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Walking in the black cold of the night, Wyll found a man in the road.
In the road, buried up to his chest.
It didn’t take a studied wizard to guess this predicament was magical in nature – that the man had offended a powerful druid or someone else with the ability to shape earth and stone. For all Wyll’s childhood fascination with quicksand, he’d never heard of someone being sucked into a cobblestone road. The stone was tight around his ribs, molded to the skin.
It also did not take a wizard’s ken to guess the man was a vampire. The road, and the man embedded in it, faced the east, where the sun would eventually roll up over the distant hill. His skin was a bloodless white, and not just from the cold – the loose flaps of skin shredded from his hands were dry and bloodless. He must have struggled, attempting to claw his way free from the rocks. He must have been very hungry, to not bleed at all. His eyes were red and dull. There were pitted scars on his neck where he’d been bitten and turned.
If he’d been living, he’d have been dead. The cold this far north didn’t suffer bare flesh for long. Drops of ice clung to his eyelashes. His hands were gnarled fists. His ears – vulnerable elven appendages meant for warmer climes – were blue-grey and blistered where the flesh had frozen solid. He didn’t shiver. He didn’t react as Wyll went down on one knee beside him.
He was a vampire and someone had put him in the ground, intending to kill him. The second fact gave Wyll pause more than the first. But he would not trust the judgement of a stranger who would doom a man to a slow, excruciating wait for death. This man was a spawn, almost certainly. Wyll had seen enough in the year since the Netherbrain fell to know that most people didn’t wait to put a spawn to judgement. Seven thousand spawn had survived the death of their master, and how many still lived a year since? Fear made monsters of men.
In fact – Wyll glanced behind at the spawn’s bare back and caught sight of the familiar sigil. Not just one of Szarr’s spawn; one of his closest thralls. It was easy to construct a narrative from that. With no sire left to blame, who could the sacrificial spawn blame for their lot except the ones who had lured them to their deaths? Had the elf been exiled from the confines of their sanctum underground? Or had he gone looking for escape, sick of the underdark and hungry for the sky?
Or was he a monster in truth, gone looking for innocent necks to split?
Wyll would have the truth out of him. But not here, and not like this.
“Good evening saer,” Wyll said, pulling the mantle of the Blade firmly around his shoulders even as he slipped off his pack and cloak. “I see that you’re in a bit of a tight spot. Never fear! The Blade of Frontiers comes prepared for all situations, I’ll have you out in a jiffy.”
The spawn stared at him, dead-eyed. He didn’t attempt to draw breath, ribs still against the cage of stone around them. Likely shock, or trance, or imagining Wyll some hallucination. No matter! Wyll could patter without a partner – it was an essential skill in the hero’s trade. The recently rescued often couldn’t keep up their side of the conversation, but found a confident voice nonetheless soothing till they could be brought to a healer and made whole.
Wyll shrugged off his inner cloak – the enchanted one, spelled for warmth with a blessing from Silvanus. It always smelled faintly of damp dog, like burying your nose in a wolf’s pelt. Nonetheless, it was his dearest companion on nights like this, but he was hardly the one in dire need. He wrapped the thin fabric around the spawn’s shoulders and pinned it in place. The spawn made a rattling moan as Wyll pulled the hood up and over his head, so faint he could scarcely hear it over the breeze.
“I know what you must be thinking – what sort of hedonist wears a heated cloak? Well, I’ll tell you. I am the friend of a very talented wizard from Waterdeep, who took great offense to the realities of ‘camping’ when we once traveled together. Now that he is once again safely ensconced in his tower, and I am once again wandering the Sword Coast, he’s taken to sending me gifts to offset the unpleasantries of the road. A very nice man, if a bit – well! He’s also gifted me a comprehensive collection of scrolls, which will be the ticket for getting you back on top of things.”
Gale had most recently sent him an enchanted scroll-case, which could magically summon up any stowed scroll you wanted by thinking about it before you opened the lid, allowing you to draw scrolls in combat without begging an intermission to dig through your bag of holding. Not many monsters were willing to honor a three-minute intermission.
Wyll thought very hard about the stone shape scroll and opened the case to find it neatly to hand. Stone shape was one of many spells he hadn’t thought worth the cost of carrying, but had found handy to keep on hand. There were times when nothing would do the trick except five feet of solid stone shaped in accordance to your needs.
The scroll case made a little pinging noise as he closed it, which Wyll was almost certain alerted Gale what sort of scroll Wyll had withdrawn. He received replacements suspiciously often without mentioning having used them. In Gale’s defense, he’d mentioned struggling with insomnia, what with his lady loves being off battling Vlaakith’s forces in space while he was stuck in his tower egg-watching. Perhaps scribing scrolls was a nesting instinct.
Wyll cleared his throat and made sure his outer cloak was tucked back around him. Then, with a flourish, he read off the spell and melted the cobblestone road trapping the vampire, flowing it upwards beneath the man’s feet till he was safely back at the ground surface. Wyll did have to leave a pothole off to the side to account for the displaced stone. Unsupported by his prison, the vampire wobbled. Wyll darted forward to catch him before he could collapse onto the pavers.
He was wearing pants, at least. And shoes. He’d probably been fully dressed before being caught, and then been stripped so the sun would have an easier time burning him alive. Cruelty. Wyll would not abide cruelty.
The vampire was so very light. Wyll held him close to his chest, making sure the cloak was tucked in around him. “There we go, saer. Now, of course you can go on your way if you would like. But if you don’t object – I would feel much more comfortable seeing you off well-fed and well-rested. I’ll set up camp near here, won’t take but a minute.”
Astarion had been sure he was hallucinating. The cold had burned at first, but it had all gone dim as he properly froze. Just like old times. Then was even the roiling hunger in his gut and the fear tangled with it to keep him company. He was going to die, and it was over a fucking rabbit.
So when he heard a voice and felt phantom hands on him, he figured that was definitely a hallucination. Oh, a hero just happened to be walking along this barren, accursed road in the wee hours before dawn? They just happened to decide Astarion deserved to live? They just happened to have a cloak enchanted for warmth, which pulsed agony through Astarion’s bitter and frozen shell?
Scooped from his second grave and cradled in the man’s – he refused to call him ‘The Blade’, what a stupid moniker – arms, Astarion figured it all out. They were going to the man’s camp to get “comfortable”. That made perfect sense. Not very efficient, to waste a scroll for a bit of ass, but Astarion had gotten as far from civilization as he could get. Whores were likely thin on the ground. And stealing away with a villager got so-called heroes impaled by avenging mothers with their own sword. There was no one who’d complain about Astarion being stolen.
Not even him.
The ice on his eyelashes had thawed to tears, and he could crack his eyes open enough to see when the man tossed a small box to the ground and said an incantation that transformed it into a solid stone cottage. The way he threw around magic said money and power. It said that Astarion might not wriggle free from this captor as quick as his last. But when they stepped past the threshold and the tearing winds finally stopped trying to claw the skin off his face, Astarion found he didn’t much care. He’d rather be kept than tossed out on the doorstep come dawn. And so he sent up a prayer to one of the many useless gods – Tymora, because he figured it was chance that had brought him a savior – that he’d be a good enough fuck to keep his skin.
The pop-up cottage was…twee. It was smaller than Cazador’s opulent guest room. The place was anything but opulent – a bedroll sat rolled and tied in one corner, a small wood stove in another. There was a stool beside a small tabletop and two trestles. A copper kettle sat on the stove and a small pan, two mugs, and a narrow woven basket filled with cutlery hung from hooks in the wall beside it. The man apologetically laid Astarion on the floor while he set up the bedroll. There must have been magic at work in that bedroll too, because it felt like far softer than the feather pad and wool bolster it looked like. The sheets were linen, plain-woven but soft from many washings. And there were pillows stored in his bag of holding that he dropped onto the bedroll around Astarion, talking all the while. Something about not having guests over often, and being poorly prepared.
Astarion’s muscles felt like lead weights, utterly unsuitable for movement. He laid where he’d been put while the man fussed with the stove – though there wasn’t a store of logs beside it, so presumably that too was fueled by magic.
The furnishings in the room might have been sparse, but the decorations were not. Someone had gone around the room with clay pigments and painted a floral motif at chest height, running up and over the doorframe and around the window. The window had a thick quilted curtain done in blue, pink, and yellow diamonds that matched the walls, instead of the utilitarian white of the bedclothes. Beside the stove, someone had painted the words Parry, Riposte, Repast above the floral border. Where the walls weren’t hung with useful things they were covered in paintings and prints – portraits of strange smiling men and women, an illustration of Baldur’s Gate from Dusthawk Hill, a print of Drizzt Do’Urden and his leopard Guenhwyvar that was nearly the size of the window. Hero worship at its finest.
Still, the ‘Blade’ couldn’t be the worst sort of adventurer if he had a nearly life-size print of Drizzt Do’Urden hanging from his walls. It was tacky, of course. Astarion would never stoop to such foolishness. But as long as the man didn’t expect Astarion to be able to play the part of Drizzt in the eventual fucking, it was nice to know he hadn’t been taken by a man with no taste at all.
The man sat down on the bedroll next to Astarion and started taking his boots off. Already? Astarion didn’t feel nearly limber enough for…but he also didn’t feel energetic enough to protest. His skin burned, especially his poor ears, and he had started to shiver again. Which was utterly useless, he was dead. His body was always forgetting it was dead.
The man had horns, Astarion realized. He’d not noticed them with the hood up, but now that he was stripping down to his smalls and a ragged undershirt, Astarion could see all the evidence the man wasn’t fully human. One of his eyes was red-on-black, the other gold-on-white. His skin had ridges that spoke of infernal ancestry, but he had no tail – was he a tiefling whose tail had been chopped off? Astarion had never heard of people chopping off tiefling tails, but maybe there was a booming business in them. How was he supposed to know?
The man was still talking to him. He had a nice voice. Very soothing; not so deep it rattled your bones nor so high it was unpleasantly shrill. Astarion should probably be listening to the words and not the tone, but – if the man needed something more than a hole he shouldn’t be undressing when Astarion was still frozen solid.
The man murmured apologetically as he unlaced Astarion’s boots and pulled them off, then his trousers. It hurt, no matter how careful he was to mind Astarion’s swollen and aching feet. Astarion whined, and the man spilled forth apologies like a fountain. He still stripped him, and turned Astarion onto his side, and pressed his searingly hot chest against Astarion’s back. Astarion yelped, tried to struggle away, but the arm around his chest was an iron bar and his limbs were still useless. It hurt, though. It was going to hurt.
The comforter was pulled over him, another weight to keep him still. Astarion gulped for air, the muscles in his chest finally unstuck enough to breathe. He wouldn’t cry at such petty torture as this, he was better than that, but the ear beneath him was agony and his skin burned wherever it touched the bed and the man was pressing his wrist against Astarion’s lips to keep him from screaming.
Or –
“Drink, damn you,” the man said. “You won’t heal without blood. And you’re not even hearing me. Not listening at all. Stubborn as a feral cat and scratches like one too. Come on, darling, bite down. Big bite.”
Was the man insane? Indubitably, he must be insane. But the fragrance of sweat on skin and blood beneath was pressed against his nose and the voice was urging him to bite and Astarion wasn’t strong enough to resist even the most obvious traps laid before his feet. He latched on. Blood filled his mouth and –
…that’s what it was supposed to taste like? It was so surprising that he nearly spat the blood back out in shock, which would have been a crime against the new god Astarion was inventing in order to be able to worship at their altar. He’d assumed that mortal blood would be a lot like squirrel, except less gamey. There was no resemblance. It was as if he’d been shoving dirt in his mouth his whole life and reassuring himself that it was nearly the same as fucking bread.
Warmth flowed over him like sunlight couldn’t, soft and gentle in its attentions, easing the pain wherever it went. Astarion clung to the man’s arm and wept.
It was humiliating, to be so beyond humiliation into the ecstasy of relief. He had been ready to die, not even knowing the taste of real blood. He had been going to die and now he wasn’t, and he was getting snot all over the man’s down comforter. He was going to live.
He came back to himself warm as a rabbit in her burrow, still swaddled in the comforter. The man was sitting beside the bed and blotting his face off with a handkerchief. Astarion sniffed. How abominable that his body could no longer produce blood but found the time to still produce snot of all things.
“I’m not usually like this,” Astarion said, clawing for some sort of self-respect. “Really, I’m not.”
“I should think not,” the man said. His arm was unwrapped and the bite marks – plural, it looked like he’d been mauled by some sort of wild cat – were still oozing blood. Astarion would be worried about that, but he was still floating on the haze of good blood. “You’ve had an awful shock. What’s your name?”
“Astarion. What’s yours? I don’t want to talk to a cutlass. Or a scimitar. Or a – another type of sword. What’s your people name?”
“I may be the Blade of Frontiers, but my friends call me Wyll,” the man said.
“I’m not your friend,” Astarion pointed out, reasonably. “What am I supposed to call you?”
“You can still call me Wyll.”
Astarion started crying again. It was very confusing.
Wyll asked him about the druid and Astarion explained how he’d been ratted out by that damned rabbit. The druid had acted like he was some sort of murderer for pulling bunnies out of their burrow and feasting on them, but what was he supposed to do? Starve? Astarion’s lack of sympathy for the plight of the damned vermin was apparently been the final strike.
“I assume he doesn’t murder every traveler who hunts and kills creatures to survive,” Astarion complained. “Just the monsters.”
Wyll frowned. “I have a druid friend who says that every living thing deserves the chance to thrive. You’re no less deserving of life than me.”
“But I’m not. Living, that is.”
“Of course you are. How else could he kill you?” Wyll brushed Astarion’s hair back from where it had fallen into his eyes. “I’m sorry that happened to you. If you’d rather not travel alone, I’d gladly accompany you on the next leg of your journey. Where are you going?”
Astarion’s tongue stuck in his mouth. “I don’t know.” Wyll didn’t seem quick to kill him, so Astarion explained that he’d fled after his sire’s death, looking for – something. Something more important than safety. Freedom. There were other spawn hiding in the Underdark, but he would rather die than go back there and face those people.
“You don’t remember me, do you? I suppose that’s fair, as I hadn’t remembered you in all that mess,” Wyll said, with a rueful smile. And then he explained that he had been one of the heroes who killed Cazador Szarr.
“That’s twice you’ve saved my life now,” Astarion said, feeling rather faint. The man who had saved him had killed Cazador. He seemed interested in keeping Astarion around. He was rather beautiful – the horns were flattering, his skin was clear of any diseases, his nails were blunted. Surely there were worse fates. “Are you not going to ask for payment at all?”
“I had your breeches off already, I know you don’t have any coin in those pockets. And I’m afraid your shirt is – ” Wyll paused. His hand flew up in a warding gesture: “No! I took your clothes off to warm you! You don’t have any body-heat of your own; skin on skin is the safest way to warm up the hypothermic, and – I apologize, most sincerely, if I have given you reason to think me some sort of lecher.”
“Do you not think I’m beautiful?” Astarion asked, hardly knowing what he wanted the answer to be. “I’ve been stolen away before, you know. I could be good, if given the right incentive. If you protected me.”
“Ah, give me one moment,” Wyll said. “I shall be right back.”
He stepped outside the cottage and closed the door firmly, but gently. He screamed very loudly. What a fascinating man.
Wyll came back inside, stamping his feet from the cold – he hadn’t even thought to put on shoes – and dragged over the stool so that he didn’t need to sit on the floor. He set it down a few feet away from Astarion’s bedroll – from his bedroll, where Astarion was laying. He sat down on the stool and looked at Astarion with apparent sincerity.
“I think you look starved, and hunted, and very frightened. And like you’d do well with a bath and several days of better sleep. It’s hard to know if you are beautiful when all I can see is that you are scared. I did not save you, either time, in hope of a reward, or payment, or profit. I did it because people shouldn’t be made to suffer. I am asking you to travel with me only if you wish, for as long as you wish. You’d always be free to go. I would not try to keep you.”
Astarion decided then and there that he was going to keep Wyll. This strange and impossible man who had plucked him from twice from death, who decorated his cottage with twee paintings and was driven to walking barefoot in the snow by the mere thought of fucking Astarion as payment. The man was straight out of his most impossible fantasies. Well. Hopefully moreso queer out of his most impossible fantasies. Because Astarion was making plans. Schemes. He wasn’t letting a chance this golden slip through his fingers. Not now that they’d thawed enough to grab hold of things again.
“Very well, darling, it’s a deal,” Astarion said magnanimously. “I will allow you to accompany me, and keep me safe from any unhinged druids and snitching rabbits. Though, as my self-assigned protector, I am going to insist you take better care of yourself. Why are you letting your arm drip on the floor like that?”
Wyll glanced down at himself. “Oh! I confess, your venom works a trifle too well. I can’t feel a thing. But yes, of course, I’ll patch this up. That way I can be ready for next time.”
Next time?
Astarion narrowly resisted the urge to slip himself out the covers and out the door of the cabin for a little scream-session of his own. He was going to keep this man, and keep him alive, if it killed him.