’t smell like crypt dust—”

“Astarion.”

Just my name. Firm. No room for evasion.

Her gaze carved into me like steel. What do you want from me?

The smile faltered. My chest tightened. For once, I couldn’t hide behind wit.

“Now?” I said, my voice rougher, quieter than I meant. “In this moment? You.”

The word trembled out of me like a blade drawn too fast, sharp enough to cut both of us.

Her breath caught. “What does that mean?”

“I think I made myself pretty clear, darling.” My hand slid up, gripping her hip. Too tight. Almost bruising. The touch betrayed me, but I couldn’t loosen it.

Her chest rose, fell. “So you want to fuck me now? Is that what this is?”

Her words hit harder than a stake. My hand stilled. For a heartbeat, the mask cracked wide open. I wanted to snarl, to tell her no, it wasn’t just that—but the words stuck. And in their place, my smile sharpened into something crueler, brittle as broken glass.

“Well,” I drawled, velvet wrapped around splinters, “that is one way to phrase it.”

But the grip I had on her wasn’t playful. It was desperate. I held her like she might vanish if I let go.

“That’s not an answer,” she pressed.

My eyes narrowed. I leaned in, whispering against her ear, “What if it is? What if that’s all I want right now, hm? Your body. Your warmth. To sink into you until I can’t remember what it feels like to be without it?”

Her pulse flickered beneath her skin. “You think it’s me you want.”

Think? My jaw tensed. “Think?” I echoed, sharp as a wolf scenting blood.

“I need you to hear me clearly,” she said, steady even as I felt her heart race. “You don’t want me. You want what I represent. Safety. Certainty. A tether when you’re adrift. Someone who doesn’t hurt you. That’s not wanting me, Astarion. That’s wanting escape.”

The words hit like silver through flesh. I flinched—just a flicker—but she saw it.

“And what if the monster is this?” she whispered. “This need that swallows everything until there’s nothing left of you without me?”

My throat locked. Hurt, fury, denial, hunger—all tangled inside me until I didn’t know what expression I wore. I hated her for being right. I hated her for seeing it. I hated her because I needed her to.

“I want you,” I rasped, harsher now, the words dragging themselves out raw. “Not just to fuck you. Not just for warmth. I want—”

But the rest broke in my throat. Centuries of chains had never let me finish that sentence.

When I reached for her, she caught my hand gently, stopping me. Anchoring me.

“Astarion…” Her voice was steady, but it held an ache that twisted the knife. “You’ve been free for a month. Six weeks at most. That’s not enough to heal sixteen decades of what he did to you. And right now… right now you’re latching onto me because I feel safe. Because I feel good. Because I am not him.”

Her grip tightened on my hand. Not rejection—restraint.

“If we take this further now,” she continued, “it’s not just you using me. It becomes me using you. Even if you say you want it. Even if you swear all you want is to fuck me. How do I trust it’s not just the wound speaking?”

Her words flayed me. I wanted to scream, to tell her she was wrong. That this wasn’t a scar talking—it was me.

“You’ve been trained to give yourself away,” she said. “To seduce, to obey, to survive by offering your body when your soul wasn’t yours to give. I will not—cannot—be the one who turns that into another chain.”

Something inside me snapped. A laugh tore free, humorless, bitter. “You always speak as though I’m some fragile child. As though I’m incapable of knowing what I want.”

“Astarion—”

“No.” My voice rose, sharp, ragged. “You’re free to refuse me if that’s what you want. Say it plain. But don’t dress it up in pity. Don’t tell me what I feel is false, or just another scar talking.”

I tore my hand from hers, pacing, restless, fury burning through the shame. “For once, I want to make my own choice. My own mistakes, if that’s what this is. I will not have you—or anyone—telling me I can’t.”

I trembled. With hunger. With fear. With the unbearable need for something that was mine.

“This isn’t about Cazador. This isn’t about the chains. This is me. And I’m damned if I’ll let you decide what I’m ready for.”

Her chest ached at my words—I saw it in her face. But I didn’t stop. Couldn’t.

“You dissect me,” I spat. “Hold every word under the light, decide whether it’s genuine or just another scar. Gods forbid it might simply be me, wanting something without your permission.”

Her throat worked, her voice breaking softer: “It’s not about permission. It’s about protection.”

“I don’t care!” The shout ripped out of me raw, echoing off stone. “If it’s a wound, let it be a wound. It’s mine. My hunger. My mistake if it damns me. Don’t you see? That’s all I’ve ever wanted—the right to ruin myself on my own terms if I must.”

The silence after rang like iron.

She didn’t move. Just whispered: “Then tell me plainly, Astarion. Tell me as you. What do you want of me right now?”

Her eyes searched mine. “You don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I am. A week ago you could barely hide your disgust at the idea of bedding me, and now you look at me like this. What is it you really want?”

My lips parted. A thousand lies, a thousand deflections clawed for freedom. None made it past my tongue. My eyes traced her face—hungry, furious, terrified, longing. All the things I’d never been allowed to feel without punishment.

At last, the truth broke out of me, hoarse, trembling, unguarded:

“I want you to choose me.”

The words cut the air between us like a blade.

Her face crumpled, sad and sharp all at once. “I already did,” she whispered. “In every manner that matters.”

And then she turned to leve the room. Leaving me again with nothing but the echo of my own hunger and the unbearable silence where she should have been.

“Stop,” I said finally, my voice low, deliberate. “That’s not a conversation either of us were ready for yet. What you’ve given me tonight… it’s enough. More than enough. We both need time to process it.”

I raised a hand, palm open, waiting. “Come back. Lay with me. I just… I want to feel you here.” My throat worked around the words. “I want to hold you.”

For a moment she hesitated, her eyes darting from my face to the hand I offered. Then, with a breath sharp enough to tremble, she stepped forward and placed her hand in mine.

I drew her gently down, guiding her back into my arms. The warmth of her pressed against me was almost unbearable after the cold space she’d left behind. I buried my face in her hair, inhaled the faint scent of her bath clinging to her skin, and let myself soften just enough to whisper against her crown:

“Thank you.”

The words barely carried, fragile as breath, but they were truer than anything I’d said all night.

---

When I roused from trance, it was only three hours past sunset. The house still smelled of soap and faint iron, and she was still in my arms—but not as herself. The red-haired elf’s face stared back at me, serene in trance, and for a moment the old paranoia stirred before I remembered: she shifts when she wants armor. Even in sleep she was guarding herself.

When her eyes opened, the hours closed between us again. She gave me what I had demanded—fragments of her night, the puzzle pieces she had risked her life for. Her escapade had not been random. She had mapped tunnels, safehouses, and contacts into something larger: the skeleton of a network. A path for the broken to flee the city, for victims to be ferried from the Crypt’s bowels to sanctuaries outside its reach. It was a madman’s dream dressed as strategy, fragile but real. She wanted it to grow roots, to hollow the city from beneath until resistance could thrive in silence.

I should have admired it. Instead, we fought. Again. My fury tangled with her defiance, each of us cutting at the other with truths too sharp to ignore. I told her she gambled with my life; she told me I was blind to anything beyond my own chains. It was ugly, jagged, but somewhere in the clash there was also the faintest flicker of understanding—that we both burned for survival, only by different fires.

And then the dagger. The source of suspicion that had shadowed me since the Barracks. A gift she had pressed into my hand, meant as a tool, turned into a curse. Lolthite, etched with the sigil of a slaver house from Menzoberranzan—one with whispers of ties to vampire lords. A weapon marked in bloodlines and allegiances I had no part in, yet worn at my belt like a confession. It was never me they scented. It was the steel. The irony bit deep: her attempt at protection had branded me instead, placing me in the crosshairs of a hunt that might not relent.

By the time she finished, nothing between us was settled. Not really. But there was at least clarity where shadows had been. And for now, that would have to be enough.

“Alright,” she murmured at last, her voice thin as parchment. Then, more firmly: “I’ll go back. I’ll try to get more research done. I need to make as much progress as possible.”

“About that…”

Her eyes lifted to mine, sharp despite the exhaustion. “Yes?”

“How urgent is it?” I asked.

Her brow creased. “What do you mean?”

“The research,” I pressed. “Why is it so urgent you were willing to leave me behind? What do you think Candlekeep will make of it?”

Her lips parted, then shut again as she gathered her thoughts. “I don’t know, Astarion—pretty urgent. Especially the Bhaalite shrine. We directly interacted with that place, and we both know the other Zhents will come sniffing around. The Thay business is less tied to us, but Tam’s plan? If he really has ascended to godhood, if he’s building dread rings across Thay—” she exhaled sharply, shaking her head, “—that could erase every soul in eastern Faerûn. That’s not just war, that’s cataclysm.

“But honestly? It’s their aberration projects that gnaw at me most. Something’s wrong there. Twisted. I needed someone working on it while I got you to safety and dug deeper into vampirism. And now…” Her gaze flicked away, tight with unease. “Now that I know some of what Larloch is up to, it’s different. That’s not abstract anymore—it’s a direct threat to the Great Library itself. Or at least, I think it is.”

She drew a long breath, shoulders tightening before she went on. “It’s not only urgency, Astarion—it’s survival. I’ve nearly died four times since we set foot in this cursed city. I don’t know if either of us will walk out of here alive. Some of this needs to make it back to the world. Not for me. For everyone.”

The words dug under my skin, cold and raw. “What do you mean?”

“I told you already—I didn’t trust leaving you alone in the House of Mercy. And teleporting there isn’t easy; the rods shift constantly. It wouldn’t be a quick return. Here, at least, I thought you’d be safe behind the wards. But Vhol’s interest ended that fantasy fast. So I turned to the only thing left—I wanted the library’s protection for you. Their backing. Leverage you could survive on.”

So that was it. She hadn’t been running from me. She’d wanted to shield me—buy my safety with the very knowledge she bled herself gathering.

“Can’t you just send it?” I asked. “Tell them everything with a Sending?”

She shook her head. “No. Words aren’t enough. I need to deliver the copies and materials I compiled. The samples from the caravan. The detailed records. What I stole. All of it.”

“Then can’t you just prepare the copies with instructions?” I pressed. “Deliver them with me. We could go together, drop it, and return immediately. You wouldn’t need to go inside. And I’d already be there if they wanted to meet.”

She froze. I saw the realization flash across her face like lightning striking stone. “Why didn’t I think of that?” Her eyes darted to the window. “What time is it? The sun’s still down—gods, that could work now.” Her voice rose, caught between shock and urgency. “So… you’d be willing to come with me?”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Yes. I’d like that.”

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 1 of Mercy meets Hunger