Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Astarion wakes, he's warm. 

That is an odd sort of realization, because he never is—his thoughts move slow and sluggish as they catch in the confusion, the wonder at heat brushing over skin and trickling down the arches of his face. 

Warmth. It is as alien a concept as mercy. 

And above him, so distant, a blazing mark in the sky with great gossamer wings spread out in resplendent glory, is the sun. 

The sun. 

It's not quite yellow, like his memories have tried to remember it as—more of a white, a hole carved in the blue for fire to burn through, scouring deep into eyes unfamiliar. It hurts, in a way he wants to laugh at. Two hundred years with the threat of ash, and even in isolation it won't let him be? What a kind reminder of cruelty. 

But the sun.

Astarion squints up at it, at the spectacle, at everything and anything above him—there's… a passing fancy to the cover of the old romance novel he shoved between the crease of his bunk and the wall until the pages bled together from pressure, with white ribboning between blue. A painter's ideal of the sky, of perfection wrought over impossible heights. 

It's beautiful. 

It's not real. 

He isn't burning, isn't sinking fangs into his own flesh as ordered penance, isn't clawing himself forward to reach his sire's side—he is simply laying here on the sand, seemingly alive, seemingly no commandments, seemingly free. 

Free, beyond the hooks deep in his gut. 

The thrall sits, perched against his ribcage, in the empty hollow that once belonged to a heart. It isn't calling him, isn't demanding silence and obedience and violence, but it is there. 

If he was truly free, off on some distant beach with nothing familiar and the sun overhead, he wouldn't feel it. Wouldn't be chained by it still, snarling alongside the hunger. 

A dream can be many things. But it cannot remove that which cannot be removed. 

The best it can do is play pretend.

Soon he will wake up, shivering back to consciousness from whatever hole he has been thrown in; soon he will blink bleary eyes and find not blue but grey once more—maybe the grey of a back alley with morning blaze fast approaching, or the grey of a tavern's back room tangled in papery sheets, or the grey of the kennel with cold stone splattered in memory. 

But that is soon. It is not now.

So Astarion sprawls over the sand, digs his fingers into golden warmth, and simply lets himself experience it, if only for a moment. 

-

Some hours later, the illusion has not ended, and he is beginning to worry. 

It is entirely unlike any dream he has ever had. And change is frightening, always frightening; familiarity at least is predictable, an agony that repeats. Anything new is not. 

Astarion needs to prepare. 

He thinks of moving, and his arm moves; moves fast and quick and as he imagines it would. It feels real. 

Nothing here is real. 

Astarion grimaces, moving his arm again—it splays against the sand, warmth in the gold, and the other mirrors it. There are aches he doesn't remember, burns blotched over pale skin, though they're little more than an annoyance he is quite equipped to ignore. The dream knows it wouldn't be accurate if he was uninjured. He's ever so happy it's dedicated to realism. 

But he's able to push upright, to wobble his way to his feet with a head that ducks and sways under the motion; there's a pain there, something odd and jagged, throbbing in the back of his skull. The hunger has clawed deep inside, begging, and he shoves it down with well-honed practice. 

And then he's standing, blinking out over a beach, and he does not understand. 

The world isn't just the beach, repeated segments of gold; there's a forest beyond, and an ocean, and a thin path that skitters up a cragged coastline. It looks like a place, like something that could exist, and even as he turns and squints in different directions nothing cracks. Just moves with him. 

Peculiar. 

What's moreso is the sound, coming from somewhere behind him. 

"Ah, hello there!"

This body is well-crafted, familiar in its movements and as quick to react as his real one—it flinches and he turns it into a spin, hands into rictus claws, coiled. The sand, blindingly gold, the sun lighting up corners of the world he has never seen before in anything but grey—movement, beyond. Something tall. Some one.

It's a man, a human, with truly garish purple robes and a coif of hair that hasn't been properly cared for in a tenday; he's raised an arm in greeting, pleasant as you please, and is marching over with the determination that razes gullible villages to the ground. He's no one familiar, nothing to set him apart beyond wizardly oddity. Nothing to make him important enough to materialize here. 

This is an odd dream, it appears. 

Astarion waits, because if the dream is pushing him to talk to this conjuration he will do so; there's no point in running. There never has been. So he shoves fear and apprehension into gravedirt and straightens, flicking hair over his shoulders, smoothing down his tunic. His hands feel the fabric; his body feels the pressure. 

If he ignores the sun, it almost feels real. 

"Apologies for startling you," the man says, damn near jovial, stopping a few feet away with boots kicking up a spray of sand. "I am Gale—and you?"

He's tall and unkempt, looking like one uncomfortable with the dirt under his nails and over his cheekbones; a noble, or at least from a finer life, with a face that would be familiar if every face wasn't familiar after two hundred years purring nothings in their ears. 

Astarion stays tense. Stays unknowing. 

What is happening?

Dreams are metaphors, panes of glass for real life to stain itself in pretty lessons; but Astarion's dreams, when he can clutch them from fragile unconsciousness sprawled over the kennel's cold floor, have never been like this. His mind doesn't bother with sunlight, with distant shores, with comforts; it sets a dagger in his hand and has Cazador kowtow before him. It makes him win.

This is not winning. It is unlike any dream he has ever had. 

Perhaps it is a nightmare. 

"Astarion," he says, when the silence stretches too long. He doesn't understand but he can recognize when a lead is set before him, when he is given a role to perform; and if that is to play along, then he will sing. Words are only words, and he has such a collection worthy of fooling the dream into believing he is caught in its illusion. 

"Well met," Gale says, a mote of magic dancing off his fingernails. "Now, I'm afraid there's no better way to bring this up; considering we are standing in the wreckage of a fallen illithid ship looking quite worse for wear, I would hazard a guess we are both escaped prisoners of a kind?"

Ah. 

So it will be like that, then. 

Dreams are fragile things, and this one does not appear to realize he has already carved through its mystery to reveal the truth at its core. It's laying a narrative before him, pressing the script into his hand. 

It has always been easier to obey than fight. 

"Yes," Astarion says, stilted. He checks his wrists; no shackles, no burns from them. A different type of prisoner, then. "I escaped, yes."

"I have no plans of becoming a mindflayer," Gale says, rather firmly, as if that's a position he thinks he needs to defend. "I search for a cure. Did you notice anything of use on the ship?"

Astarion is barely following this conversation. He understands every word in ten. "Mindflayer," he repeats. He meant to sound confident. It comes out like a question. 

There is a pause. 

"We're infected," Gale says, and his eyebrows raise to his hairline. "Surely you're aware?"

Infected?

The pain in his skull. 

Something sinks through Astarion's gut. 

Cazador knew well the weaknesses of vampires, how silver chains could burn like fire and momentary exposure to the sun would only injure; how skin could be flayed away with careless precision and bones pried free to be regrown with a few desiccated rats. 

But he did not target the heart, and he did not target the head, for fear of greater consequence. 

Past the murkiness of the dream, the lingering weight to his limbs starvation carries, Astarion can feel it—there's an aching, gnawing bite in the back of his mind, the thrumming pulse of pain that filters down to something dull when he doesn't focus on it. It is unlike anything he's ever felt; like something is living inside him. Something made of teeth. 

Whatever injury knocked him out, it was to his head. 

But the dream wants him to believe it was something else. Anything to keep him from sensing the wound; from finding the truth. 

"My apologies," his mouth puts forth for him, polite and bland. "I don't know the finer details."

Gale laughs, wry. "I imagine few do, yes. It is called ceremorphosis—the act of being infected with an illithid parasite, which is what wriggled through your eye. In a few days, well. I'm afraid we won't be having such a lovely talk, because we will both be sporting tentacles and a taste for brains. Not a particularly desirable outcome."

Astarion hums, because that feels like the right response. Gentle encouragement. Courteous interest.

Ceremorphosis. Surely it would have been easier to fake a poison, a mental compulsion, some psionic aberration of a lesser variety. An injury to the head can be diagnosed as many different things, even one as deep as this one. 

He wonders what it actually is. Perhaps he was stabbed, a hole in his brain to match the one in his neck; that will take an achingly long time to heal. 

A longer time unconscious. A longer freedom.

"Thus I search for a cure," Gale says, clicking his finger together. "And I believe you are as well?"

Astarion sniffs. Touches the back of his head, like he can feel the injury, like his fingers will come back scarlet and dripping. "Of course I am, darling." Another empty response, but with something alive; something like a person, more than a corpse saying the words. Playing the part.  

"Then I don't suppose you would be open to traveling together," Gale says. "Two heads are always better than one—or four, if we count our unwilling guests."

There. The instructions on what to do next, dressed up in fineries instead of ink-soaked commandments. At least this is familiar. 

Soon, this fanciful scene will fade. Soon the dream will return to Baldur's Gate, to the dark and the dread and the dead there, and he will find Cazador, and he will spill black blood over his hands as he tears out the monster's throat, dripping and ragged in viscera—he will kill him, and it will be painful and satisfying and he will make the man beg, plead for mercy and forgiveness that will never come, and he will be free–

But he waits, for now. That fantasy always comes, when he has enough time to dream, when the unconsciousness strikes him curled around flayed forearms and bones scattered like tossed pebbles. Eventually that will come. 

So for now, Astarion merely curls his lips into a too-thin smile, something bristling at the corners and inviting in all the most dangerous of ways. "Why, I'd be delighted," he purrs, and feels some hollow pulse of success in Gale's flushed cheeks. "Lead the way." 

-

The group grows, clawing itself from stragglers and pounding headaches, and Astarion marvels at this batch of fucking heroes his mind has managed to conjure.

Shadowheart is, perhaps, the only one he could expect—she's acrid at the best of moments, entirely unwilling to weigh her conversation with others in anything but bitten insults. She's got the face of a target from long ago, hair hiding the corners, and he can see himself in her; the him before he learned to temper his viciousness with charm, with fluttered eyes and pursed lips. The dream has stitched her together from the Astarion of years past, before the cellar, before the crypt. She's still fighting like she thinks it will do anything, politeness from a forked tongue, and he cannot help but laugh, to love and hate her in equal measure. 

Lae'zel is snappish and cold, which is plenty enough for her to fit in. He's a touch surprised at her features, the reptilian slit to her eyes and forked ears—githyanki are far from common, but Baldur's Gate would be where they show, and perhaps his subconscious has registered enough to create her. But that aside, she is a mess of blades and ignorance of the Material Plane and a brain so sharp he could cut himself on it. Since Gale blasted her out of the shitty cage that hardly deserved to hold her, she has taken to their new team with teeth and trial, and there is a fight that burns in her brighter than any false sun. 

Maybe she is his urge to survive, the dead who wishes not to die again; she's singleminded in dragging the group to the crèche, to the freedom she urges they will find there. A fanciful thing, maybe. But it is even the hope of safety from these parasites, and she clutches it like lifeblood. He can respect that. Respect her, even, with her brutish habit and nonsense words his brain has decided to model after the hiss of a snake. In this dream, she is an ally he will keep. 

And then Wyll. 

The prince-type, the savior. A perfect little hero, here after two hundred years. There is no part of him that is Astarion; he is only the ideal, the concept, the desperate, burning wish to be rescued before Astarion learned no one would save a monster. He's heroic and infuriating with it, carving through goblins and bugbears, teaching little tiefling children how better to line up for slaughter, wrestling the group to do all selfless things and bear the cost themselves. Gale, the eternal optimist, lets him, slips the reins from his hands just for a hunter to pick them up. 

A hunter who doesn't kill Karlach, and is rewarded with a crown of horns for his troubles. It could be a kindness. 

But Astarion can read between the lines, can see what the dream is dragging to his feet like carrion. 

Karlach is the first monster Wyll has spared, and it is because she is brash and bold and good, despite the history heavy over her shoulders. She endeared herself to him in one barked conversation, and then he marched to her tune and killed the faux paladins, and he held true to his decision, even as a devil cursed him. Because Karlach was good.

Astarion is not good. He would not have been saved. 

Karlach is what he could never be, and her time was ten years, and now she is free. 

He wants to hate her. 

But they are all heroes, vicious in their selflessness; he cannot understand why they are who his mind conjured up, why the dream has taken the faces of his previous victims but made them so unlike anything he knows. 

Made them heroes. 

Made them hunters.

But there is sun on his skin and blue overhead; there is freedom over his tongue and a body that remains untouched; there is warmth and peace and choice.

They are heroes. 

If he does not want the dream to end, he will need to play along. 

Let these aspects of his mind, twisted and warped into mockeries, try to claw him awake; let them try to catch him. 

He has not seen the sun in two hundred years. 

Fake though this might be, he will not lose it now. 

-

The first few days are spent cautious, conversations that bubble like freshwater streams, no weight or power behind. They're all testing each other, figuring out where they fit in this newborn truce, whether blade or bane will catch their back. 

It is like watching foals trample around in search of their mothers, and Astarion relishes in some small dose of reprise as everyone is too suspicious of each other to single him out. He spins daggers and arrows from the shadows, tucks into darkness like an old friend as they carve their way across the lands, hunting for answers to the mystery. The dream is well-crafted, he'll give it that; each area they come across is sculpted to near realism and each person they encounter believable, though he can see himself in them all. Some aspect, some reflection. His subconscious has nothing else to pull from. 

Camp is crowded, tents tucked tight to each other, but it is not the bedchamber, with bunks piled high, and it is not the kennel, rags thrown to be fought over for the memory of comfort. He arranges his tent off to the side and fills it with pillows, meaningless nothings he takes from everyone else when their backs turn. Sprawls on them, fingers sinking into fabric, nothing like papery sheets. He gathers trinkets and artefacts for little more than to have something, to fill this fantasy with ownership and possession of anything other than himself. 

Thrice now has he tranced, a dream within a dream, and thrice still has he woken in this fallacy of comfort. 

He wonders how much more time he has. 

How soon until it all comes crumbling down. 

-

Half a tenday in, Lae'zel brings back a slaughtered elk and dumps it with unceremonious grace before Gale. 

The rest of the party looks over. Particularly as the creature's head lolls to land on the ground with an indecent crunch.

Lae'zel just raises an eyebrow, nudging it closer with the flat of her boot. "Food," she barks, when it becomes clear the wizard will keep blinking up at her in silence. "You may content yourself with potatoes and radishes—but I require meat. Use this."

"Ah," Gale says, rather delicately. He prods at the dead creature's pelt with a look of true discomfort. "And this is coming to me, because?"

"Chk. You have prepared our other meals," she says, arms crossed. "Is that not your chosen task?"

Gale's expression says that yes, it is—when he was merrily chopping old vegetables and monologuing about what herbs he's found on their travels. 

The dead elk stares reproachfully, sprawled before his lap. 

Wyll huffs a distant cousin to a laugh. "I can help you prepare it," he offers, sheathing his blade and slipping his whetstone back into his pack. "Thank you, Lae'zel—if we smoke it, that should be enough to tide us over until we can return to the Grove."

She scoffs. "We need more. A warrior cannot fight her best on scraps. The crèche will not wait for hollow stomachs; I will hunt more."

Astarion, across the fire, threading filigree over the poor stitching of his stolen tunic in an attempt to stay grounded and aware, goes very still. 

The elk, dead, arrow shaft buried in the meat of its neck. Black hooves against dirt, umber fur against bark. A creature. A beast. 

It cannot think. 

Half a tenday has he sat around the fire with them, bringing vacant spoonfuls to his lips and dumping his bowl when their gazes flick away—half a tenday has starvation roiled in his gut, familiar in its agony, and he just let it. 

His dreams never last beyond killing Cazador. He has never made a choice for himself. 

But though he smiles thin to hide fangs and spins elaborate fables about the life of a Baldurian magistrate, he is not bound to rats in the kennel and emptiness with the excuse of broken rules. Cazador's commandments still allow him food if he hunts it himself; and this is just a dream, just dead memories. Nothing to stop him. 

The forest is on their threshold. It is full of life.

He is tired of starving. 

Astarion volunteers for guard that night—by which he means he puts up a token protest when he's told it is his turn, a familiar sort of paltry resistance, the fakery of words against even as he obeys—and waits, stitching little silver lines through the ruffled top of his shirt, as the others fall asleep. Lae'zel and Wyll are blindingly efficient at it, gone as soon as their head touches the ground, used to grabbing mere seconds when they can snag them. Gale shifts and turns and mumbles annoyances about the hard ground, but his tent goes quiet before long. Shadowheart is silent as ever, darkness curling around, and Karlach stays tense and coiled even as her eyes flutter closed. 

He waits, until the moon crests the horizon and the crickets come alive, before slipping upright, gathering his dagger. Stops. Sets it back. 

Walks into the forest. 

The dream is kind; creatures run to and fro, blood-scent heavy on the air, full of prey unaware of the predator released in their midst. He abandons grace and lopes on hands and feet, a beast, an animal—and sinks his fangs into the quivering throat of a boar. 

Blood explodes through him. It is rich and vibrant and alive; choking in its intensity, in its liquid gold. Astarion keens, fisting at the coarse fur, hunched over and pulling them both to the ground. The boar croaks and bellows, but its thrashes weaken, and the bruises it clubs into Astarion's stomach with its hooves swell purple and blue with blood. With something in the veins beneath. 

He drinks and drinks and drinks.

Hours pass, or maybe minutes, the boar little more than desiccation and ruin; sounds, movement. The wake and ruffle of trees. Astarion blinks. 

Dawn rises, brushing against his skin, sprawled in the dirt and the shuddering fantasy of being full.

With a groan, he pushes himself upright, limbs shaking as the muscles within have a chance to grow for the first time in centuries, strength he's never known crawling over his body. The world is active and curling, the twitter of distant birds. Light, through the leaves—he looks up to see the sky, marred with clouds. They aren't like yesterday, soft and pillowing; they scour over the blue in jagged lines. He wonders how the dream knows to make them so sharp, when all the paintings he's seen have them soft. 

Astarion stares at it, blood pooling in his mouth. 

When he wakes, he will starve again. But he will have memories, false and stitched together, of being full—of sinking his fangs into living things instead of bloated corpses, tasting red instead of black. 

There is still the ache in his head. He thought it was from injury. 

Perhaps this dream is Cazador's doing. A cruelty, to show him what he will never have. 

Perhaps this is not a kindness at all.

-

Astarion can feel the effect immediately. 

He moves faster, sharper. His eyes lock onto targets. The world moves but he moves with it, dancing forward with delicacy, no more arching backs and breathy words but now power, danger. 

Of being a threat.

"Hells of a hit, soldier!" Karlach calls, tugging her greataxe from a bugbear's split skull; she's nodding to the goblin booyahg with a dagger in its throat, buried to the hilt, blade jabbing through the back of its neck. 

"Why, thank you, darling," Astarion preens. It comes easy and empty. "I try."

-

The dream has loosened his chains, freed his tongue, but it does not have the decency of limiting pain. 

Astarion hisses around the missing gash in his arm, the jagged offset of skin from flesh—blood so freshly drank spills over pale white, blotting his shirt and dripping down his fingers. A rabbit this time, killed as he snuck out past Shadowheart's tired guard, fangs piercing grey fur; but it's soured by being in his body, bitter and decayed. A spawn's blood is never anything more than poison. 

It is not much. Hardly a bother, hardly an annoyance; he cannot bleed out, will only grow weaker, but never die. Godey would call it a pitiful attempt at pain. 

Godey is rarely incorrect on matters like that.

Beyond, the fight wraps itself up, bellows and yelps dying to groans. Gale flicks a fire bolt at the last gnoll, the undead thing shrieking as its fur catches—it slumps to the ground and the party slumps in turn to weary relief. They've been ambushed more and more often over the past days, draining vitality even as they search ever on for a cure, but they can hardly afford to take a rest as more and more blabbers of ceremorphosis fill the air. 

The others cluster and crowd, winding down, shouting questions at each other to check in; seeing if they will continue for today, or break for camp.

Astarion wavers.

His forearm is missing a chunk, flesh like knotted worms peeking through the gap in skin, and it sits heavy and starkly in sight. It's old and familiar, the ache; he has been made to discover and explore avenues of pain most creatures could not imagine. This is, quite truly, nothing.

But the others won't see it that way. 

Astarion hums, frowning down at his arm. He reaches out and tries to pull the skin together, slipping his fingers under the flap to tug at it; an answering pain on the other side. Too wide to pinch closed. No bone visible, no tendons, but plenty of cut veins. Open meat.

He's good at this, at the apathy—staring at his body like it belongs to someone else. 

"Astarion!"

Gale, puffing over, one hand clasped to his head and a wince on his face. "You didn't—ah, hells, where's Shadowheart?—respond. Any crooked nails over here?"

He takes the time to roll his eyes completely around his head. "Oh, I'm so glad you came; I've this devilish little patch of dry skin. I'm worried even the treasuries of Silvershield can't provide enough for healing."

Astarion is too slow, though. His fingers slip from his wound but there isn't enough time to hide it, to wrap the weakness in layers of clothing and shadow and vitriol until it disappears entirely. 

Gale's brows furrow. "That's far from a love tap," he says, frowning. "Will you need to rest?"

Astarion sees an opportunity to take offense and does so with gusto—here is a script he knows, well-worn tracks and daggers laid under stone pavers. Familiarity with twin claws in the gut. "I'm quite well-managed in combat, love. One little wound is hardly reason enough to kick me to the pits."

Gale sighs. "Not like that. Taking time to heal isn't the end of the world. Our parasites have already proven themselves outliers; one day apart will not turn you into a monster."

Turn him into a monster? What a polite notion. 

Astarion smiles, lips pressed flat to his fangs so they don't show. "I'm fine, darling. No need to worry your pretty little head over it." He shifts, pressing the cut flat to his side—it'll be hells to wash the blood out after, but hiding it is more important. "Now, where was the note that so kindly pointed us in this direction? I'd like to set it on fire."

The bait doesn't land. The wizard just hums, fumbling at his pockets; from within the purple robes he hasn't managed to replace with anything satisfactory to his fashion-blind eyes, he tugs out a bottle, filled with crimson. A healing potion. 

Gale smiles, damn near gently. "We can handle the search for a day—rest at camp, Astarion. Take a break."

Astarion bites down on his flinch before it can show. 

The worst part is that he wants it. 

He wants it, wants them to smooth injuries and stitch together undead flesh until he is hale again. No cost, no ask; just given. And his dream could have leaned into the fantasy, could make these heroes truly heroic, selfless, offering healing unbound and untethered. 

But this is a dream made from his mind, and he has never known kindness; or if he has, he doesn't remember it, scoured away in the crypt and the rot beneath. 

Gale's eyes seem warm. The potion bottle is bright. 

The party is terrified of the parasites. 

They are consumed by it, singleminded in their drive to find a cure; Gale spent the first few days writing feverish research down and Lae'zel hissed with a primal fear as the day of expected transformation came and passed. Nothing has happened, thanks to Shadowheart's mystery artefact, but they all speak in hushed fear of the gnawing presence in the back of their skulls, and they will not stop until they are free from it. 

The thought of taking a day for rest is foreign. Alien. False. They would not do it themselves. 

For Gale to offer, it means he believes Astarion is less help in the hunt than the others. That he can rest, and the party will not suffer for it; that their search for a cure can continue unhindered. That Astarion can stay behind, tending the camp, until their return. No longer allowed to help in that way. 

He has many avenues of approximate usefulness. 

But there is only one he can offer while they force him to rest under the excuse of injury. 

They won't demand it, Astarion knows. That would break the illusion; he cannot imagine perfect, picturesque Wyll holding a healing potion behind his back until Astarion gets on his knees, or Shadowheart wringing blesses from his clever tongue. He would know it was fake, and the dream is ever so determined to keep him from realizing. 

But it doesn't have to force him. There is no thrall, there is only desperation; an animal fear of waking up. 

In truth, they will likely not even ask. They will simply send him to the camp for injuries, and then to travel faster, and then for no excuse at all; and he will slip, piece by piece, until soon they abandon him altogether and the dream ends. 

No. They will not ask. 

He will have to offer.

The dream has played its cards, then. 

At least he knows what to expect. A most gracious acquiesce, instead of letting him fumble through script after script until he finds what his subconscious is prompting him to say. This could even be a victory—proof that this is little more than a dream, a fantasy of freedom and sunlight and blue.

It does not feel like one. 

"Well," Astarion says, prettily, "I suppose if you are providing."

"I am," Gale says. His voice is frightfully firm. "We're a team, Astarion. No one stays injured while we can prevent it."

How kind of them. How perfectly heroic. 

His mind knows how to hit where it hurts. He shouldn't be surprised he is so effective at attacking himself; it is all he has ever known. 

-

His wound heals under the potion, skin flush against itself, only a faint white shape that will fade the next time he sinks fangs into a beating heart—but his sleeves are splattered with the stench of acidic blood, and he would rather that go away. 

He has plenty of time, after all. A day of rest, while the others search the countryside. A day to prepare. 

A day to distract himself from the trembling animal in his chest. 

Astarion disappears into the trees, shoulders tucked tight to his sides. He cannot think about it so he doesn't, buries it deep into a grave, next to all the others he's dug over the years. Frees himself from concerns that do not matter, because he can panic and fret as much as he likes, but it will not change the outcome. There is only the action; the justification comes after, as protection, as a fragile attempt to explain away why it is happening. 

But for today, Astarion heads to distant shadows, ears perked for a familiar sound. The river rushes by, bouncing over stones and gurgling deep into the rapids sprawled over its breadth. Running water. He takes some gentle delight in splaying his hand over the surface, dipping under the blue—no burns. No pain. Nothing more than water. 

The dream can be soft, at times. Never before has he fantasized about crossing rivers, far too focused on larger mercies, but now that he can he relishes in it. In stripping his clothes and splashing into the depths, as he does now, kicking up sprays in childish glee. The river is cold and aching with it, but he is always cold, and he sinks into an eddy with a murmured hum. 

Astarion leans back, resting his head on the pebbled shore. Water trails through his hair, twining down his chest, lapping at his skin. He cleans himself with careless precision, a well-worn ritual, now with room to sprawl instead of a cramped washtub.

His fingers brush over his back, over the scars, raised welts time will never heal. 

Astarion pauses. 

He tries, for a second, to change things—to imagine smooth skin unmarred by a madman's poetry and memories of a night in agony. To unshackle one piece of history, let the river catch and drag it away. 

Still the scars. Still the poem.

Astarion sits in the river and closes his eyes. 

The dream will grant him healing. Will spin together a group of heroes who welcome him into the fold, let him play pretend he is one of them, he is free; but it will not erase his past. Erase what he has done to survive—what he will continue to do, just for fear of waking up.

Ever the liar. Ever the whore. Ever the monster. 

A dream can be many things, after all. But it cannot remove that which cannot be removed. 

-

After a tenday in this fractured mockery of reality, Astarion wakes from his trance before dawn, as he does now with consistency, and rises. 

Camp is silent around him, the soft inhale-exhale of many breaths and voices that murmur with latent snores. Lae'zel is on guard, and her slitted eyes flash over to him, fire-bright in their intensity; but Astarion just bobs his head, all polite, all demure, and she scoffs, turning away. Not a threat. Merely a team member, in her eyes. 

What an honour, to be perceived as belonging. 

He slips from camp, passing through shadowed trees and brambles, until he finds the spot—he'd seen it coming in yesterday, an outcropping within a copse, flat boulder pressed through the earth in amber-gold. The canopy breaks overhead, revealing the sky. 

It is a useless ritual, little more than clawing memories to clutch before the dream cracks in full, but still he finds himself doing it. 

Astarion clambers up, boots newly liberated from a raider's carcass gripping firm to the stone; he arranges himself on its peak, legs braced, head tilted back. Already the purple is brightening, morning rising between. 

He waits, with perhaps not patience, but at least anticipation. 

The sun spiders over the horizon, twining delicate fingers of gold on the surrounding forest to turn the emerald alight. Twilight clouds soften from black to grey to white, filling in, stars fading beneath their majesty.

It is beautiful. 

If he were a poet, he would write about it, pen delicate stanzas about the sky to carry back when he wakes up. He's never had the tongue for pretty words with meaning, though. Only false compliments to lavish over those unloved in taverns and nobles who wish to feel important. 

The sky deserves more than that, he thinks.

So Astarion just sits, lets gold trickle over the forest until it lights up his pale skin, warmth burrowing deep within. It is not enough to wake his dead heart but he can imagine it, for a second, inhaling useless air and squinting up at the yellow; play wonderful pretend of being a person, of being Astarion Ancunín, long dead and buried. 

Ten sunrises has he seen. Each is more lovely than the last. 

"Ah, there you are!"

Astarion doesn't flinch, far too obvious a reaction. He turns instead, a casual twist over the shoulder, nothing more than idle curiosity. 

It's Gale, because of course it is. He's dreadfully persistent, particularly as the world shifts and sways against time, when hours pass in blinks and his lectures have no more than a moment between before picking up again. Whatever aspect of Astarion's consciousness he is, it is a bastard. 

But to break the bastard is to break the dream, and so Astarion merely rolls his eyes, leaning back with a lavish stretch that pulls his ruffled top over his collarbones. "Oh, I'm dreadfully sorry. I'll be sure to write a full proposal every time I wish to take five steps from your side."

Gale just laughs, long fingers flicking in mock reproach. "I'm sure there is no better use of your time, dear magistrate. Well-read though I am, I'm certain you could find a way to word it so even I would find it incomprehensible."

Astarion sniffs. "The bylaws are almost as entertaining as you."

"Then I shall be enraptured." Gale strides over, pausing on the offset of the hill; he squints up at the sky overhead, dawn snaking her last orange fingers beneath the horizon as cerulean overtakes it. "A fine day it seems, wouldn't you say? All the better to finally venture into this wretched village."

A fine day. That's a nice enough phrase, and Astarion rolls it over on his tongue, lets it weigh against his fangs. It could be, in the abstract, being warm and calm and sunny. 

Overhead, the sky is blue. 

Astarion rests his elbows on his knees, half for ease, half to curl his fingers around the hilt of the hidden dagger in his left boot. Does it truly change so often? New patterns of clouds each day, weaving themselves together, a latticework of brilliance against every shade of blue? He's seen deep navy, velvet-rich; a pale whisper of blue, so light it seemed as a memory more than actuality; oranges and reds and pinks woven together in a tapestry worthy of adorning some foppish lord's wall. The paintings have only ever had it as blank and indistinct, a mere backdrop for whatever they desired to capture. Never the focus. 

He doesn't know. He doesn't know many things, but this one sticks with him, the uneasiness of prey in an exposed field. 

"Is this normal?" Astarion asks, vague, and flicks a hand to the sky. To the endless, stretched like lace behind his fingers. "How it looks?"

Gale squints at it, then him. "Well, that would require a debate on normality," he says, drumming his fingers over his side. "Weather is, of course, as transmutable as they come, often without any real consistency. And certainly not with those sorcerers who so love running around to kick up storms where storms should not be. But I suppose for Faerûn, this seems typical enough, with spring in the air and summer fast approaching. Particularly with the–"

His words fade to a distracting background buzz, crickets in the distance. Astarion tunes them out with a callous kind of ease, anything to aim his frustration at instead of himself. 

Because of course. 

Astarion doesn't know. His mind doesn't, either. The dream cannot make facts from ignorance.

He stares up at it regardless, at the watercolour splashed between clouds. 

Perhaps the sky is only blue, vague and blurry to all; but he welcomes the dream and its illusions, for how little they may mean. It is a comfort he will try to remember when he wakes up. 

-

The party grows sharper. Grows dangerous, in more than their fumbling inadequacy at entendre and bullish propensity for aggravating every soul they come across; they clad themselves in new armour and hone new weapons and cast new spells. Common foes are felled with ease and they talk of taking on greater challenges, talk of trying what they fled from again. They talk of pushing onward.

They talk of a return to their strength before the tadpoles.

Astarion echoes their sentiment when the opportunity presents itself. It rings with anything but truth.

He has never been strong. 

He still isn't. 

But they are, and they brandish this strength, fire in their fervor; he can flit in the shadows for now, fake power to match theirs, curl up beneath hidden daggers and arrows unseen. 

It will not hide him forever. The gap grows and grows, sapped by blood he drains too fast and does not have to fill the void. Soon he will no longer be enough.

Useless in one way. 

Perhaps not in others. 

-

He slithers out of Lae'zel's tent after the moon has fallen past its peak, a corpse caught in the movement; it is only when his feet splash in the river he comes back to himself, blinking at the world as it jerks and stutters on. 

It is but a dream. None of this matters; none of this is real. The scratches on his back are little more than memories stitched together to feel genuine; the ache in his tongue is a distant fettered thing he has grown well used to. Nothing more. Nothing less. He buries it back in its grave, in the ash and ruin of two hundred years. 

When he wakes up, he will not have chosen to do this willingly; because it never happened. None of this is real.

He slips out of his tunic and into the water, grey and rushing under twilight. It's simple, old habit, to smooth down all rough edges and evidence, pretty himself back to perfection. Dirt and blood and more. 

Lae'zel was kind, in her own brutish way. Kinder than those he remembers. Leading, with clear expectations for what she wanted, and no propensity for worse beyond the strength of arms he simply couldn't match. She'd been quick to accept and quicker to move forward. A good first choice. 

Perhaps she will protect him, if she sees him as something to own. More nights with her, with anyone that will open their tent for simpering words and delicate looks; perhaps he can barter for safety, for all he cannot have freedom. 

Astarion drags water up his arms, smooths them over. Puts his garb back on, adjusts the matted curls of his hair so they will dry soft. Cleans worries from the corners of his eyes. Buries fear in its ancient coffin.

He cannot be their equal in a fight. Cannot be useful in that matter. 

What kindness, then, that Cazador trained him so well in other ways. 

-

The next day, Lae'zel is warmer. That could be an exaggeration, because it is fed through the callous ice she treats them all with—but she's different, to the keen eyes he's locked onto her. 

She speaks to him more readily. Gives him pointers on his stance. Allows him to walk beside her on the trail. 

Another victory to claim, then. Another proof he is so desperate to collect, to keep from slipping into the fantasy, to believing this is genuine.

If they were real people, this is not what they would do. He's a cheap lay, a quick fuck; Lae'zel should be avoiding him, if anything. Should scowl at him who came to her openly, despite knowing her for so little time.

But the dream has let this strategy work. Is telling him, in the same certain terms as the hunger in his chest, that this is where he will find his use. 

Yesterday, he watched pale orange scatter over evening stars and marveled at dawn's gentle embrace. That was new, and they were miracles. 

He wonders how many miracles the dream will have before the cost is no longer worth it. 

-

The days crawl on with frightful consistency, each bringing new battles with enemies that are never as tired as they are. They collapse at camp in weary exhaustion every evening, meals thrown together from scraps and ill-preparedness, and the delegation of keeping guard becomes an injustice. 

Astarion hunts less and less, as his body breaks down from the combat. He becomes hungry. He becomes weak. 

But he's used to that, to starvation. It's simple, to hide the worst under ricocheted insults and biting words, until they are so caught in their frustration they don't look deeper. 

He is ever so good at it, after all. 

For today, Lae'zel and Wyll are off hunting, taking what flecks of sunlight still remain to light their paths as they carve through the nearby forest. Shadowheart is praying in her tent, Karlach sharpening her weapon. A slumped ending to a long day and longer night.

Astarion sits by the fire, prim, and merely raises an eyebrow as Gale joins him. The man yawns, molars flashing as he sprawls back against the log. His fingers are held wearily to the flickering warmth. "I miss my home," he says in lieu of a proper greeting, morose. "What it lacks in company it makes up in comforts; good food, better books, a bed with true sheets and a place to rest my head that does not come accompanied with pebbles."

A devil of a surprise, really. Wizards are often native to comfort—Gale, so verbose and extravagant, could not have come from anything but civilization. Astarion hums, empty and ambiguous.

"What of you?" Gale asks, head tilting to the side. "A home of your own you'll be returning to once we're free? The rest of our merry troupe seems more content for the wilderness; I'm glad we may at least commiserate over the fineries of life."

Astarion snorts. Fineries indeed. "Oh, a rather simple abode, I'm afraid," he says, plucking at his collar. "The life of a magistrate is a comfortable one, though lacking in the many amenities you're familiar with. But it is enough for me."

"You live alone?" Gale asks, curious. "No–" he trips over whatever word he was about to say in graceless inconvenience, but soldiers admirably on. "No paramours?"

Undeath keeps him still, poised. His flinch is nothing more than a shift from adjusting his sprawl.

It has only been Lae'zel to this point, who sees carnal pleasures as little more than they are—Wyll desires some fairytale romance, Shadowheart sees it as weakness, Karlach wants it with a helpless urgency. But he's making progress, slipping bottles of wine into Shadowheart's tent and dropping mentions of how little the darker gods—particularly their followers—don't bother him. Watching a truly insipid dance around the campfire and clapping when polite. Purring quiet things that makes Karlach's eyes go black and full. His attempts on Gale have been more subtle, still unsure of the wizard's motivations; but perhaps he needs to worry less. 

Two hundred years have left him with an expertise even in dream, it seems. 

Astarion leans in, a lavish little thing that curls boots into soil and lets snowy curls billow before his eyes. "Quite unattached, I'm afraid."

Gale swallows. Glances away. "I see," he says, and appears to wrangle his composure back like a ravaging beast. He's mostly successful. 

Astarion taps his fingers over his thigh, shifting so a slit of pale skin cracks through the folds in his shirt. Nothing but what he knows. Old habits. 

"I'm more familiar with those of mannish lifespans," Gale admits, as if that will salvage the conversation's direction and distract from the scarlet tangling over his ears. "For us, it's not atypical to live with our parents at your age. Is your mother or father around?"

Astarion jabs his nails into the meat of his wrists. 

Father. He must have had one, for his existence, someone that brushed an infant's hair out of his eyes and held his hand as he toddled his first steps; but that man was lost to the death in the alley, and his memory to the crypt. The only man who calls himself father is the one who prefers sire, and it has never been a family any more than it has been a benevolence. 

This dream is not reality. 

"Very, very dead, darling," Astarion says, and smiles. It is entirely unkind. "He's all the better for it, I can assure you."

"Ah." There's a faint flush to his cheeks, the embarrassment of someone who knows he's stumbled face first into the jagged edges of someone's history and doesn't quite know how to pick himself out without lacerations. "My apologies, Astarion. I didn't mean to pry."

Oh, he did. He's more often termite than he is human, gnawing deep at anything set before him so he can puzzle out the mysteries. There is no question he does not find worth asking and answering.

Astarion still hasn't figured out what he is. What part of himself has reshaped itself into this wizard, this conglomerate of irritating ideals and ignorant ideations. He has never been one for knowing the details of life, beyond the facts he carves into himself for fear of disobedience; the books he enjoys are fantasies with poor prose and poorer characters but at least a breath of a world outside. 

The man before him does not make sense to exist in the dream.

Gale has the face of a victim, so many years ago. Brunet instead of blond, brown eyes instead of green; but the shape is the same, the purse to his lips identical. Astarion tries not to remember them. He rarely succeeds. 

The silence stretches.

"I believe I've made things awkward," Astarion says, light, airy. "Please, return us to kinder topics—tell me more of your tressym. Tara, was it?"

Gale welcomes the distraction, spilling back into delightfully dull stories of his creature companion amidst his tower's isolation. Of a world empty, no break for life or living, for all he tries to brighten his tales with magical revelations and spells learned. It sounds lonely. It sounds familiar.

Astarion tries not to think about it. 

He doesn't succeed at that, either. 

-

Astarion's trance cannot be called a reverie. 

He is in a dream within a dream; the forest of their camp melts into stone walls and the skitter of claws behind plaster, the reek of poisoned blood and bloated corpses. He pants, shackles scorching around his neck, his wrists, his waist—no clothes and an ache below, salt on his tongue, thrall pounding behind his eyes. 

The kennel. The crypt. They blur together. Both at once and neither, something new, the alley, the grey, the clatter of old bones and broken jaw, claws on skin, memories, reality, lips forming please please please despite how it means nothing–

He wakes with cruel laughter in his ears. A last gift, a parting echo; the words hook through his naval. 

Thou shalt know that thou art mine. 

Astarion wheezes around useless air, clutching at his chest. 

Gods, how he knows, how he fucking knows—even in a dream that shows him the sun and frees him from the city and gives him blood he can still fucking feel the thrall, heavy in his ribcage, a quivering promise it will one day reconnect to his sire. Grass beneath him but all he can feel is stone, rags bunched between twitching fingers, the click of bones walking closer. He trembles, a star caught in a storm, grasping at his shirt like that will keep it on if someone decides to rip it off. 

This is a dream. This is a fucking dream, and he will prove it, will shatter past all the work it has done to convince him otherwise, all the play and pretend and posturing that he is anything more than a beast on a chain. 

He can feel the thrall in his gut. The commandments lurk in his marrow. He should not be able to drink; not unless his subconscious has conjured a fantasy. 

Fear cradles his mind.

He hadn't wanted to do this. Had wanted to stay in the hopeless impossibility, the idea that perhaps it was true; but he can't continue like this. Can't not know.

Astarion drags himself upright, shoving off his pillows with shuddering inelegance; his fingers splay uselessly over the ground as he pushes to his feet, knotting into his tunic, shaking down to the bone. Wyll is on watch but he will sit by the fire, and Astarion has always positioned his tent furthest away, the rebellion of a surly child.

He slips into the dark, fumbling on unsteady feet, and heads to the left; sticks to the shadows, cloaking himself in obscurity, in pale remains of freedom. Gale's tent is closest, purple and strung with wizardly trinkets, and he is the one who welcomed Astarion to the group without hesitation, who vouched for him amidst the others' skepticism about his place. He is the one the dream has spent the most time on, crafting him into the perfect idealization of a man who is not a hunter, is not a killer, is not one with a stake tight in his grasp. 

If any of them are fake, it is Gale, and Astarion needs to know.

So he pushes back the flap, untying the twine knot with nails bitten down to the quick; creeps inside. 

Gale is curled on his side, limbs pulled tight to his chest, a furrow between his brow as though a nightmare has grasped him roughly. A final appeal for mercy, the dream trying to keep him from figuring it out, but Astarion is past caring. He kneels, brushes Gale's hair off of his neck, and bites. 

It's–

It's horrible. 

Bile, twisted and acidic, like rot and corpses and poison—Astarion gags, tearing his fangs free, fumbling back. He spits it out, but it sinks into his tongue, latches deep into his senses like oil, like plague. Like death. 

He doesn't– he doesn't know what the blood of thinking creatures tastes like, and all the dream can do is offer rats. Just desiccated cadavers stuffed with garlic oil, what he lapped from stone pavers after months without. There is strength with it, the few drops flowing through his veins, but it is wretched and rotten and vile.

Cazador would not hum as exultantly as he did when he drained Astarion's victims if they tasted like this. 

It is a dream, then. 

Or perhaps nightmare, as Gale flinches upright, scarlet trickling from twin punctures in his neck. "Astarion," he manages, bleary, confused. "What–"

Then his hand slips up, pressing against his throat, and he goes very still indeed. 

Astarion slumps, trembling down to his bones. Warm blood pools before his knees, sinking into the soil, and he can feel streaks over his lips, down his chin; ever a messy eater, unfamiliar with the precision needed. 

Two tendays hiding his nature, keeping it bound beneath secrets and lies and fluttered eyes, and it all comes crumbling down. 

He wonders how the dream will react. If it will kill him now he knows its secret, end him as he's sunk to the bottom of his own actions; or continue, let him drag himself through the misery of revelation, in this party of heroes and killers and hunters. 

Gale's ashen in the dark, fingers clutched to his chest. But his eyes are focused, sleep cut away with methodical technique, and already magic sparks over his palms. "Astarion," he says, and his voice is low and poised. Not yet a growl, but flirting with it, hovering on the edge of an active threat. "I would suggest you explain yourself. Quickly."

Astarion shakes. The thrall wraps its maw around his awareness, jagged, laughing at him for ever thinking he could try; that he could succeed. The urge comes to bow. To prostrate himself here, keep his eyes pinned to the ground, promise servitude in return for life—anything to keep from waking up. From returning. 

"I'm sorry," he gasps, and it comes out weak and scared. It comes out real. "I– I wasn't going to, I just needed to–"

I just needed to know.

The dream will not take kindly to being reminded of its non-existence. 

"You bit me," Gale says, low and viscous. He rises to his knees so they're mirrored, red light stretching up his elbows, filling the tent like sickly fire. "You're a vampire."

"A vampire spawn," Astarion corrects, fumbling. "Hardly so dangerous, I swear, little more than a human–"

"That is what someone exceptionally dangerous would say."

Astarion laughs. It comes fragile and cracking at the edges, hands pushed before him like he can ward off the death, can ward off the release from the dream and return to the kennel—like he can escape. "I'm not," he pleads. "I'm not, truly, you could kill me easily–"

There is no dignity in begging. But there has never been, and he throws himself into it, slithering down until he's lower than Gale, staring up with eyes blown wide and arms wrapped tight around his chest. Helpless, harmless—but blood drips down his face and fangs peek through his lips. Monster. Monster.

Gale's brow furrows. "You walk in the sunlight," he says, frowning. "And we've passed rivers. How?"

The dream, Astarion thinks, delirious. "The tadpole," he says instead, clawing answers from nothing. "It– it protects me, lets me avoid such things, that's all. I'm not dangerous. I'm not dangerous."

His face drops into a scowl. "Then why did you bite me?"

Because I thought I was free, because I thought I was alive, because I thought this was real. He chokes over useless answers and graceless fumbling, terror scouring at his useless organs, bone-deep and crushing. Air heaves in his chest. "I won't– I won't again, I swear, I swear. It was–" a break, a failure, trying to be more than animal "–nothing more than a momentary lapse. I'm better. I won't."

"But why did you?"

Questions, questions, curiosity at the end of a track with blood; Astarion wheezes. He's shaking. The world has narrowed to a pinprick of red light reflecting over his sight. "A taste. Just a taste, nothing more—I feed on beasts. Creatures. I've never– I won't bite any of you. Not again. I swear."

The wizard stares at him. Astarion hunches in on himself, not flat on his back but feeling it, kissing leather and wrapping himself in silver. This is worse than meaningless pleas for mercy he knows won't come; worse because he wants it, because the price is not pain but an ending, a return to the nightmare. 

He wants it, and he will gut himself to get it, and that doesn't matter because it has never been his to give. 

Please, he's whispering, though his lips stay frozen and his eyes don't move. Please. Give me more time. Don't send me back.

The dream, fragile. Him, falling apart. 

"Go," Gale says finally. His voice is still hard and flat but the red disappears from his fingers, twining down into the darkness of the tent. "Go, Astarion. We will discuss this in the morning."

Mercy. Mercy.

"Thank you," Astarion gasps, babbling, shooting up to his feet—he ducks and sways with the motion, punch-drunk, and stumbles back. "Thank you, I won't–"

Words fail. They fall flat and useless, no longer a weapon, no longer a shield. He crashes through the flap of the tent, throwing it closed behind him—ignores Wyll, looking over with confusion, and runs to the forest. Disappears into the trees, into the shadows, until he comes to huddled against a rocky outcropping with dew soaking through his pants. 

Tears, running down his face. 

Astarion sobs, empty and broken, and curls around nothing. 

Freedom. He'd thought this dream was freedom, a break from captivity; he thought it had pulled all the strings to give him a false shot at something more. Imagination of a life beyond. 

But that would be kindness. And his mind cannot create what it doesn't know. 

It is a choice of chains; does he live with these heroes, these hunters, carve himself hollow and tame? No thrall but now just obedience, self-dulled claws, much as any commanded spawn passed between noble's beds; a delight with vacant eyes?

Or does he let it break, and go back to the agony that is at least familiar?

He does not trance. He does not think, hours passing by until dawn crawls back, the forest creaking and clicking to awareness. He does not move until Gale's words strike him—his life, to be decided in the morning. He stands. He brushes himself down. He heads back to camp. 

Overhead, the sky is blue. 

-

Gale tells the others, because there is no world in which he doesn't. 

Wyll radiates fury, hand on his blade, Karlach looking lost and confused—Lae'zel sets her jaw and Shadowheart summons radiant energy to coil at the ready. Astarion cowers before them and pretends he isn't, smile trembling, promising pacts and contracts and commands to be followed. Never will he bite another soul, never will he threaten them; personal pet vampire, leashed, following at their beck and call. 

He'll be good. He swears. He swears.

They don't kick him out, but it's a narrow thing, with shifty eyes and armour adjusted so it wraps around their throats. Astarion could have guessed that. His subconscious has stitched together the harshest of realities. At least in death he would be free, safe in the oblivion; but here he must beg. Must grovel on his belly in the dirt, yap like a trained dog until they believe him harmless. 

The dream does not give him the freedom of fighting back. It eats his pretty words, chews through his charm until it's little more than desperation. Defanged and poised and pleading. 

It is as it always is, after all. 

-

Days pass in revolting speed. 

He cannot afford to distance himself, to blink and let hours pass by, let the dream unshackle itself from reality to get to the next scene; he must be there, present, proving himself. So he sits around the fire, stitching new designs with shaking fingers, smiling coy and half-lidded when they talk to him. He bites down on insults, swallows anything the dream could hear as an attack; drains himself down to the marrow to pose as little more than a doll. 

This is familiar, at least. The dream is ever so kind as to provide tasks he can perform. 

The others stay tense and stilted, conversations stuttering to a halt—but they are fools, the lot of them, and soon they talk and laugh again. He doesn't intrude on meals anymore, slipping off to the forest, washing his tunic after each hunt so not a drop of blood is visible; and slowly, they seem to– not forget, because that is an impossibility, but at least relax.

A spawn is he. Not a lord, not a threat, hardly more than an elf with pale skin and odd diet. He clings to the idea, simpers emptily about difficult roads and irritating bedrolls, a magistrate caught in the wilderness—but that is dangerous in itself, that he will prove too delicate for staying with them. 

He wavers on the edge of a knife. It has ever been his way. 

Gale doesn't forget, though. Once the pinpricks in his neck heal, he marches right over while Astarion sits stiff as an impaled deer, parchment in hand and curiosity on his tongue. Astarion is the first vampire spawn he has encountered, you see, and he will likely never have this chance again; surely there is no harm in a few questions. 

Another book to fill the shelves, then. A source of answers that comes breathing instead of leather-bound—or breathing, since Astarion has forced himself to maintain the illusion, though the secret is spilled like rotten guts. 

Gale asks with politeness, at least, though he rarely accepts silence. Vampires are, of course, fantastically rare, since to create another is to create a threat, and they cling to undeath with more fervour than the living ever have. 

Astarion answers in bland apathy. Why does it matter? When he wakes up, not a soul will know. The weaknesses of a vampire spawn are common to hunters, and doubtless Wyll has told them in preparation for the worst—for the best, if they grow tired of him. What he can say is little more than stakes and decapitation, watching Gale's quill scritch against the parchment with sickness in his throat. 

Dreams are metaphors, pale reflections of real life—but this is particularly unsubtle. It explains itself in methodical precision, carving the rule as deeply as any commandment before it.

If he wishes to be free, he cannot be himself. 

Perhaps it is mercy this is just a dream. 

-

He compliments Karlach's new weapon, a greataxe she's already lovingly caressing and promising death. 

He helps Shadowheart distribute bandages and healing potions with polite interest.

He offers Wyll an old map of the Sword Coast, lets him tell stories of his exploits and forces curiosity. 

He tells Lae'zel of the Material Plane, little phrases and customs she's unaccustomed to. 

He brings Gale books, stacked high, pickpocketed from traders and travelers and corpses. 

He slips out that night and finds a deer, padding through the forest, head raised and ears alert. 

He butchers it, puncturing its throat, stabbing his fangs deep into his neck while it's still alive and tearing out blood, faster than he can drink; scarlet spills from his lips, down his face, over his hands. 

He screams at it, at its corpse, at the world. 

It's not enough. 

It's never enough. 

-

The Grove is a sheltered haven of protection and ignorance. Twice have they ventured here, first to collect Wyll like a wayward stray plied with scraps of heroism and second to learn of the supposed healer Halsin, deep in imprisonment; and now they come again, to gather more supplies as they scour the map for any opportunity to raid the goblin camp. It is fortified in ramshackle protections and brutish warfare, scouting parties littering the countryside, and Gale is hesitant. If Gale is hesitant, then the dream does not want him to press forward yet; so Astarion trails through the Grove, running his fingers over druidic architecture, and does his best to play hero.

Rest does not come easy in this home of hunters, even though he wears high collars and lavishes himself over sunlight, anything to clear the air—he talks about the drow blood in his eyes to anyone that will listen and dares not even hunt, just sits there, vicious in his fear. He wants to believe the party will not mention it, too embarrassed at traveling alongside a monster; but that is hope, and this dream has well shown him the fallacy of it. 

Trancing comes even less so. The thought of being still and defenseless here is enough to raise his hackles, pull fangs to bare; and he does not trance, and he walks instead. 

Which is why, as he wanders through the Grove searching for any distraction from the gnawing presence in his chest, Astarion runs into Gale, hunched over what he's pretty sure is the amulet Shadowheart found in their last set of ruins. Purple light spills between his fingers, splashing over grass and grove, and the wizard's face is tight with concentration—he mumbles some archaic command, magic crackling around his hands, and then flowing into him, a river to a delta. 

The amulet falls, lifeless, to his feet. 

Curious.

Astarion makes some soft sound in his throat, a hum, tapping his heel on the ground. Gale flinches hard and spins, eyes wide and wild. "Astarion," he says, bewildered. "I– it's not what it looks like."

Awfully convenient, that. Astarion waits, crossing his arms, and lets disbelief curl jagged derision over his face. 

Gale exhales, dragging a hand through his hair. There's a purple gleam under his robes, catching on the scruff over his jaw; even as he notices it the light fades, disappearing back under his skin. Another oddity to add to the list. 

"I need to… consume Weave," Gale says, face drawn up in a truly impressive grimace. "Precious artefacts, enchanted items, anything with magic; it feeds something of mine. Something would be quite disastrous if not fed, I can assure you."

Astarion raises an impassioned eyebrow. Gale winces. 

Is this the best his dream can do? A poor reflection of a vampire, feasting on precious things instead of blood, but with a vague, nonsensical reasoning behind it? Whatever metaphor, whatever part of Astarion he is, Gale is ineffective in all the worst ways.

"Of course," he drawls, and feels ire drip from the words. "You have to eat magic. How silly of me to forget."

"Not me," Gale hastens to add. "A… curse of mine."

Ah.

How odd, that a dream which goes out of its way to spin a truly elaborate farce about the pain in his head, will simply settle on curse for something like this. The most basic thing to exist in this magical land; an empty word, really, for how many meanings it can hold. 

"A curse," Astarion repeats, bland and biting. Then stiffens, a fierce reminder of being too harsh, too vicious—soft, gentle, harmless. Loyal. Not a threat. "And how should I react to this?" 

What does the dream want him to do? Why did it show him this?

Gale blinks. "React?" 

Then he pauses, adjusting his cuffs, flicking his gaze around like someone will spring from the shadows. A perfect picture of worry. 

"I would request you don't tell the others," Gale says, hesitantly. "My curse is… not dangerous, so long as I sustain it, and knowledge spreading beyond our ears could bring unwarranted attention upon our heads."

How polite, to ask a secret like this be kept. How familiar.

At least Gale has the decency to look ashamed, sensing the disparity of the last time undesirable secrets spilled between them. "I know I'm in no position to ask it of you," he says, and stops. Draws off. "I'm not ready," he settles on. "Soon, I will tell them; but I'm not stable yet. I only ask for time."

Time. Something the dream holds a tyranny on.

Astarion looks at him, at the wizard, at the man, painfully human, painfully false. Purple light still flickers over his fingers, twining beneath his robes; a prettier vampirism, with its harsh edges smoothed off and reputation stripped. A dashing variant. 

Tell the party and earn trust—or destroy it, so willing to spill secrets of those he is supposed to be loyal to. Display Gale's weakness and let it consume him, cast him free of the group he's led through heroic sacrifice after heroic sacrifice. Is he the same as the children they've plucked from danger, the refugees they've promised to save? 

Artefacts to blood. Hunger to hunger. 

Astarion hums. "I see," he says. 

And he does. 

-

Astarion doesn't tell the others. There's no reason—the dream already knows its own creations, for all they're content to follow the script and fake that they don't. And his subconscious hooks into that; perhaps if he told them, they would say they don't believe him, and kick him out regardless. 

A secret to another, one that stays to the shadows it was discovered in. Curse, rather than monster. Hunger to hunger. 

The look Gale sends him is pathetically grateful. 

Astarion pretends not to see.

-

In fine fashion, they have but to walk some dozen feet into the delightful marshlands before the illusion crumbles away. It's festering and hideous, air choked with smog and decayed bodies, redcaps marching around in faux simplicity—whether lure or compulsion, it is a wretchedly good trap, and Astarion would tip his hat to the hag that owns it if he thought he would survive the encounter. 

Wyll, of course, urges them to take her down, both to save the insipid girl from the Grove and to end the curse of the creature over these lands. Lae'zel mutters furious complaints about avoiding the crèche but sharpens her blades in anticipation, and Karlach has never seemed quite so pleased at the thought of taking down someone who deals in deceit. Even Shadowheart looks interested. 

Gale frontlines the charge, cautious as a man who regularly asks questions of creatures mad with fury. At least they are not fools enough to march in without investigating. 

But it is that investigation which leads them up and around the hag's shack, steam and smoke heavy overhead, when Astarion's nose twitches. Something thick and burning, acrid in all the worst of ways; blood, almost, but a vile substitute. He can't quite remember where he must have smelled this before to construct it here. Maybe it is a combination. 

Wyll recognizes it. Powdered ironvine, protection from monsters, which is plenty to raise Astarion's hackles if the stench wasn't enough. But it could be someone in danger, someone trapped in a desperate siege from the hag, so on they go, up the hill, to the man at its peak. 

To the hunter. 

He's all long hair and leathers, crossbow snug on his back and fletching a bolt with familiar ease; he looks up as they approach, eyes flinty, though they soften when they take in what appears to be typical adventurers. He is but a man. 

He is but a Gur.

Astarion's fangs pierce his lip. 

The last he saw their kind, Cazador had sent him to round up children and spirit them away like some fairy-horror creature of night; before that, it was those he was lucky enough to find in taverns, to purr into their ears and lead them home for glorious demise. But they are not settlers, and they do not come to Baldur's Gate often. For two hundred years, they have existed in separate worlds. 

But his dream is not reality; it does not worry about minor details like that. 

And before him, alone, unaided, is a Gur. 

"Well met," the man says, raising a hand in greeting; Wyll returns it, taking charge as Gale cedes control of the conversation. "Apologies for the smell, but I'd hazard it's a worthy cost in a hag's swamp."

"You'd be remiss not to have it," Wyll says, because he is a fool and a killer. He makes as if to talk about the hag, as if to share wine and thought with vagrant vagabonds. 

As if he understands.

"Why, a Gur," Astarion says, and settles into a drawl; lets the world fade away in fractured shards of glass as he steps forward, hand braced in mock concentration on his chin. His words come out edged in beautiful ice. "I'm quite surprised you managed to make it here. Rather a lack of defenseless villages to raid, you see."

The Gur laughs blithely, a smile on his face. "My coffers have run dry without crops to steal or children to eat, yes, but I'm sure I'll manage."

Wyll goes stiff with frustration, flicking a dagger of a glance over, and even perfect, positive Karlach is frowning. Astarion smiles back, thin enough to keep his fangs tucked away. Of course his dream would make the Gur seem reasonable; it would be too easy to have him a slavering brute with more blades than thoughts. Less satisfying, when he seems a monster more than a man. 

Men have always been the greatest beasts, when the curtains fall. 

"Astarion," Gale hisses, and something between them thrums, pain pulsing in the back of his head. The dream doesn't want him to engage, or is prepared to punish him for it—a threat he cannot ignore. 

But oh, how he wants to.

"I am Gandrel," the Gur says, blindingly ignorant of the danger, sliding the bolt into his quiver. "A monster hunter only, though raider would be a feather in my cap. I'm here to barter with the hag, if she will keep her blood-price feasible."

"A limb or two, if she is willing to accept damaged goods," Astarion says sagely. "Is there anything in particular you want to know? The location of a missing kobold, perhaps, or death of some hapless noble whose lands you've found yourself rather attached to?"

Gandrel looks at him, then. 

Astarion isn't being subtle, far from it, but his insults dig deeper than everyday familiarity. Gandrel's brow furrows, just a hair, as he tries to piece together why—what history there must be, for bitterness over casual bigotry. 

How terrible it must be, to not know the reason. How dreadful to be alone in the dark. 

"The location of a missing monster, yes," Gandrel says eventually, though the words are slower than they were before. Still cheerful, but he's watching the group with the vigilance of a hawk, and he has not removed his hand from his crossbow. "Though considerably less fierce than a kobold. A vampire spawn."

Astarion goes very still. 

"He has information," Gandrel continues. "I seek to capture him alive for return to Baldur's Gate, but this land is littered with crevices to hide away in. I hope the hag will guide me better than my own senses."

A hunter. 

Vampire spawn are preciously rare, and fewer still for those who escape to roam the countryside. He will not delude himself into imagining the Gur is here for anyone but him. The dream will not let him escape that easily. 

Cazador doesn't leave Baldur's Gate—Astarion would never believe it. The vampire lord has his palace as a throne, and the city is his; he stays there. Cazador appearing in the corners of camp, eyes aglow, breaks the illusion. Shatters it to pieces. 

But Cazador would send a Gur to capture him. 

His breathing shuts off. He does not blink. The world is dagger-sharp around, honed to a razor's edge, and he cannot see anything beyond the darkness of the man's eyes. 

One of them is not leaving alive. 

Astarion knows the party will hate it, if they do not hate him already—but whatever they lay on his back, he can take. He's swallowed punishment far worse. Pretty and loyal has he stayed to them, proved himself if not useful then at least not useless, and one kill amidst a campaign slaughtered over Faerûn will mean little. Shame and scorn mean little. 

A choice between the chance and the confirmation. Cazador will not grant mercy; perhaps the party will. Defanged and hamstrung and bound, perhaps they will not kill him. 

Two hundred years ago, he could do nothing more than die. 

The Gur is not anyone he remembers—just a face, empty and featureless. Maybe a lost soul he picked up, or a stranger on the streets, or even an original from the alley, though the tatters of his memory have long stopped relaying to him. 

The Gur—Gandrel—is not them. 

But he is close enough. 

Astarion steps forward. Gandrel tracks him, wary, sensing the wind has changed; a flash of silver as he palms his hip, though he doesn't draw the blade yet. "Oh, I believe I know him," Astarion says, and his words come out flat. Lifeless. Corpses, to match the one saying them. "And he will not be returning to Baldur's Gate, I can assure you."

There is sunlight overhead, and running water to cross in reaching here, and a party of heroes beside; Astarion frees his dagger, tongue pressed flat to fangs, and strikes.

Monster hunter, but one caught unawares—Gandrel stumbles back, a hollow grunt of pain, hilt protruding from his chest. Blood-filled strength sheathes it deep in his flesh, scratching bone. Deadly. Fatal.

Behind him, the dizzying sounds of the party, surprise and fury alike. Astarion wrenches out the blade and lunges again, slams it home, pushes Gandrel back. Snarling. Barking. The hunter falls, quiver spilling bolts over the festering sod, crossbow digging into his spine. His eyes are white with panic. 

Astarion lands. Attacks. Attacks again. 

Again and again and again, parting flesh, soaking them both in blood—it escapes in great waves, currents, thick and rich and heavy. He sinks into it, into the madness, the destruction, bares fangs and laps at what sprays over his face. 

Gandrel gasps, throat ragged, scarlet spittle in the corners of his lips—he is dying, and quickly, spilling out to the soil. Astarion gets close. Straddles him, knees pinning his arms to the ground, fingers curled in rictus claws as he leans in. 

"Two hundred years," Astarion hisses, poison rotten as the bog around. "Can you understand that, hunter? Two hundred years."

He gurgles. Tries to say something, maybe. 

Astarion tears his throat out. 

Scarlet gushes over his hands, over his face. He inhales, shuddering, and the primal part of his brain surges forth; digs his fangs into the viscera and pushes him to drink. Mindless, he obeys. 

And oh, how the dream rewards him—no more the desecration of Gale's blood but instead something more, beyond speech, beyond speaking. Vibrant, flavoured like ambrosia, like stars and suns and galaxies beyond; he drinks and drinks until his stomach aches and his mind crackles. This is immortality, elysium—everything he could have imagined from a thinking creature's blood, spun into glory, into victory.

He feels full.

Astarion ratchets upright, perched on Gandrel's corpse—on the corpse of the Gur, of the kind who had killed him, who shackled him to this eternity. Behind him, he can hear Gale, commanding the others with frantic speed, sounds of movement and action, of a stake to plunge into his back. But no one grabs him. 

Blood thrums through his veins, pours down his face, pools in his stomach. His thoughts slip past hazy and inconsistent, alight in living, in the fervour of faking life. Claws digging into flesh, hilt protruding from bone. Death given for a deathed animal. Blood taken and won. 

For a moment, he almost feels his heart beat. 

Falsity can be freeing. 

Astarion laughs and laughs and laughs.  

-

The world swims back in focus long after the sun has set. 

Astarion blinks, wrenching himself upright; blood has dried and hardened to an armour's embrace, constraints around his wrists and neck. It's tacky in his eyes, gumming the corners, sticking his lips together. 

He's aware. How long has that not been true?

Around him, the bog sits heavy and rotting, shadows pouring deep into the greys and greens. The creak and whistle of distant creatures, those still alive, birds in distant trees and the shuffle of invisible paws. Life. Prey. 

Movement, across from him. 

Gale is sitting on the soil, legs folded beneath and arms braced. Bags hang under his eyes, palm supporting his chin, weariness scrawled through his shoulders. 

He's been waiting, then. Waiting for Astarion to come back to himself, back to his body, crouched and coiled over a corpse. Someone he killed. Someone he slaughtered—but that doesn't matter, not as scarlet pours through his veins, awakening a fire he has never been allowed to feel before. 

Astarion twitches. Flicks his head from side to side, blood cracking and drying in his hair. Flexes his fingers, joints popping and settling into motion. He's been hunched over, frozen, for what must be hours—or whatever time means, in this endless dream. 

His thoughts simmer in his head. He has never felt so alive.

"Hello, love," Astarion rasps, through a throat beat to hells and unwilling. His lungs splutter weakly for air, clogged up and choked, but the cracks are already healing, blood stitching together even as they break apart. Regeneration, the likes of which he's never known. Recovery. A cure. 

An easement to the pain, before it has weeks to settle claws in his mind. 

He never thought he could have imagined it. 

"You killed him," Gale says, quiet. His eyes are searching, dark in his face. 

Astarion smiles. Lets his fangs meet the air, red-tinged and bloody, and savors it—savors winning, for once in his rotten undeath. "I did."

Gale—not quite hisses, but it's certainly close. Frustration bleeds through his face, vicious as a man caught unawares, who has spent time and trial to find a reason for keeping a monster in their party. He's wondering now whether it's worth it, whether he should just give him up, cast him aside. End it all. 

Come, stake me, Astarion thinks, near delirious—if this was Wyll he'd be dead already, splayed alongside Gandrel in remorseless efficiency. A bulk grave for them both. Perhaps he can claw his way out of this one, too. 

Gale's eyes snap to him. "Do you enjoy ruin, Astarion?"

He laughs. What a ridiculous question. "It's all I know."

There is nothing good that is his; there is nothing worth having. What is there is marrow scraped raw and bitterness welling like freshwater springs. Better to dig his fangs in and tear them open before Cazador makes it worse.

Gale drags a hand over his face. "They want to kick you out," he says, grim. "I appreciate you keeping my secret, I truly do, but there's little I can do in return when you've murdered a man in cold blood. What in all gods possessed you to do that?"

Kick him out? That's a polite phrasing for death. Nice, almost. 

Astarion leans back, head rolling. Gandrel's body is cool under his fingers, splayed on his chest, around the hilt still lodged in his ribcage. Dead. There is no threat to come from him, not from the dream. He won. 

"He was going to take me back to Baldur's Gate," Astarion says. The words pour light and easy, blood loosening his tongue. His thoughts are a jumbled mess of ecstasy, gripping onto the situation with slick hands and no strength; he keeps humming, deep in his throat. Keeps reveling in the moment. "I stopped him."

Back to Cazador, back to the kennel. Perhaps another page of the dream, another lesson he will not let himself learn—or perhaps he would have merely woken up, face pressed to grey stone, and this would be nothing more than fragile memory that will not survive the mausoleum he surely faces as punishment for disappearing so long. For daring to run, even if only within his own mind. 

"You'd rather kill a man than go back to Baldur's Gate?" Gale says, incredulous. Frustration scours over his face. "Hells, Astarion, you need to give me more than that if you want a chance of convincing them."

What point is there in convincing? The dream will decide what happens. He will beg and plead and offer himself as soon as he sees them, slither like some blind, pitiful thing, but for now his thoughts jumble and flow and ricochet off each other in glorious tranquility. 

He's full. He's here, in the bog, in the wilds; he's far from home. 

Baldur's Gate. A palace, a prison. 

"I will raze this land to the ground before I let anyone take me back," Astarion rasps. There's a part of him that knows he should lie, should grovel, should beg forgiveness and apologize and swear it will never happen again. He has killed a man, when he told Gale he would never bite anyone again. When the group allowed him to stay with fractured scraps of acceptance. 

But his mind is racing, some delirium of blood-drunk, a farcical assembly of what he imagines the blood of a thinking creature must taste like—and he cannot think as he should, not with this, not with warmth suffusing his limbs. 

This is what Cazador has taken from him. What he has always deprived.

Gale frowns. "I thought you were from Baldur's Gate," he says, slow. He's catching onto something being wrong, if the corpse between them doesn't lay it out clearly enough. 

"I am." That spills out easily. "But I will not return to him."

Gale goes quiet. Listening, maybe. 

"My sire," Astarion says, and smiles. Leans forward, bracing his elbows, and feels phantom gore splatter over a stomach that had once been split open to pour on a dusty alley street. "He rescued me, you see. And how deeply do I owe him for that mercy—why, it seems I will never manage to pay him back."

You forget your place, boy. Who was it who took you from that empty street? Who saved you from oblivion?

Astarion has never forgotten his place. He has only fought against it. 

"What does this have to do with Gandrel?" Gale says, brows furrowed. His fingers twitch, like he wants to grab parchment, to write this down for the history books. It will never make it print, if it escapes the dream at all, if Astarion's tongue is ever loosened enough again to chatter so freely. 

No thrall keeps him from speaking about this. Only his own fear. Only his own hatred. 

"The Gur," Astarion hisses, digging his nails into Gandrel's lifeless chest. Scarlet, caught in mirrored crescents. One little law, a lifetime ago. Nothing more. 

Two hundred years has to start somewhere. 

"He killed me," Astarion says. "But they gave me to him."

Perhaps Cazador sent them. Perhaps it was coincidence. But what matters is that it was dark and it was cold and he was in the alley, and they came for him, and he was dead and he was dying and it was hell, before he knew the true meaning of that word. 

Cazador will ever have the heights of his anger. 

But two hundred years has given him plenty to spare. The Gur have their share. 

"Not Gandrel," Gale says, though he's less firm. "He wasn't one of those who… did what they did. But you know that, don't you?"

Oh, how he does. 

But those he wishes to kill are two hundred years buried, and he will scrape vengeance against who he can still reach. 

"I know," Astarion says, because his grip on time is already slipping, world blurring at the edges. "That makes me a monster, doesn't it? Just a monster. I wonder how I became one."

He tilts his head to the side, little more than hunger, than teeth bared. "Can you understand that, little wizard? How much of my reflection are you?" His head aches and pounds. "Two hundred years of servitude to a master who delights in silver chains. Two hundred years without ownership of body or mind. Two hundred years begging for death that will never come."

That still never will.

Two hundred years. Gale swallows the words, eyes pale pinpricks, ash around his jaw. A revelation, then. Astarion is ever frozen as an elf not yet into maturity, a mouth that jabbers and simpers and distracts from his youthful face. A body that always heals back to how it was on his death, bearing no scars except those Cazador desires. He is the same as he was in the alley.

But two hundred years, at the end of all things. 

His nails dig into Gandrel's chest. The corpse is cold and still and dead. 

He's said too much, he knows, but the fear isn't there. His thoughts still slide over ice, bright and sparking; the taste is more than anything he's ever known. Dried, fractured around his lips, splotched over his hands. How did he know to make it like this? What memory is this from?

"Your sire," Gale says, and hesitates on the word; draws it out like he can't stand the taste. "Who is he?"

Astarion drags a hand up to press at his face, to feel the scarlet caked over pale skin. It all feels so real.

"To create a spawn is to create a slave," he murmurs. "One incapable of disobeying. Of being free."

Astarion looks up, to the sky overhead; grey and purple, streaked with twilight and the splatter of tiny stars. No clouds, nothing to cover the curve of moon, caught through the black. This view, at least, is familiar. Centuries of nothing but it. 

"He is the type of man to have spawn."

Cazador Szarr, father to seven, sire of death. 

A shadow so long that even in dream, he cannot escape. 

Astarion hunches there, caught in the dark, shivering. His thoughts won't connect. Nothing works. Already time trembles on, telling him just what he has done, what weakness he has ripped from his chest and thrown to the wolves. A monster, admitted. A murderer, confessed. 

He will not beg for his life. Not when that has already proven itself useless. Not when he cannot bring himself to care. 

"We will talk in the morning," Gale says quietly, parallel to before, though his hands don't spark with magic and his eyes are a cradled sort of sad. "Come back when you're ready, Astarion."

He hums in response, ambiguous and empty. His thoughts skitter on. 

The wizard stands, pushing up on creaking knees and robes that pool heavy to his ankles. How long has he been waiting, waiting for the corpse of a magistrate long buried, hunched over the man he slaughtered while laughing? How long was he there?

Gale leaves, stepping away in somber thought, as night slips cloying fingers into the bog and spills shadows over the flickers of a dead man. 

Astarion stays, well after he should trance, staring up at an impassioned sky. 

-

They do not kill him. 

Perhaps they should have.

-

Things change, after. 

Gale must have told them something, spilled out secrets Astarion laughed and glibbed over with a tongue made slick from blood; something about the Gur, his sire. He can't remember it in full. The world has been fumbling recently, inconsistent, blinks between hours. It must not have been much, because they don't ask about it, don't pry out secrets like fragile bones of flayed hands, but they are–

They are different.

Lae'zel dumps looted throwing daggers in his lap. Wyll shows him the different toxic plants and healing herbs they pass. Shadowheart calls down shadowed energy to aid his arrows in finding their mark. Karlach adjusts his rapier stance and guides him through practice. Gale–

Gale talks to him. Endless as he ever has, monologues despite the lack of reciprocation, but he also stays closer. His eyes are always searching, seeing something he doesn't share. A piece past the façade, past the spawn, past the whore. The dream, trying to keep closer tabs on him. 

Astarion doesn't understand.

He knows servitude. Knows the shape of the word please on his lips until it loses meaning, until it becomes soundless pleas for what will never come. Knows the rules and their fallacy. Knows obeying doesn't truly matter, because Cazador will always find a fault to explain his punishment, all boiling down to because he wants to.

This group is not Cazador. But still they leashed him, or he leashed himself and gave them the end, and he knows that—knows what he must do. Every second alive must be bought. Must be earned. To keep the chains from his neck and the skin on his limbs, he must beg for it, must slither on his stomach like a cur in the streets; fail, and it's to the kennel. Fail worse, and it's to the stone beneath. 

Fail here, and the dream ends. 

He killed a man. Tore his throat after promising to never bite again. Slaughtered him with gleeful carnage and laughed in his blood. In reality, this would buy him death. 

But his subconscious has mercy the world does not. And instead, they let him stay, keep him along in careless tolerance. Allow the murderer within their ranks, mention nothing when he comes back speckled in rabbit's blood. 

At least it is proof, if nothing else. He is so terrified of being abandoned the dream restructures itself to protect him. 

The party continues marching, continues fighting. They save him a spot at dinner and he eventually joins, stilted, burying insults deep in the ash he guards as the fractures of a personality, fluttering his eyes whenever they glance in his direction. Swallows fear and plays hero. Tries to stay necessary. Stay useful. 

They never mention Gandrel again. 

It is both better and worse.

-

Long enough have they put it off, and their armour is at its strongest, their spells honed; it is time to raid the goblin camp. To free this mysterious archdruid, in fragile hopes he will heal whatever is in their heads. It is useless, Astarion knows. The dream will end when it ends and not before. 

But he cannot say that, not where the dream will hear him, so along he goes. 

They strike in the morning, when the guard is at its weakest, and set plans to fall upon the camp with clever wits and clever blades. They prepare to storm the gates, to tear them open and march inside. 

They don't have to.

The goblins are biting and gnawing and useless and utterly devout. At the mere mention of illithid power, for all it hides under the name Absolute, they shriek and beg and hurl themselves to their knees. They cannot meet his eye; for fear, for reverence. They would tear themselves open if he demanded it—if he requested it.

He does not have to fight through the front gate. It is thrown open and paraded before him. Inside is even easier.

The addiction threatens to bloom; he leans into the ache of his skull and watches Priestess Gut shriek as her mind twists around itself, isolated in her room, no fellow goblins to help her. Alone to dying to dead. Dror Ragzlin falls in shrieking agony, guards collapsed around him, the brand over his eye doing nothing and meaning less. 

But he believes in it. Serves it, right until his death. Begs for mercy from an uncaring god. Prostrates himself under what he believes is its fury. 

Astarion holds out a hand. The goblins shriek and cower. 

Is this how Cazador sees him? 

What is the dream trying to say?

-

By evening, what was once a lively camp becomes a graveyard, a thing of corpses and ruin. Fire crackles over rotten wood, bonfires with humanoid cuts crumbling to ash, black-fletched arrows snapped and shattered. They have won. 

It is victory at the cost of monsters slain. Such a simple payment, at the end of all things. 

Once they are healed, or at least capable of movement, Gale marches them back to the Grove alongside Halsin, the mysterious druid, who takes the form of a bear when he is feeling peckish and a massive, towering elf when he is not. Charming fellow. 

Charmingly useless fellow, for he cannot cure them of parasites. Astarion could have told them that. 

But if the dream is content to prolong this hunt, then he will bow his head to its rhythm. He grits his teeth against the cruelty of it all and hobbles back to camp, where the tiefling refugees join them, breaking open barrels of ale and popping corks from saved bottles. 

A celebration. 

The dream has no shortage of memories to pull from for creating this, but it carves uniqueness from odd corners; those here have no costumes, no extravagant robes, only rags stitched together with the care of those who have little and want to keep what they have looking its best. The tieflings are empty; there is a reason they sheltered in the grove and had no choice but to set out alone when rejected. They are scavengers, vagrants. 

And here, in the darkness, with blood-splattered companions, they revel.

Astarion slips to the shadows. 

The group is less reluctant; Wyll takes center stage, gently consoling all those who cling tearfully to his arms and ask how ever they can thank him; he tells them with nothing but living their lives. Such a sweet sentiment. They will die before the year is out. Karlach booms with laughter and raucous stories, burning crude fingerprints into pieces of bark for children. Shadowheart marvels at the scene as though she has never seen its equal. Gale conjures gentle little illusions for any who stray too near his asinine aura, caught up in the mysteries of a wizard they haven't had the misfortune of knowing for longer than a fortnight. Lae'zel stands gruff and irritated, arms crossed, but perhaps—perhaps pleased, with the work they've done. With the victory. 

Astarion watches them, and begins to understand. 

He's always labeled them as heroes, because he knew it, from far back when Gale asked to travel together after half a conversation and kept recruiting four more to his side for the sheer reason that they were all threatening to turn into mindflayers, rather than turning to sprint in the opposite direction. Then Wyll saved a tiefling from a snake, and Karlach figured out how to hold branches long enough without burning just to feed an abandoned mutt in the forest, and Lae'zel kicked in the kneecaps of the paladins of Tyr, and Astarion thought, yes. Heroes.

But it is only now he is realizing just what his dream has actually made them. 

They aren't asking for rewards. Not even something immaterial, for it's clear the tieflings have nothing, not favours or information or deals. Whatever they receive is freely given, and they wonder at it like something unexpected. 

No. 

They are merely being heroes. 

He is nothing like them. 

It is a frightening sort of thought, because it's hardly anything new—he knows it, they know it. They rolled their eyes when he bitched about selfless deeds, before he grew too scared to show disapproval and merely stayed silent instead; they scoffed as he pickpocketed traders and looted bodies just out of sight of their allies; they glared across campfires as he let barbs sing through the air, before that became dangerous and he became a doll. 

They know he is not like them. 

But he wonders, quietly, if they know by just how much.  

Astarion is not a villain. That implies power, implies choice. 

But he is certainly not a hero.

He sinks into the shadows, pressing his back to the fluttering fabric of his tent, hands fumbling for balance even as he stays still and frozen. He has no heart left to bleed like them but he's faked it, letting their excitement at doing good deeds wash over him with echoed sentiment, dragged himself along as they marched from hapless fool to the next. Already their goal of removing the parasites seems to have fallen to the wayside, much too busy with chasing out hags and rescuing children; they march to the tune of their soul, since they certainly haven't a brain to lead. 

If he is not like them, what better way of endearment than the only thing he has left?

He knows the script. Mercy have they shown him twice, for the bite, for the Gur; he has curled in submissive and docile, but those are pretty words, and he should do more. Should play the part he has perfected over two hundred years. 

Karlach can't, and Wyll fantasizes for a lover over a fuck, and Lae'zel still sees it as only action instead of bond, and Shadowheart doesn't trust anyone enough, and Gale has a curse holding him hostage—but it has to be one of them. It has to.

He cannot make himself go. 

His boots stick to the sod, heels dragging, and there's an animal shaking in his chest. 

It's a dream. Nothing more than a dream. Even if he wakes halfway through, his body will be untouched, unsoiled, nothing within. No purple on his hips from blood he actually has to bruise. It doesn't matter. Offer reward for mercy, let his mind drift, to clever little fingers and tongue and acts he has spun together until they are more second nature than existing. It is a dream but one with chains; this is a small price to keep his freedom. 

He cannot make himself go. 

Not today, he thinks, desperate. Tonight is warm with wine and cheers and the miserable thrum of happy people unaware of how little they've won—none of them will want to slip into the surrounding forest, to let him kneel before them and purr nothings in their ear. It will ruin the mood, will make them scowl at him for looking for carnal pleasures instead of satisfaction for people saved. 

Not today. The next time. He has slipped from bedroll to bedroll, spending his nights with them as often as they will have him, clawing acceptance with a body well-used and perfect in its motions; he has played the part pretty and polite and empty. He has been fine.

But looking at them—looking at these heroes, so picturesque, alive in the light of living and glory and wonder—he cannot do it. Not tonight. Not today. 

Next time. Next time. 

His knuckles are white around the stem of his looted glass. The wine within is vinegar, ash and dust in his mouth, and he drinks like it will do anything; like undeath will grant him the haze of alcohol. 

His dream is well aware that bastards would not scare him. That cruel killers who wear skulls for crowns and trade lives like coin would be– not welcome, but at least familiar. He could carve his place among them, tear acceptance out with fangs, prolong the dream and follow its rules. 

Not heroes. 

He's shaking. 

Astarion grabs his wine and stalks out of his tent, rolling his shoulders back and flashing baleful eyes at any who look over to him; he doesn't know where he's going other than going, moving, trying to walk out of the nightmare for all he's desperate to stay in the dream. Tieflings bob and chitter at him, voices in the murk. His hackles are tight to his neck. 

"Ah, my friend!"

Gale. Gale, the irritation, the bastard, the fool; he waves a hand, smile perched on his face, and gestures to the cut logs arranged outside his tent. The audience he'd collected is filtering out, going on to distract themselves with other pretty nothings, and there is a bottle and a half near the wizard's feet with a glass well on its way to drained in his hand. 

Astarion hums, falling back in place, back to his body, and pads over with both eyebrows raised. "You'd give up their applause?"

Gale laughs. "I'm a touch too empty on magic to do anything truly impressive, and there's only so many cantrips I can flash before they would learn all my tricks. No, better to send them on their way while they still believe I've a mystery in me. Something you would know, no doubt."

Astarion smiles through thin lips. "Quite accurate, love."

He arranges himself on the offered stump, ankles crossed before and legs splaying out. His wine catches the light, casting pink over the grass below, and he takes another sip, just for the act. It pools in his stomach like mud. 

"In truth, it's tiring," Gale admits, nursing his glass. In the shadows cast by those blocking the campfire with their dance, he looks wane. "I'm rather out of practice with groups—with people in general, I suppose. I only have so many things I know to say before I run out." 

Astarion cannot help glancing over. 

It is the first truly human thing Gale has shown; the only weakness beyond an unbearable personality and verbosity of a devoured library. Perhaps those stories of his tressym, spoken of like she was the only soul he had known for years, are more than fables. 

"I agree," Astarion says, keeping his voice soft. "Particularly when they are so excitable and we are still injured. If I had to thank my saviors, it certainly wouldn't be with a party before they'd had a moment to heal. Why, if I were free, I'd go–"

He breaks off. Swallows. 

The tieflings are saved. Blood bought with blood. 

But why?

The dream doesn't like him asking questions, prying back the curtain to scrape proof from its innards. But here, in this circle of heroes, music trickling through the shadows, he shivers with unknowing; in grasping at this fragile illusion, searching for validation, but still not understanding why it exists at all. 

Why them. Why this. Why a fantasy.

Why him.

"Does this matter?" Astarion asks, because he is sick of the praise and the congratulations and the farcical feeling of it all—that because they have pried these tieflings from one prison they are rescued for it all, that they will never feel hardship again. They have escaped the hangman's noose, but still lurks the executioner's blade, and the assassin's poison, and the uncaring crush of the world's apathy; they are not free. The dream knows that. Still it plays pretend. "Does any of this matter?"

Silence, for a moment. 

"I don't know," Gale says, and the words appear to physically pain him. He drowns the momentary weakness of knowledge in another gulp of wine. "I suppose I would say that it depends on what mattering means to you."

Astarion laughs. It comes out jagged. 

"It certainly matters to them," Gale continues, adjusting his stance like he's preparing to puff his chest out. "For us, it means just a day of hard work, excluding research and gathering, of course. But for them, it means their whole lives."

What a perfect answer. One for the storybooks, for a dramatic speech by the king before his soldiers, for everyone who wishes to feel important. 

For heroes. 

"This will not save them," Astarion murmurs, lips pressed to his glass. "They will not be safe."

No one is, not in Faerûn, not in life. The sooner they learn that, the faster they can sprint headlong into death regardless. 

"Yes," Gale admits. "There is nothing we can do to save them, not entirely, not forever." He drums his fingers over his leg, staring at the bard whip up a clever little tune on her lute, voices barking along in raucous lyrics. "It all feels rather pointless, doesn't it?"

What a curious thing. 

Wyll would not say that. Karlach would not say that. Astarion flicks his gaze over, disguised in the long fingers he tucks his chin into, throat bobbing in fake breath. Something in his chest is tense, waiting for what he cannot predict.

"It does." 

So why are we trying?

Gale smiles, like it's funny. "Yes," he says. He's still looking at the tieflings, bobbing and ducking around the campfire, singing through throats that have already begun to rasp with the volume. "It is hard enough to save ourselves. And then we spend our time saving others, instead." He drinks, fire reflecting in his eyes. "Sometimes I wish I could live with myself if I didn't."

Oh. 

Maybe he is not quite hero. 

Maybe he is a person, beneath it all.

Astarion inclines his glass in Gale's direction, wine sloshing within, red on white. He mirrors it.

"To being monsters, then," Gale says, and laughs, just a little. "Perhaps the world would be easier if we were all heartless."

-

The day after, with their injuries half stitched together and weariness in their bones, Wyll drags them to help the tieflings pack up and send them on their way to Baldur's Gate. It's a sorrowful progression, made moreso by how many of them are clutching their heads and wincing against sunlight, but one they have to take. Despite the Grove being freed from their goblin threat and Halsin back at the helm, the tieflings no longer trust them; they want safety they can rely on. 

Their first intelligent decision. Astarion makes a conscious effort not to slip coins from the packs he helps load. 

He doesn't look at Gale. Gale doesn't look at him. They are both content to let yesterday's conversation melt to ash. 

But afterwards, with camp packed up and a few half-hearted attempts to clean the devastation wrecked by two dozen souls who believed the reckoning has skipped them by, their hunt continues. 

In the ruin of the goblin camp, they find other plans of attack, stamped by the drow paladin's hand with confirmations of being carried out. One for a location called Waukeen's Rest, past where they found Karlach, and depictions of warriors within. 

Familiar warriors, it seems, because as Gale drags them off to help, Wyll recognizes those battering down the door; and he recognizes the one inside they're trying to save. The Flaming Fists, famed warriors of Baldur's Gate, and a counsellor in the aptly-burning remains of an inn. A coincidence out of any novice's book. 

What is less expected is how Wyll marches right up, asks for information, and with a single mention of his name, they give it. 

Astarion exchanges a raised eyebrow with Gale behind his back. 

Things devolve from there.

Because he isn't just Wyll, the Blade of Frontiers, scourge of monsters and hero of the Sword Coast; he is also Wyll Ravengard, son of Duke Ravengard, heir to the Flaming Fists. 

Well, shit. 

And to complicate things, because it was just so painfully simple before, the attack on the inn was to kidnap said Duke Ravengard, from goblin to drow, and take him to Moonrise Towers. 

Wyll does not so much take the knowledge well as decay in it; he shrinks in on himself, eyes blown wide, hands white-knuckled around his hilt. The Flaming Fists see that, because they crowd him, place solemn hands on his shoulder and tell him, with great pains, that his father is a strong man, and will survive this. They are a comfort in the same way a killing blow is. 

Gale shooes them away with pointed words. They'll take the time to search the Inn again, the surrounding area, and then the goblin camp; if they had written records of the attack here, surely they will have them for where they took Duke Ravengard. Something to get moving, to keep focused; teams of two, to cover everything and stay safe. 

Shadowheart grabs Gale before she has to even consider being with Lae'zel. Karlach flicks the githyanki a fiery thumbs-up. 

Astarion does what he hopes is an admirable job hiding his wince as he turns to Wyll. 

He's still standing by the doorway, where the counsellor delivered her festering news. One hand is braced on the frame, and the rest of his body looks more like a reed stem, swaying in the wind, then the muscled weapon it really is. His eyes are pale and distant; looking anywhere but here. He barely reacted to Gale's statement, and even less as the other groups leave, making promises to return to camp by nightfall. 

Astarion clicks his fingers. A twitch, because Wyll is still a trained hunter used to the wilds, but little else. 

What delight. 

There will be no searching of the Inn, not with Wyll in the shape he's in, and Astarion doesn't fancy the idea of dragging his sorry hide out of traps and burning debris. "This way, hero," he mutters, and plants a hand on each shoulder—gently, because he's not so much a fool as to get stabbed for his kindness, he pushes Wyll around the edge of the building, to the cluttered pile of benches he'd seen on his way in. They're broken and splintered, but he finds one in decent enough shape, pushing on Wyll until he sits. The man sinks into it, shoulders hunching up. 

The shock has gripped him deep, taken him by the marrow. It is a deeply uncomfortable thing to see him, usually so full of life, sitting quiet and blank. This is not what he is. 

"My father," Wyll murmurs.

Astarion's ears flick over. "Hm?"

Wyll doesn't look at him. Barely even moves. 

"I didn't save him," he whispers, staring at his palms. "I– seven years, I just left him. Baldur's Gate has the Flaming Fists because it's dangerous, but I thought–" He swallows, throat pulled taut. "I thought he was safe."

Astarion stops. 

Wyll isn't looking at him, shoulders stretched like iron bars, tension rippling over his form. He's not really there, though he's sitting on the half-broken bench and he's breathing and he's existing in all the ways that bodies tend to do; his mind is leagues away, back at home, back to the land he hasn't seen in seven years. 

He's staring at his hands, because if he looks anywhere else, he will have to confront that his father was here, and the drow have taken him. 

Astarion hesitates. This… isn't what he does. The position of comforter falls to those who are comfortable, that inspire comfort; he is bony and jagged and acrimonious with a flair he's worked hard to perfect. He is not the choice people make. 

But there's no one else here. 

Astarion licks his lips. Adjusts his stance. Pulls back the teeth, just for a moment, to be what he perhaps wished for on every shattered evening, and no one would provide. 

"He's not dead," he says, soft and unused to it. "You've done the impossible before; you can rescue him."

Wyll's laugh bubbles up his throat like venom. "If he's alive, it's for a reason," he spits. "They'll– torture him, or force his signature, or shove one of these bloody parasites in his skull. I can't save him from that."

The words sound wrong, coming from Wyll's perfectly heroic lips—like he's a ventriloquist's puppet with someone else behind the strings. The dream, speaking through its pawn. 

Another crack. A break in the picturebook hero, paper cut away for flesh beneath; it's trying to make him a man, no longer just a myth. Trying to make him a person.

It is an odd thing, this dream. To bring a hunter as low as what he kills. 

"Maybe," Astarion says, noncommittal, because Wyll's a logical man—he wouldn't appreciate empty platitudes about finding his father skipping in daisy fields. "But we're alive, aren't we? No fate is inescapable."

"But some are unbearable," Wyll says. Grits his teeth. "And hells, I will not watch my father become a monster. Not while I still draw breath."

The ruins break further, distant belches of smoke to an apathetic sky. Broken struts, boards strewn between like sinew. A desecrated corpse of a building that once held life. That once held a father. 

"I will save him," he whispers. 

Astarion pauses, at that. 

The phrase is innocuous within itself. But Wyll's saying it cold, and he's staring at his lap, and he's drifting further than ever before; whoever is saying that, it isn't Wyll. The difference is subtle, stitched together from old habits and well-formed patterns. But like recognizes like, and Astarion knows that the man he's talking to now is not the one he has sat across the campfire and laughed at foolish stories with.

Because Wyll was the one who struck the deal with Mizora, who fled Baldur's Gate, who was captured by mindflayers. Someone to blame as the body dons the garb of another soul and makes them competent enough to do everything Wyll couldn't. One who will not be scared; one who will not care. One who will do it all. 

It is an old, pained strategy. 

A familiar one.

Astarion's nails bite into his palms. 

"Am I speaking to the Blade of Frontiers?" 

Wyll's brows knit together. He blinks, tugged back to his body, enough he can glance over with a frown. "Yes?"

"You've quite an amount of titles," Astarion says, delicately. Spawn. Whore. Pet. Dog. "The Blade of Frontiers, son of Duke Ravengard, hero of the Grove. I don't suppose Wyll is anywhere still in there, is he?"

The man looks at him, furrowed. There's a set to his jaw that wasn't there before, in face of a new target, any form of distraction. Of something he gets to batter his fists against that isn't himself. 

"What kind of question is that?" Wyll asks, incredulous. 

Defensive.

True, then. 

"Just a curiosity," Astarion says. "Because the Blade doesn't have any ties to your father. No reason to save him."

Wyll's eyes narrow to slits. "Are you suggesting I abandon him?"

Astarion swallows. Faces him like he would a beast, palms open in his lap, poise unthreatening. "No," he says, because unfortunately, he isn't. Wyll is far too much a hero to ever let a life slip past when he has even the faintest motion he could save them, and certainly not for his own flesh and blood. "I'm just asking why you want to save him."

"I'm his son," Wyll snaps, the first time he has ever sounded angry—or, he would sound angry, and he would look it, with fists clenched and brows tight. 

But Astarion has had years to piece through his own fragile anger, and it never hides the fear underneath. 

"You are yourself," Astarion says, and turns away. Looks over their surroundings, to the rubble they've made camp in, the sprawled slump of buildings hallowed and emptied by time. "Surely that means something."

Wyll slumps. Goes boneless, eyes fluttering closed. The ridges on his cheeks are stark in the evening light, horns dragging his head down until his chin presses to his chest. Tension bleeds away for a flood of resignation.

"My father wouldn't abandon me," Wyll murmurs, which is a fragile covering over the truth that he did. "I have to save him."

"You want to save him," Astarion corrects. 

Wyll frowns. Tilts his head to the side. Puzzles at the difference. 

"You do not owe anyone pride," he says, and it comes out painfully honest. "Go save him, if you will; but save him because you want to save him. Not because the hero of the Sword Cost thinks he has to, not because the son of a duke thinks he should. But because Wyll has decided it."

The man next to him goes very still. 

"It must be a choice," Astarion murmurs. There is something aching and hollow in his chest. "It must be your choice. And I think you've been keeping yourself from making choices for a long time, now."

Wyll doesn't have an answer to that. 

No one would, really. 

Truth is rarely kind. 

-

Thank you, Wyll says, the next day. 

In shaky stitching Astarion's fingers itch to fix, he's added a new patch beneath the mark of the Frontiers; a simple W, in Common script, done up from grey thread. It is boring and basic and uninspired and painfully human.

Thank you.

He wonders if he's ever heard those words before. If they've ever been said by someone who means them.

-

Though they had hardly been planning for anything else, their journey picks up speed—to the Moonrise Towers they go with haste, Wyll charging forward with bullheaded determination. Lae'zel is damn near chipper at the thought, telling swooping stories of the crèche and all she has experienced, not quite picking up that her companions' reactions tend to be of horror rather than matching excitement. 

Raised as a warrior from before human children are allowed to toddle from their house by themselves. A dichotomy she sees as perfectly normal; as mockery, actually. She laughs openly as Wyll talks about being trained in swordplay at fifteen. 

Like it was a disservice, to start him so late. 

Lae'zel revels in stories of glory, of war ripped free by its dangling guts, of dragon dreams and escaping back to the Astral Plane. She speaks of power and strength. She showcases all of it.

She bows her head at the thought of Queen Vlaakith, goddess in everything but name. 

Astarion turns away.

The mountain pass is unkind in the distinctive manner of wilderness—the routes unkempt, picturesque in finality, the boundary between the civilized and the deranged. It is everything he has never had to scrape his feet along in Baldur's Gate, and he wonders how his mind knows how to make it so perfectly miserable, with infuriating insects and unstable slopes and the shriek of distant gnolls. He wishes, quite earnestly, to leave. 

But what comes next is the shadow-cursed lands; and even the thought of that is enough to grow ice over his ribcage, nestled alongside the ever-present thrall. He is a vampire spawn, a creature of darkness, and those lands should be home. 

Astarion has never been over fond of home.

Perhaps he will stay here for a while longer.

-

It's an odd choice, between ghouls, ghasts, and dragons. Neither are really preferable. 

The Flaming Fists match their name in the brief seconds before they are piles of ash, which has Wyll raging; but as the githyanki patrol squad lands before them, he has a tight enough grasp on his composure to acknowledge that attacking the dragon-backed warriors is not the best idea. 

Kith'rak Voss is, in polite terms, a character; Astarion hadn't though he knew enough githyanki features to stitch together an entire group of them, but it could be that his creativity is just smoothing over ideas from others until they're just different enough for his subconscious to view them as people in their own way. And either way, they're all insane, so that makes it easier. 

But Lae'zel is silver-tongued when she wants to be, and she even lies about the artefact; sands down the conversation until they're allowed to pass, though certainly not with warm welcome. The crèche lies before them. 

It is an omen as much as it is a potential. 

Lae'zel has set her eyes on the sky, on the stars far above; like she can see past the Material Plane to the Astral beyond. Like all she has to do is step foot in the crèche for her mistakes will be washed away, cradled in the arms of her queen once more. Like it is a cure, more than a home; like it is a paradise. 

She describes it like one would a dream. Something impossible. She speaks with only conviction. 

Something sour sticks on Astarion's tongue. 

He's heard this before. 

-

The crèche is a failure. 

The machine tries to kill her; the warriors within are uninterested in mercy; the parasites mean opposition. Whatever help they have been searching for, it is not here. It has, perhaps, never been. Just another edge of the blade. 

Astarion knew, could feel what the dream was reflecting through metaphor, long before Lae'zel decided to march them through its depths to carve acceptance from a queen who demands death as payment; but she wouldn't have listened, and it wouldn't have mattered. So they are forced to flee, cutting down all those in their path, from the illusion of a tyrant and her long-fingered grasp of death. 

In camp, flinching at shadows and huddled under a stone cave they've tucked their tents as far back as possible, the party mills around in awkward tension. Githyanki blood stains all of their hands, though they've washed in the closest river, and no one can meet Lae'zel's eyes. She hasn't attacked them for butchering her people—hells, she'd fought alongside them—but everyone tends to be a touch concerned about assumed genocide. 

Another avenue closed. Nettie couldn't heal them, Halsin couldn't heal them, Ethel couldn't heal them, Volo couldn't heal them; the crèche, equally useless. But all others had been options discovered on the road, no expectations set on their backs beyond faithless hope. 

Lae'zel has been striving for her crèche since she landed. She pinned her life on it. 

And it abandoned her. 

She sits on the edge of the cave, longsword gone from her sheath and armour peeled off. It's raining, a gentle patter on the rock overcropping, a drizzle that splashes up her ankles and pulls mist to slither over the floor. 

There is something achingly lonely, seeing her silent, arms curled to her side and staring over the distant forest. She's there but she's not, forked ears pressed flat to her skull and face curiously blank. A ghost in the camp. 

Astarion is moving before he realizes it.

Lae'zel snaps back to herself before he can get within fifteen feet, ears flicking. Her slitted eyes narrow. "I have no interest in blabbered speeches," she snaps, but the derision is curdled by something deeper in her voice. "Take your words elsewhere."

Astarion nods. Keeps his mouth closed, shoulders low; but still he walks closer and sits next to her, far enough away there's not the threat of touching, just within arm's reach. He splays his hands over the ground, rooting his nails into the moss.

Lae'zel huffs. 

She doesn't tell him to leave. 

The planned move would be to blink at her through half-lidded eyes, flick his gaze to her tent—let her carve frustrations out in bruised hips and moans until she's whetted her anger and is ready to continue. Until the dream can trundle on, continue towards its inevitable demise. 

Astarion just sits there. Shifts his stance so the tips of his boots extend from the cave, raindrops running over the creases in the leather. Behind them, the party moves and shuffles as they prepare for rest, but they're far away, drenched in shadows and the murmur of those trying to be quiet. A world apart. 

Outside, distant crickets take up a tune, the rumble of approaching clouds. Tranquillity, in another world. 

"She is my queen," Lae'zel says. 

Astarion doesn't turn—gives her the privacy of pretending she is saying these words to herself, that she does not desperately want the comfort of someone else to listen—and just hums, quiet. 

"Generations of githyanki has she led into battle, against the ghaik, against our sworn enemies. She has never failed. She is powerful."

Tyrants can be many things—but above all, they must win. Everything else can be crushed under the reputation of victory. Mockery and viciousness matter not to those who decapitate their enemies and sit upon the skulls. 

Lae'zel looks at her hands. At the claws, poised on her fingers, at the calluses and creases from a lifetime of war. 

"She is powerful," she repeats, empty. "So why is she not right?"

If strength was surety, there would be none left alive to appreciate it. 

Astarion hums again, curling his legs in. She looks back up, at the distant rain, as if she can peer through the mist to see the crèche past the shadows. Like the answers will appear for her. 

"Because you don't need anything to glut yourself on strength," Astarion says. "You just need ambition."

Lae'zel stays quiet, digesting that. But it won't be enough—she has been raised on power and its importance, how much it means above all else. The words of one spawn will not crack a lifetime of believing the opposite.

But he has more.

"The githyanki serve her," Astarion says. "They've served others in the past, haven't they?"

It's the truth, and it strikes like a meteor; Lae'zel flinches back, eyes pale and fists clenched. Her feet dig into the moss. "We are not slaves," she barks. "Not again."

"No," Astarion agrees, quiet. "But she is your light, your guide. She commands and you obey. Any who oppose her are called traitors and hunted, if they are not slaughtered on the spot."

It is a culture of violence. But that has to come from someone, someone who chose it. 

Lae'zel scoffs. It can't quite hide the primal fear in her eyes. "They name me hshar'lak; they will not find me easy prey."

Hells will they ever. She tore her way through the crèche, both in and out; with this party of fucking maniacs at her side, there is little chance they will kill her, not with her strength where it is. 

But that is not what she's scared of. Why she sits here, staring into the rain, legs curled tight to her chest. She is not the type to be vivisected by her fear, to let it consume her; but she still feels it. All creatures do. 

He knows so little of githyanki; he can't read the age of her face. How long has she lived this unlife? This blind devotion to a monster who proclaims herself sovereign?

"She calls herself your queen," he says. "Did you choose her?"

Lae'zel stiffens. Goes still. Seems to freeze in place, knees to her chest, hands curled over. A statue, eyes blown wide. Something sculptured and lifeless. 

She doesn't have to answer. He knows. 

Perhaps she knows, too. Perhaps she has always known. 

Perhaps she has never been allowed to know. 

"Has she ever proven herself to you," he asks, "the way you have always proven yourself to her?"

"She made me," Lae'zel says. It comes out unsure. It comes out unconvinced. "What more could I ask for?"

He's heard that before. From his lips to Cazador's, to the victims, to the spawn, to the world aching and breaking under its own weight. The act of creation is always one of kindness, because if it isn't—if the thought of it being something else is true—then it could be cruelty. Then it could be wrong.

Everything outgrows what it is made for, eventually. 

"She made a child," Astarion tells her. "She did not make Lae'zel."

Queen Vlaakith, monster, tyrant. She is no one worthy of being followed. Of being revered.

And not by someone like Lae'zel, who is harsh and bitter and brutish and earnest, in her own violent way. She gathers weapons and walks them through basic forms, insults their footwork and adjusts it, sharpens blades and fletches arrows without being asked. Hunts past her own exhaustion to make sure the others are fed. Keeps watch more than the others combined. Sets up camp right when they arrive and takes it down earliest. Waits for them. Protects them. 

She deserves a life of her own. One without servitude. 

He doesn't know how old she is. 

But in this moment, distant-eyed, curled up, shoulders hunched, she seems young.

"Go," Lae'zel says eventually, and her voice has softened to a whisper. "Leave me. I must think."

Astarion nods, dragging himself upright. The rain picks up, rasping against the stone, and a wind blows humidity into their cave; what rest they get tonight will be shallow, tempered by air and fear. She will not find comfort in her thoughts or in her tent. 

But still she sits there, and looks over the world, and thinks. 

He knows, now. What the dream has created her from. 

She is who he could have been. The blind devotion, the unwavering desperation to do what was expected—she is what Cazador made spawns for, before obedience was forced and begging made amusement. Why he always favoured Astarion, the one last spark he could not quench in full, the eyes that burned with fury even as the body laid meek and docile under bruising hands. 

Lae'zel is Petras. Is Leon. Is what Astarion might have become, if he had not learned hatred before he learned fear. 

The bitterness swells, fierce and furious; but it is not enough. Resignation tempers it, drags it down to the apathy, to the hollowness he has always carved from himself rather than let anything rot and fester. 

Lae'zel is him. Is who he could have been. 

But she isn't anymore. 

Whatever this dream is trying to tell him, he doesn't want to know.

-

Lae'zel sits alone for hours, long after he leaves. Moonlight turns the edges of her hair silver. She ignores the bowl of stew Gale sets cautiously at her side, all conversation floating around her head without landing, and eventually the rest give up and simply fade back to scratching what rest they can from this miserable cave. 

Astarion joins them, because he knows she isn't ready. Maybe she never will be. He disappears into his tent, tucks himself alongside the pillows and empty curl of his stomach, and tries to find a trance that slips from his grasp like water. 

But then, late–

The quiet shnk of a sharpening blade. Of a familiar ritual. The rasp of a whetstone, clutched in an experienced hand, against the edge of a longsword—but not the one she has used from the beginning, with its githyanki handle and jagged guard. He can hear the difference, the resonance of the metal. 

It's something else. A new weapon. 

Astarion curls in his tent and feels– well. He doesn't know what. 

But something.

-

Amidst raiding parties of githyanki and the looming threat of the shadow curse, another visitor finds the time to stroll merrily into their camp and strike up a conversation with all the ignorant ease of one who has never felt threatened by the world. Astarion hates him immediately. 

And when he is done, Elminster Aumar—who appears so truly identical to the scathing stories Astarion remembers reading, the dream isn't even trying—vanishes, leaving a crater of devastation in his wake. 

Gale's secret, dragged before the party with grace befitting a verbose old man who calls himself chosen. And with a story behind it, more than a poor explanation and purple light; a goddess and a lover made one. A gift. An attempt. An orb of mythical standards, now stabilized, but with the potential of ending all life for leagues. 

Or ending the life of the Absolute. 

The party shuffles with it, sitting around the campfire littered with the remains of the old wizard's enormous appetite, blinking at each other with wide eyes. There's a bomb in their midst, one wearing the face of a wince and hunched shoulders.

Not what they expected, then. This dream knows how to pull together insanity and make it feel almost real. 

"My apologies," Gale says, and though it's bright and blithe and his general level of jovial, there is an undercurrent there. Weariness, maybe. Dread. He's been clutching a secret to his chest and he knows he should have spoken of it long before, should have revealed all the destruction he's brought along on their journey. "I– well. If I truly wished to tell you, I would have done so by now. I have no excuse except remorse."

Tendays, since Astarion discovered it in the Grove. Even longer past the morning on the beach, when he first could have mentioned it. 

But secrets are always things of fear.

Karlach sighs. Drags a hand through her hair, then brings it down to thump on her chest. "You're not the only one here with the threat of blowing up, soldier," she says, grim. "Hells if I didn't wish you'd have mentioned it, but there's nothing we can do about that. Just– tell us stuff, yeah? We're close enough now."

Lae'zel scoffs. Her claws click over her greaves. "You have weakened us," she tells him, bland. "But now we know. Do not do it again."

A slightly less kind variant. But for Lae'zel, it is as warm as a proffered blanket. 

Gale smiles. Still weary, but softer, tempered by hope this will come together. "I will explain more in depth tomorrow," he says. "Elminster may have… misrepresented certain things, for all he gave the generalities. But I request some time to gather my thoughts, if you'll allow it."

"Of course, Gale," Wyll says. "Just don't stray too far."

The wizard bobs his head; it's only just crawling into evening, the sun still high overhead, but it's clear there will be no more traveling today. He stands, adjusting the set of his robes, and wanders off to the nearby forest. 

Wyll watches him go, head tilting to the side. Astarion almost expects him to start whispering to the others, talk strategies now that Gale is out of earshot; but they stay quiet. Just curious, just pondering. 

A bomb. 

But one with a hero's goal. 

Astarion stands, tucking the star-flecked cape he's been stitching galaxies into around his shoulders, and disappears. It's easy, with distracted minds abound, to slip into the shadows until he is little more than a pair of pale eyes, and the canopy shelters him as he tracks the fading footsteps. 

For Gale's part, when Astarion finds him sitting upon a rock beneath a break in the trees, he looks less than surprised. 

"I should have guessed you'd follow me," he says, wry. "A secondary apology, then, for not giving you the full story before. You can understand why I was leery to say it."

In part. Astarion isn't quite sure whether he would have believed in the mythicality of it more, or if the dream was correct in keeping things vague so he didn't look deeper—but now it's all spilled like guts between them. A curse's consequences that will spread far past only the one who holds it—a death he has been told to fall upon, just to earn forgiveness.

He hums, stepping closer. Doesn't say anything, because his mind is moving and shifting and jumbling around like a mess, and he cannot bury everything in the gravedirt before it emerges. 

"I suppose you've come to tell me not to do it," Gale says. His voice is this curious blank, emotion stripped away, but it's clumsily done; there's a shake in his vowels, in how he keeps his eyes fixed on the sky overhead. "To spare myself."

Astarion looks at him, then. 

The Netherese Orb in his chest is not vampirism. It is not a thrall, however much it commands him; all it wants is to feed, and he is free to obey how he chooses, to pick and decide his own actions for all they lead to the same conclusion. 

But it is hunger, and it is hunger that is not from Gale, and it has sunk its teeth deep into his soul. 

He has still not figured out what part of himself is Gale, what aspect of his unconsciousness has woven together into this truly irritating man who seems to make it his life mission to carve conversations from empty air and stuff unnecessaries into what had once been peace. This man who wearied and broke himself to save tieflings who will die anyway. This man who sat by corpse and corpse alike, waiting for him to come back to himself, allow him to plead his case before the others killed him. 

Gale is not Astarion. There is no part of him that is the same, for all they might be a reflection; he cannot be, because second guesses are not the same as a lack of desire to do it at all. Astarion knows this. He does. 

But he wonders. 

"Are you hunger?" Astarion asks. 

The wizard blinks. 

He looks down, finally dragging his gaze off the sky; his face is worn around the corners, eyes that have gathered bags and scars from their journey. He is not the coiffed, gentile fellow from the beach; he is not the picture of elegant isolation his stories paint. 

He is something else entirely, it seems. 

"Of all the strange things you've asked me, this is perhaps the oddest," Gale finally says, and tilts his head to the side. "Unless you mean are you hungry, of course, but I'm inclined to believe you don't."

Astarion stays quiet, watching. 

After a time, he sighs, curling his arms in. His robes pool around his legs, spilling down the sides of the rock; in a gap around his neck, lines of black twine over his chest, just a corner visible on his throat. No purple light now, with Elminster's stabilization; with the granted trigger. 

"I am… ambitious," Gale says, soft, like the words weren't made to be said. "That's the nice word for it, a dressing over the wound; ambitious enough it slips into greed, into avarice. I held the ear of a goddess and wanted more. Nothing was ever enough."

He laughs a little, though it's far from funny. "That is the curse of all wizards, we're taught. They try to temper that egotism, show us the faults of our forebearers; but I was a prodigy. How could I slow down? Not when Mystra herself cast light on my achievements and promised to take me to higher heights."

"And then I saw a chance to take myself there. Oh, it was to be a gift for her, an offering no one else could do—but I knew it would make me strong. Knew the power I could find in it. Knew what I could become, if I just managed to do it right."

He brushes, unconsciously, at his chest. "And you can see how well that turned out."

The air echoes hollowly between them. 

"So yes, I suppose," Gale says. He looks at his hands. "You could call me hunger."

Astarion swallows. His throat is painfully dry. 

This should be a victory. The dream, peeled back, the first crack that has spilled forth in direct words instead of him merely analyzing motivations. The dream, speaking through itself to tell him it isn't real, that the man before him is little more than an aspect of his existence woven into false flesh and given a name. The dream, fictitious, a lie. 

It doesn't feel like winning. 

Astarion walks closer, pressing a hand to the base of the stone—a reflection, so long ago, when he looked up at the rising sun and Gale spoke of skies. Is this normal, he'd asked, of the clouds, of the blue, of the dream. Is this normal?

Monster to monster. Hunger to hunger. 

How lucky are the two of them, to be such simple concepts. To be consumed with nothing more than base urges. 

The wizard exhales, raising an ashen hand to press against his chest. To the orb beneath, like he can feel it, like it's lashing at his palm. Purple light, spilling between his fingers. A promise of destruction.

"Have you ever wondered," Gale says, almost inaudible, leaning back against the rock to stare up. "If this life wasn't yours? If there was supposed to be something more, but you haven't yet managed to pull back the curtains? That everything you have ever done has been little more than a footnote in some separate story?"

Astarion goes very still. 

The thrall, a gargoyle, perched between his bones. The sun, white instead of yellow, in a blue sky. The dream, haunting in familiarity, splayed in the corners. 

It doesn't like him asking questions. Doesn't like him discovering. 

His mouth moves regardless. 

“What if none of this is real?”

A pause. The distant chitter of birds. 

"Ah," Gale says, soft. "That would be something, wouldn't it?"

He isn't smiling because he doesn't believe it. He's smiling because, in some small way, the thought is appealing; that of course it all comes crashing down. That the curtains will part, the audience applauds, and his mistakes turn out to be little more than lines on a stage he can flee from. 

But he hasn't fled. 

Gale leans back and looks at him, for the first time. His eyes are drawn; alive, and weary with it. "But I'm afraid it is, at the end of all things. And we have nothing to do but try our best to make it through."

The dream, clutching for life, for stability. A promise wrought in blood that it will outlive him, cast him down to the rocks before he escapes unscathed.

It isn't trying to save him.

It's trying to break him. 

"We escape ancient pasts to claw towards impossible futures," Gale says, quiet. 

Astarion knows this one.

"And gut ourselves on the mysteries between," he finishes. 

Gale smiles, pleased, a little curious. "You know Ghâtaroi," he says, lips quirked at the corners. "A finer poet there never was."

Astarion looks away. "She killed herself before she reached thirty years."

"Yes." Gale flexes his hands, at the scars knotted over his wrists and spilling into his palms. Not all of them are from battle. "All great things fall to ruin, in the end."

Astarion exhales. Sits down, next to the rock, dew soaking through the legs of his pants, slipping down his boots. Gale mirrors him, curling his legs in, hand still clutched at his chest. Night is coming, but slow; they have time before they have to return to the party. 

Overhead, the sky is blue. 

It's almost picturesque, alight in ribbons of clouds woven together like some ancestral tapestry. The little pocket Gale has tucked himself in is directly beneath a break in the trees, a perfect circle, golden sunlight trickling through. 

Astarion hopes he remembers it, when he wakes up. 

-

Gale tells the party more details; his childhood, Mystra's choosing, the true powers of the orb. Promises, with earnest passion, that he will not kill them; that he will take great pains to explode when only the Absolute is nearby, so that he will end this wretchedness once and for all. 

They try to convince him not to. That they will find another way to slay the false god, one without death. 

Gale smiles. Says it's for the best. Says not to worry. Says he's okay.

Astarion watches, something old and wretched in his throat.

This is familiar, too.

-

The shadow-cursed lands have no sun. 

There are many other things wrong with it, things that carve fear down his spine, but that is the only one he can concentrate on. From their first steps within, the sky goes from blue to grey to black and stays there, dark and roiling, endless in their impenetrable expanse. 

Two hundred years without, and now he walks with fragile docility into emptiness once more. 

The ice here is endless, leeching warmth he doesn't have from his bones, and it is dead with it; what shadows exist are little more than memories, twisted remains of falsities given undeath as weapons. 

There is nothing here. There is nothing here.

If you're cold, you move to keep warm. 

Astarion marches on, because there is no other option; because the party has declared that they will go until they find this pack of goblins that promise them safe passage. That they cannot travel to Moonrise in any other way but these dead lands. 

The dream will not kill him; he cannot die here, much as he could not before, much as he has never been allowed to. He tells himself this is still better than the kennel; that this is a kinder hell, with choice to soothe the ache of pain. 

That is a paltry balm, because it is still pain.

And then he wishes that he could change, that he could flee these heroes in their suicidal quest, that he could have the strength to break away without fearing the dream will end; that perhaps he could leave all these reflections of himself and the misery they carry, the faces that appear too much like his. 

He wishes, above all else, that he could be free. 

Too bad there are no stars here to wish on. 

-

Half a tenday in, familiarity finds him with jagged claws. 

The party pushes themselves harder than ever, eager to escape the curse that lays fury on their backs and summons wretched things from the shadows; they move and fight with a speed that drives even them to exhaustion, curled around the campfire each night with weary eyes. 

But that is for them, who eat each day, choke down whatever stale things they can find in this land. 

Because they can't hunt. There are no creatures. 

Astarion clutches onto sanity with a fading grasp. 

Starvation is an old friend, though he will not greet it with kindness. It carves a fire in his stomach, in limbs that tremble as they push themselves through combat with nothing, in cuts with only white flesh and bone beneath. What little personality he's allowed himself to keep drains away for strength of will, for shoving at his chest like he can force the hunger down. 

Two hundred years without. And only now he falls apart. 

They walk through shattered courtyards, twisting grey vines laced through the stone pavers and over the broken bodies of people and crows alike. Astarion keeps his eyes fixed out, unmoving; he's not breathing, not blinking. Not doing anything that requires effort. Nothing but moving. One foot after the other. 

"Careful, my friend!"

Astarion whips back to himself, arms curled in—freezes, leg halfway over a gap in the twisting path, a twenty foot drop below. 

His stomach roils.

Gale puffs over, light spilling from his robes, the cantrip one of many the party has cast on themselves to hold back the shadows. "Lucky I saw you in time," he says, chipper, like they're not walking through an undead hell in search of heroes who might already be dead, if the drider they just killed has any friends. "Are you okay?"

A keen locks behind his fangs. He's almost trembling.

Astarion flashes a grin, eyes curled at the corners. "Just dreadfully bored, I'm afraid. Caught up in a daydream of silk sheets and roaring fireplaces."

Behind them both, Karlach lets out a startled ha! 

Gale raises his eyebrows, fingers steepling together. "I thought you said you had dark vision," he says, an odd blend between a frown and curiosity. "Is this curse too deep to even see that?"

"Clever on occasion, aren't you?" Astarion says, instead of anything else. 

"I certainly like to think so." Gale adjusts his collar, tapping his fingers over his pulse point. His blood-scent, thick and disgusting, still blood, still blood, hits the air. "I could always cast light on you as well, if you wish."

Astarion rolls his eyes, letting his body slump as if in mock annoyance, and not as if he can no longer maintain a straight back. "Yes, and why don't you serve me up as fresh meat for any ghoul that passes us by, while you're at it?"

"If only they have a preference for meals that bite back." The wizard peers over the hole, the gap in the stone, crumbled to ruin below. Hard to miss. Impossible, for one as jumpy as him. "Are you quite certain you're okay?"

"I'm fine," Astarion says, and smiles. Darkens his eyes, lets his lips curl up into something deeper. "Perfectly fine, love. Just rather interested in leaving this accursed place."

"I suppose," Gale says, dubious.

Astarion keeps smiling. There is an animal fear in his chest, one that claws itself to ruin in its desperation to get away. 

They're ignoring the conversation in the woods, the one over Gandrel's body, the one from the party. Not reflections here, just two adventurers in the same party; little more than strangers bound together by parasites. 

By a dream that Astarion now knows is no longer a mercy. 

The group has shown him kindness. But they are him—slices and mirrors and reflections, but him, in shattered pieces, scattered throughout. 

And he would not spare himself, if it came to that. 

Freeing the tieflings didn't matter. They were besieged in the shadow-cursed lands, and what few survived were broken by it, fallen to ruin and scraps of humility. Worse than they were before; worse than they would be if they had just died in the Grove, cut down by goblin invaders. 

Mercy means nothing. It has always meant nothing.

The dream is clawing at him, trying to weaken his grip, to soften him up so that when he wakes, he will be a fresh thing for Cazador, obedience needing to be carved into his bones once more and helplessness retaught. These conversations with the others, where he tells Wyll to make choices, Lae'zel to free herself, Gale to wonder at existence; they are threats, insidious, a butcher's knife to cut off the armour until only his weakness lays shivering. 

Mercy means nothing.

This is the one lesson he will not allow himself to forget. 

So he stands there, shivering, pretending he isn't, smiling at Gale with empty eyes. The hunger howls, furious, frantic, pleading, in his chest. 

Perhaps it would be easier if he woke up. 

Perhaps this could all just end.

-

The Last Light Inn is a little darling of a place, if he is content to ignore the surroundings. The enormous, swirling dome of silver is a tad gauche, and he tells Karlach that, just so she laughs at him instead of noticing how he can't walk in a straight line. 

It's full of more life than the shadow-cursed lands have ever had, which is a feat in of itself. More heroes of the Wyll type, perfect little figurines that shuffle around looking for kittens stuck in trees and babies to kiss on the forehead, who have sworn themselves against an impossible evil and a tyrant undying. 

Their blood-scent fills his nose. Drowns him, a ferocity that shrieks and slavers in his stomach. He bites clean through lips that don't bleed and claws at his own wrist until his fingers tangle in the tendons. 

Astarion begs for mercy Cazador will not give. The hunger begs for blood Astarion cannot give. He hates it and them and himself. 

More Fists, so Wyll leads them in, once more throwing out his name to win information; but not son of Duke Ravengard. He declares himself Wyll Ravengard, and lets them figure out the finer details; stands up straighter as he does so, squaring his shoulders. 

He brushes at the patch over his shirt, the little W stitched beneath his mark. 

The party is certainly not welcomed, though, a jarred tadpole shoved up alongside their heads, but a tiefling Astarion can barely remember vouches for them with the obstinate confidence of a child. Their captor releases them. 

Their captor, who is another one from the fairytales. 

Jaheira, High Harper. She's dangerous and fierce with it, like a snake that sprouted legs but kept the venom. Gale drinks the wine she offers, because he is a fool, and proceeds to get verbose to the point he answers none of her questions—perhaps less of a fool, or at least a lucky one. But Karlach swoons over her, and Wyll would have sworn himself to her side in seconds without his parasite, and even Lae'zel eyes her twin blades with respect. 

Astarion watches her, cautious, keeping his forked tongue locked behind his fangs and hands pressed to his bloodless chest. 

She's a myth. 

He thought she'd be taller. 

If he wants to die, if the moment comes where this dream is no longer worth the pain, he will go to her. She will not hesitate, because his dream knows better than to make her some shrinking violet who argues over the fallacy of preserving souls; she will gut and decapitate and run a forest through him just for good measure. 

She catches him watching and smiles, sharp. He smiles back. 

-

There is no night, not in these lands with nothing else, but Astarion finds an hour when the majority go to sleep; when the Inn goes quiet and empty and hollow. Still guards, still hunters, but those who have not faced his desperation. He disappears into the shadows like he is one himself.

Deep in the barn, tucked up on piles of musty hay, are three oxen. Beasts of burden, ones that rest here when not in use, slumped behind shoddy doors that will not hold if they go into a rampage.

So he moves slowly. Kneels beside the first, finds the thickest patch of fur to hide the punctures, and bites. 

Three mouthfuls. Three wonderful, delicious, beautiful mouthfuls, red like life, red like fire; he keens into it, a wounded animal, lapping at its fur for any further drop. 

He goes to the second. Bites it. Does the same for the third. 

They're enormous, these oxen; three mouthfuls from each is hardly anything noticeable. They will all have the same lull in energy, and his bites are well-hidden by their shaggy coats. And already Astarion can feel himself stand up straighter, thoughts unhooking from the terror burrowed deep in his skull. The roar of the hunger fades, slips below to a beggar's cry, the same empty pleading it has honed for the past two hundred years.

Every night, for as long as they stay here. Enough to keep him moving. Keep him aware.

The party will never know. He will never let them know. 

It's better this way.

-

The day after Dammon slammed home a new piece of infernal iron and truly obscene sounds echoed from Lae'zel's tent, Karlach finds him in the Inn. 

He's sprawled on a log near the fire, pressing shaking hands into his shirt to keep from being noticeable; tomorrow they head out again, carve back into the shadow-cursed lands, on the hunt for the man whose unlife keeps the darkness tethered here. Thrice has he drank from the oxen, and come alive each time; it's cut away pains grown so old he's managed to forget about them, to bury the sensation in coffins until it sinks beneath the surface and cannot claw its way out. His arrows once more hit their marks; his feet once more find their steps. He is– not powerful, but at least capable. It is nothing compared to Gandrel's blood, to the fire that scorched him and filled him and made him feel alive, if only for a moment—but it is at least something. 

Something that ends tonight. His last. 

He hears her long before she gets close, because she is a clumping loud thing in the endless quiet of these lands, and he turns to level a raised eyebrow at her, arms crossed. 

"Hey, soldier," Karlach says, tongue pressed between pointed teeth. "Got a second?"

Astarion doesn't flinch, but he does smile, curling his hips in so he's perched on the log like a bird about to take flight. His hair spills over his face, eyes peering through the snowy curls. 

"For you, darling? Always."

He's been expecting this, in a way. She's finally able to touch and he's made no secret of being open and willing for anything; in this dream it's easier than ever to slip away, to pretend the hands that curl around his hips are little more than memory, and she has been deprived for so very long. She's probably working her way through the camp, though she'll have a devil of a time with perfect monogamist Wyll and a Shadowheart who has never been more on edge as they approach Shar's Gauntlet. 

Karlach tips her head and takes the log opposite him. She's big and bold but there's something uncharacteristically nervous about her now, rubbing at her knees, tail lashing at the dirt. She keeps glancing from side to side like someone is listening in. 

Astarion sighs, mostly to get her going, because at least when he's talking he can focus on something other than the hunger. "This is longer than a second, unfortunately. I'm terribly impatient."

She looks down. Curls her arms in. 

"What's dying like?"

Astarion blinks. "I'm sorry?"

Karlach winces. "Hells, you're right, that's a shitty question to ask. Forget it."

"No, I–" he draws off, still blinking, unable to really get his bearings back underneath him. "I'm fine with answering, love. But why?"

Karlach doesn't speak, at first. Just looks down, scratching shapes into the dirt with her heel, scuffed little nothings that hold her full attention. 

"You heard Dammon," she says, finally, and there's no hellfire in her voice. Something flat, something dull. "My engine's only got so long before kicking it. And Zariel's not getting anything of me, not my service, not my soul if I die down there. So. Gonna have to do it up here, and I just. Wanted to be prepared, I guess."

Oh. 

Astarion stares at her, ringed in fire, the heat that crackles and pulses off her arms. She doesn't look back, jaw set. Her shoulders are pulled taut to her neck, arms clasped around each other. Scared he'll try to convince her otherwise. Scared he'll tell the others she's being serious. 

Scared he knows what she wants to do. 

What is dying like?

Two hundred years have dulled memories where the mausoleum didn't erase them, and he can hardly remember anything; not his family, not his face, not the sky. But the alley is frozen in place, carved into his marrow much like the commandments. Trying to hold his own intestines in, fingers slick with blood, as a man with red eyes knelt by his side. Agreeing to anything, anything, for survival. The ice of fangs piercing his neck. 

What can he even say?

He's followed this path before, laid down the tracks and shivered over the answer. But that was before, when things were only unbearable instead of unbearable and endless. Before he understood how little control he had.

The dream has changed things. 

He will not die here, not in a way that matters; but when he wakes, the option will proffer its jagged contract once more. Not without a fight, at least, without throwing himself at his sire with fangs bared no matter how useless it will be; or passing quietly in some far-off corner, depriving Cazador the satisfaction of taking his second death. 

But that is for him, who is miserable and shattered and broken with it. Karlach has always been sunlight incarnate, reflected warmth so desperate to live; to see her here, quiet, wondering at her own erasure feels– feels wrong.  

She's fought so hard to get here. She can't go now. 

"It's short," he hears himself say. "But there's a pressing lack of wine afterward, I'm afraid."

Karlach snorts. "You hate wine, fangs."

"But I love complaining about it," Astarion says, leaning back. "And even more than that I adore mocking those who drink it, and letting the light hit it so I can make little pink shapes on the opposite wall, and sneaking it into Gale's pack so he has to try and make dinner with four bottles of Esmeltar red." He swallows. "Hard to do that when dead."

Karlach looks up from the ground. Her face is drawn, ridges pulled in stark lines around her eyes and mouth. There's nothing of the raging barbarian, of Hell's Champion, of the woman who cleaved through Marcus' winged horrors as he tried to strike down the Inn.

She doesn't want this. 

She's just terrified of anything else.

"Wine's not that great," she says. It's nearly a whisper. "Just a drink, yeah? Not worth much of anything."

It isn't. It never has been. 

It is still something.

"But there are people worth sharing it with," Astarion says, and tucks his limbs in. Brings his knees up for nothing more than to reduce his silhouette, to tuck himself in like he can hide from the world. "And new flavours, and new styles, and new everything. They keep making new wines. You could spend your whole life drinking and still never try them all." He swallows. "That'd be a pleasant sort of adventure, wouldn't it?"

Karlach stares at her claws. Steam trickles from the corners of her eyes. 

"Dying's little more than an ending, love," Astarion says, and doesn't look at her; can't manage it, as something cold twines around his ribs. "And I’ve always preferred something over nothing."

-

Karlach splits a bottle with him that night, tucked in the cramped confines of her tent littered with scorch marks and odd baubles from every end of the adventure they've been on. She laughs at him, at the face he makes while drinking, at the world; laughs more and more, draining her glass, marveling at it like a miracle. 

She is painfully, achingly alive. 

Perhaps she always was.

-

The moonlantern holds the shadows at bay more than cantrips or torches ever have, and their path comes easier, in some small regard. To balance that out, the monster attacks triple. The closer and closer they push to Moonrise Towers, the more torn the group becomes, ripped between life and speed. 

Astarion hollows. 

The oxen are long gone. What little they gave him bleeds out after the first meazel's garrotte, carving through flesh and sinew until red trickles down his chest; and that was three days ago. The wound still hasn't healed. He's wearing his collars high to hide it. 

The hunger shrieks and screams and begs.

Astarion stays and speaks and fights, because this pain is survivable; because he knows he has endured it before and can do it again. What Cazador will do to him upon waking up is not. He does not know that pain. He cannot risk it. 

Gale asks again if he's okay. 

Astarion smiles. Flutters his eyes. 

Of course, love.

Perhaps they don't know vampires can't drink from the undead. Perhaps they think there are still animals to hunt here. Perhaps they are waiting for him to ask rather than offering. 

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. 

Would you listen? Astarion wonders, glancing at Gale from the corners of his eyes. Would you let me if I asked?

If he were real, he would. He's already proven himself distressingly incapable of rational thought when he thinks he is helping someone. 

But he isn't real. 

None of them are.

-

The Towers are a new and exciting variety of terrible. 

In pale reflection to the goblin camp, all they need is one flash of their illithid passengers to gain access; the dream bends and bows before them, smoothing down problems and opening doors in simpering reward for making it this far. 

Astarion offers to clean up the goblins twisted from the mind out. He drags them off to a corner, drains their black, fetid blood, hates himself, and rejoins the party. 

Gale talks them through the madness here, the chaos, those who serve the Absolute and call her perfect. They're sick, the lot of them, prostrating themselves for a scrap of attention. Not even power, prestige; just attention.

The party doesn't kill them. Astarion's fingers itch to. 

And now they head to famed Balthazar, in the Gauntlet of Shar, which has Shadowheart acrid in her determination. Astarion fades to the back once again, slips to the darkness, lets the others lead. It's hard enough to focus, as his stomach grows fangs of its own and demands mercy with shredded innards, and he cannot drag awareness away from it. 

Cannot drag awareness from anything. 

Time has been moving more… consistently, as of late. Hours don't skip and stutter past, and he wakes from trance with an understanding of how long it has been, and he is rarely wrong. The days crawl by with dreadful reliability, even in the darkness, and he cannot remember the last time he's blinked and come to with the world having moved by without his awareness. 

He wants to blame it on the hunger. That starvation has made him grounded, kept him pinned and tethered to this false reality, forced him to exist through every aching second as he hunts for anything he can kill with blood to yield. Any corpse to pluck from the ground. Anything, anything.

It could be that. 

It doesn't feel like it. 

Fear curdles, sour and old. The dream is approaching its end. 

He doesn't want to wake up. 

-

Ketheric Thorm dies, and the curse alongside him. 

An avatar of the god of bones crumbles to ruin, and the Nightsong, unstabbed, unbound, with cracked porcelain skin and fury carved through her features, kills the man who thought himself unkillable. She laughs while she does it, frenzied, and stomps a hole through his chest. 

Perhaps this is a dream for her, too.

It's evolving, and he's struggling to keep up, trying to clutch understanding with shaking hands. Whatever it comes from is scraping at his mind, clawing creativity he didn't know he had as it weaves together Elder Brains and the Dead Three and conniving lords akin to ancient fables. There is no simplicity like dreams past, empty hallways with a dagger on one side and Cazador on the other. 

It feels so real, at times. 

But they stumble out, because they are alive, and they are not yet done. 

Long after the monster has been slain, as they sit nursing wounds and drinking to ignore the memories of traversing back through an illithid ship Astarion had done his best to fake familiarity at, they wind away the hours in camp. Soon they will have to leave, to complete this suicidal quest; but there is no victory won with broken bodies, and they have to heal first. 

He sits with them, weary, head bobbing into his chest and every muscle on fire. There's blood in his stomach, little though it is; he found rats in the Gauntlet, enough to satiate him, to dull the hunger to a rippling decay. Bearable. Many things are. 

Shadowheart isn't at the fire. 

Astarion pauses, glancing up; the other four are slumped in various positions of unconsciousness, limbs bound up in white and the red glow of healing potions at work. Wyll, curled up, head in Karlach's lap; her, sprawled back, pressed to Lae'zel's side; her, determinedly not moving as Gale's arm rests over her extended leg. She's the only one even approaching alert, and there is an awful fondness in her eyes, looking over those leaning against her, trusting her to protect them in sleep. 

But Shadowheart isn't there. 

Astarion slips from camp. 

He's no ranger but their cleric is far from one of nature, and footsteps lead through the detritus of a land that is no longer quite as shadow-cursed, though still ruined. The monsters of this area are fleeing, hunting for cast shadows that will protect them from the sun, but he still keeps his daggers ready as he follows her path. It would be both of their lucks to die here, alone. 

Shadowheart looks over as he approaches, some protective alarm rune encircling the clearing. She's kneeling, arms wrapped around her sides, and tears are pouring down her face. 

Astarion stops. 

"Why are you here?" She rasps, through a throat shredded from screaming. There's a wary fury in her eyes. "Go away."

He should. 

Astarion steps forward, cautious, moving with a slow ease she doesn't have to flinch from. Some five feet away, he slips down to sit, eye level with her kneeling form. She watches him, eyes huge in the dark. 

He knew she was him when she first joined. He's always known where she came from; the part of him that stayed angry. The part of him that had to, because the only other choice was breaking down. 

She's reached the end of her anger now. 

Shadowheart chokes on something, liquid-bright under the pale moon. "Go away," she whispers. "Please."

Astarion grimaces. "You don't want me to."

"You don't know what I want," she snarls, though it comes out trembling. "You– none of you know, what she did for me– what I thought–"

She can't hold it back. 

Shadowheart keens, broken. A shudder races over her and fresh tears pour down her face, wrenching at her control, tearing at the composure she'd forced from herself for the entire journey out of the Shadowfell, back to the Towers, against Ketheric. She's been a corpse walking, forcing herself through battles with the loss of a deity and gift of a new; stayed fighting, and fighting, and fighting–

But a body can only hold out for so long. 

Shadowheart curls around herself, voice breaking and gasping. "I didn't kill her," she whispers, strangling the answers out of her ragged throat. "I had the spear. I had the gems. Shar was in my head, she was telling me what to do, how to win her favor, and–" Saliva pours like blood from her mouth, splattering darkly in the soil. She's choking on it. Choking on fear. On realization. "I didn't kill her. I didn't kill her."

She's saying like it's not true; like she can speak it into existence, a way to go back and change her decision, like she can still take up the spear and become a Dark Justicier. Like she can still kill the Nightsong. 

Like she would do it any differently, the second time around. 

"You didn't," Astarion murmurs, in the silence of the clearing hollowed. "You saved her."

Shadowheart croaks a laugh. "It was my life's ambition," she says, helpless. "All I knew, all I fought for, and I–" Her fists cut into the ground, tearing up sod that has never held life. "And I abandoned it. All to save a woman who wouldn't die anyway."

She's attacking Aylin because if she doesn't, she has to attack herself. 

"It wasn't your ambition," Astarion says, and wonders where these words come from; wonders how he knows to say them, how he knows they will help. "It was Shar's. You were just a pawn for her to use."

"Shar saved me," Shadowheart whispers, trembling. 

Astarion closes his eyes. 

He's heard that before. 

"Maybe," he says, quiet. "But that does not make her worthy of following."

Shadowheart sobs, emptying herself out, face pressed to the dirt. 

Astarion doesn't move closer. Doesn't touch her. Doesn't offer comfort in that way. 

But he stays, and thinks maybe that's what she wants. 

-

Shadowheart returns to the fire. 

Her face is blotchy and streaked with tracks of mud, tears cut through the center. What little energy she has left is being used to walk, staggering step to step; but she's up, and she's moving, and she joins the huddle around Lae'zel with exhaustion melting off her bones. 

She's cut her hair.

Her eyes peer through the new gap, open and exposed, and she rubs at her wrists with uncharacteristic anxiety. The amulet is stripped away, abandoned in the woods where it will never be found; there's a pale circle over her forehead where it sat. 

It looks like the moon.

When Astarion first saw her, he'd thought she had the face of a victim from so long ago, someone he remembers in the vague blur all faces become after two hundred years. 

But here, with her hair pulled back, he thinks he has never seen a face like hers before.

He wonders where it came from. 

Where she did. 

-

Jaheira gathers her Harpers and cleans the Moonrise Towers out like rats on a ship, forced to meet the cat's fangs or jump into sunlight themselves; another massacre, another bloody marker on their slaughter campaign. 

Astarion slips to the shadows. Drains more bodies. Aches and pains disappear, corpse-blood thick and vulgar on his tongue. Stares at his hands. Rejoins the group. 

Ketheric is dead, and one of the Netherstones in their possession; but two more still fester elsewhere. Jaheira urges them to move quickly, to run. 

They have spent a lifetime chasing out hags and rescuing tieflings and killing gnolls. 

How fitting, then, that the only time they need to rush is when they get closer to Cazador. 

The dream is lovely in its malice. 

-

Wyrm's Lookout is a peaceful sort of place, a deep breath before the plunge; remains of old flags waving on lonely poles and the rubble of a building collapsed well after its prime make their camp that night, a skeleton to fill with organs. 

The stars are overhead, gleaming through violet, through what had been blue hours ago. 

He's missed them. 

Astarion sets his tent up, the familiar motion, stomach soothed with a rabbit and old injuries wisping away. It's hot today, summer fast approaching, hanging its humid claws over Faerûn like an insidious threat. He has never felt its heat in anything but midnight tones. Maybe it will be different; or he will imagine it different. 

He grits his teeth. 

The dream. 

Questions are things of uselessness. He doesn't need to see any more cracks in the fantasy, to peel back the truth beneath; he already knows. He's always known. 

But those in the camp are himself. Are pieces of his mind, scattered around, given voices and words of their own. A face reflected, but new, in its own way; something that speaks. Something that knows. 

Asking them questions is like asking himself, but without the shivering fear all his answers hide under. 

Astarion sets down the rock he'd been using to hammer his tent spikes into the ground, stretching upright. It's dark already, stars glimmering overhead, the soft sounds of those slipped into unconsciousness echoing through the rubble. One last night here, before they move into the last land open to them; the final battlefield. 

He shakes off the haze, the shadows clinging to his soul like he still has one, and wanders. It's easy, with the skill his mind has conjured for him, to slip out of the thick of camp unseen. He's already been with them, watched them break down to rubble and ruin and rebuild themselves, find reasoning that he never could, discover how to fix themselves with what scraps they have left. 

All except one.

Astarion goes to the left, where purple fabric perches, tucked further from the fire than it normally does. It's simple, to tap on the covering flap, and wait for a muffled grunt of a response. Even simpler, to walk inside. 

Deep in the ruins beneath the Moonrise Towers, carving through an illithid stronghold, seeing the Absolute before them—the massive Elder Brain, demonstrable and eldritch, cosmic in its vastness. 

Close enough to harm. 

Close enough to explode.

And yet it flew away, crowned and gloried, to raze destruction on Baldur's Gate.

Astarion sits on the swath of fabric, gentle, legs curled below and knees braced. It's an open posture, one that has wormed its way into his mind; no longer the sauntering sprawl, or the lavish stretch, or something that frees his chest and hips from clothing. 

Just him, sitting there, arms loose and eyes open. 

He doesn't know where he learned it. 

He can't make it go away.

Gale looks back at him, lips thin and eyes dark, bags sitting heavy underneath. The book he's holding is upside down. "Why, please, make yourself at home," he says dryly, setting it to the side and leaning back against his neat stack of pillows. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

He doesn't need to ask. He already knows. They've always been connected like this, a strand between, the impossibility of a shared nature. 

Here, in the dim of the tent, firelight cast purple through the thin walls, they stare at each other, an illusion to a corpse. 

"You didn't do it," Astarion says. 

It is an innocuous phrase. It means nothing. It means everything. 

Gale stares at his hands. "I didn’t."

Wyll would say something so kind, so encouraging, how proud he is. Karlach would clap his shoulders and tell him she's happy he's still with them. Shadowheart would say his life is worth more. Lae'zel would inspect him for injuries, declare him hale, and then punch him in the stomach for thinking he was nothing but a weapon. 

Astarion tilts his head to the side. "Why?"

The wizard sinks. Lowers himself, curled in, fingers brushing over his robes, to the hunger that lurks beneath. 

"I don't know," Gale answers, exhausted. "I would like to lie and say it was because I wanted to spare you, limit the explosion to my death alone; but it wasn't. I only thought of that once we were well past the time. It was something else."

Oh.

He knows, now, what this is. Knows why Gale is hunger; why he was here, why he was created, why the dream has always been more focused on him instead of the others. Why this man was the one chosen to break him down, to dismantle his defenses until there was nothing left but weakness.

This isn't real. 

But the truth is. 

"I think," Astarion says, very quietly. "I think you already gave it your life, haven't you?"

Gale doesn't answer. 

"It consumed you, and asked for more. You fed it. And soon feeding became living, until you could do nothing but feed it," he says, fingers knotting in his lap. "You weren't trying to remove the parasite to free yourself. It was just because you were worried what the orb would do if you weren't aware."

Gale curls in, licking his lips. His eyes are glassy and pale. "Yes," he whispers. "Yes, I'm afraid. I have seen what it can do. I couldn't risk its release."

A hero, carving through camps and ruins and battlefields—all places filled with magical artefacts. A hero, bringing together a band of other saviors—all people strong enough to keep him from death. A hero, hunting down the monsters terrorizing the land—all things that might earn him forgiveness in the end. 

A person, trying desperately, desperately, desperately, to cage what he created.

"You already gave it your life," he says. "There is nothing more you owe it."

Gale looks at him, quiet, grasping for anything to know why.

"You are more than hunger," Astarion tells him. "You are alive."

-

He reads with Gale late into the night. There's no talking, no faux comfort neither of them are intact enough to offer; just two bodies, content in the mysteries, taking silence as what little they can still have in this world. 

It's quiet. It's peaceful. It is entirely unknown. 

He wonders. 

Wonders how much he has broken to heal these parts of himself. 

Wonders whether any of this matters.

-

Astarion curls in his tent. He's not shaking, just still, staring up at the fabric overhead and tracing meaningless shapes over his blankets. The thrall perches, choking, in the hole a heart once filled. 

The party is already making plans, preparing for what they know will be their last stand. They speak of Gortash, of Orin, of the Elder Brain that must be tucked in some hidden crevice of the city. Wyll and Karlach have stepped forward, offering their knowledge of the city streets, its customs; Gale mentions a library for Netherese research; Lae'zel seeks to find Kith'rak Voss. 

Baldur's Gate. 

It's been so long and it's been no time at all. Two hundred years, and everything he's learned stripped away in the course of a few tendays. He's tried, with fragile desperation, to remember what he learned; to crush anything else with the understanding that soon he will wake up. He has to be able to stare at all the gore and corruption and debauchery like paint peeling off the wall. There's no room for pity, for immolation, for thoughts about things he could not change—because he can't change anything, and he knows that. 

But he has changed, instead. 

The dream sunk its claws into him. It's played him like a fiddle, gave him choices and watched him gut himself on them, rip away every protection he's spent centuries building until he's soft and weak and useless again. Until he comforts heroes and tells them to live and find happiness and be more. 

When he wakes, Cazador will delight in tearing him open again. 

Astarion lays in his tent, staring up at the ceiling. Tomorrow, with the last of their preparation set, they go. They go to Baldur's Gate. 

They go home. 

-

Astarion doesn't mention it, at first. 

He drifts as a tetherless ghost, marveling at the streets alight with orange and yellow, sunlight spilling into cracks the grey of twilight never revealed; he strolls through a circus and plucks trinkets from unsuspecting street vendors and wraps himself in the warmth of a city he's only realizing now he never knew. 

His dream is smarter than to make it a paradise—gangs lurk in the shadows, refugees rejected, familiar flophouses still standing instead of razed to the ground—but that makes it worse, almost. It makes it tangible; makes it possible, in every shattered meaning of the word. 

It shows him what Baldur's Gate could be, if he was alive to experience it. 

Perhaps these streets do not glow with sunlight. Perhaps the markets run slow and abandoned. Perhaps performers do not line corners for coin. 

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. 

But he will never know. 

So Astarion doesn't mention it; just sinks into the spectacle, into the possibility, into a world that has carved itself from two hundred year old memories he can no longer summon. Cazador is here, and still the thrall perches in his ribcage, and still he knows this will break as soon as he heals from the ache in his skull, but–

He has dreamed, before. Slipped from the world into elysiums where Cazador lies bloody and broken before him, where he wraps himself in power like silk, where no one can ever touch or take from him again. Where he is free, in every meaning. 

But they end. And they always end once he has won, once he has clawed himself to peaks unseen, when he can finally be at peace. 

This dream is not like the others. It is born from something else, from fears and hopes and self-realization; but it is still a dream, and he knows where they end. 

If he kills Cazador, will he wake up?

So Astarion doesn't mention it. Too scared, made spineless at the thought of returning to that which he has spent centuries enduring, to the grey and the stone and the deep. He trails behind as the party slips from useless task to useless task, attending Gortash's ceremony, finding missing librarians, digging severed hands from poorly dug holes—loose collections of nothings, pointless and forgettable. 

He does not mention it, until the choice is taken from him. 

Their return to Wyrm's Crossing is supposed to be a short thing, checking in on a lead Gale thinks he has scrounged from scraps of paper and threats disguised as casual conversation, and to Fraygo's Flophouse they go. There's an informant inside, one probably unwilling but soon to be convinced by the party's particular brand of brutish charisma, and they're hoping they can catch her alone by coming before dawn. They march inside.

Astarion takes just a second longer. 

The dream has no shortage of memories for this, and it's the same as the one that lives constantly behind his closed eyes. The grain of the wood, old and weather-beaten, with paint that never lasts and lacquer that always flakes. The door, knob scratched by innumerous claws, base scuffed by boots. The roof, sloped down, thin windows peering out in a facsimile of luxury. 

He has been in this building, stood near this bar, for more time than many of his companions have been alive. It is a harrowing thought. 

But he pushes inside, smile firmly in place, and glides behind Gale like he never lagged behind. 

The inside is even more familiar, creaking boards and scattered tables; a few stragglers who haven't yet figured out night is over, slumped over depleted tankards and woebegotten headaches; bartenders, chipper and empty of conscious; attendants, dragging their eyes over each new arrival with a sultriness that flirts with fear. It is as it has always been. Gale stops in the main entrance, head tilted, scanning the room. Astarion looks with him, stretching out senses well-honed to the frequency of Baldur's Gate. The groan of shifting wood. The settling of supports. Ale sloshing in mugs. 

And up above, voices. 

Those familiar. 

Astarion is climbing the stairs before he realizes it, ignorant to the party, ignorant to the world—he hears the rasp and the whisper and the hiss, that ever-present curl around vowels fangs were never meant to pronounce, Common that comes thick and accented from tongues reformed. To the memories.

The room on the second floor has wide, heavy curtains in velvet trim; it is the only room they could be in now, with morning fast approaching. They're pushing themselves, staying out later than they should, hunting for anything past the omnipresent threat of the sun. 

Astarion clutches at his chest, at the thrall, humming below his fingers. The ends of the chains still haven't connected, still haven't forced the commandments down his throat, but it's here. It's waiting, and hungry with it, for a chance to drag him back to hell. 

He should turn around. Should run, try to keep the dream for just a moment longer, shelter and curl and flash his belly to this mercy. 

Astarion shoulders open the door and marches inside. 

They're there. 

Two of them, one tall, one short, in fine garb stitched through with red and black as family colours. Pale skin, pale hair, glowing eyes. 

He could picture them while dead and blind and buried. He is not surprised his dream has sculpted them to perfection. 

Dalyria, dress clinging to her shoulders and tugged low over her bosom. Petras, collar high around his throat, delicate pattern stitched over his chest. Prim and proper the both of them, the better to gather guests, gather targets. 

Exactly as he remembers them. 

This entire adventure, this stupid fucking thing he's been clinging to like a lifeline, he has only encountered aspects of himself; pieces his mind carved open to make playthings, figurines to speak through, characters stolen from stories and fables. Little more than metaphors. 

But these are the first two that are different. The first that truly exist, even if not here.

"Sister mine," Astarion says, and wants to laugh. Wants to scream, dig through the ash and dust of apathy, until he finds fury—until he summons what he buried from necessity, from desperation. "Oh, dear Dalyria, how I have missed your wretched face."

He has, in some way. Missed the family that never was—each other's brothers, sisters, comforters, torturers, hands to hold, bodies to break, consolation, competition, bound by blood and death. The only ones who truly understand. 

The only ones who know. 

Dalyria goes pale, more than she already is; what little she has in her veins drains. Her eyes are twin stars. "Astarion," she whispers, like she's afraid to say it louder. 

Her companion is not so cautious. "Astarion," Petras spits, tightening his fists. There's grime smeared over his knees, like he knelt in an alley; a target already gathered tonight. Still on the hunt for another. "Come crawling back, have you?"

Astarion bares his fangs. "Pale Petras," he hisses. The smile splays itself over his face, empty and mocking. "Looking worse for wear, brother mine. Don't tell me my absence caused any problems."

Petras growls, wound rusted machinery, gears skipping and shaking. He's tense like a beast in the hunt, fury wrangling claws over his awareness. His eyes burn, fire in the fading night.

Noise, from behind—the rest of the party, stomping upstairs to follow him. Gale opens his mouth to say something but stops, goes quiet; just steps into the room, leaving the reins to him. The rest file in, hands on hilts, magic sparking to their fingers; but the three spawn look only at each other, at the only familiarity they have ever had. 

"You know nothing," Petras bites out. "Nothing of what has happened. The Black Mass will be completed. I will not lose my freedom because you wanted to run."

The Black Mass? Nothing he's ever heard of, and nothing he's interested in. If Petras wants it, then it's tied to Cazador, and it will never be good. Astarion smiles again, lets it fill his face until blood shifts sluggishly under his cheeks. "I think you'll find I didn't just want to run. I did."

A wordless snarl in response. A thing of the darkness.

Dalyria just stares at him, shivering. She's always been the fastest to go quiet, to fall and cower beneath; the eldest of them all. The one who has felt the thrall the longest. But she's still clever, even in her servitude. A doctor she was, long ago. 

Still is, in part.

"If you escaped," she murmurs, barely audible under Petras' raving, "why did you return?"

Astarion laughs. It's a barking thing of madness, nothing of poise, of grace. Just him, in the freedom of knowing that this is just a fantasy, that there is nothing of this that will make it to the waking world, that there are no commandments to keep words locked behind gritted teeth until he chokes on them. That he has already broken himself here, ripped out his marrow until he's vulnerable and lost, that this has been nothing but more cruelty.

"Because it doesn't matter, does it?" Astarion says, baring his fangs. "None of you are real."

For a moment, everyone goes very still. 

He's pushed too far. Revealed too much. Petras snarls, coiled, and marches forward—shoves him, fingers like claws biting into his chest. He's the seventh son of some noble line but he's never fought like it; always one for bulk, for brawn. 

Astarion skitters back. Can't quite keep his balance, laugh still bubbling up his throat, though he doesn't fall over. Petras' hackles rise to his ears and he paces, moving in quick, tight circles as he stalks around the room. It is the kennel again, one rat's corpse for the two of them, Godey with creaking taunts. Another memory. Another facet of the dream. Astarion keeps laughing.

"Petras," Dalyria groans, dizzy with fear in her white-ringed eyes. "Stop, please, we just need to get back–"

"No," Petras snarls. "The favoured spawn comes back and wants to play hero. I'll drag him before the Master myself."

They have always been as quick to betray each other as wrap bandages around wounds that still have enough to bleed. A family of disparities; of dramatic ironies and relentless inconsistencies. 

Astarion straightens, fingers curling into claws. The world crawls on, the hunger bellowing in his stomach; but spawn only have acidic blood, poisoned and rotten, much like their souls. Petras hisses, fury, ferocity; his declaration is true. 

If Petras has his way, Astarion will be bound and gagged and dragged to Cazador's study, and this dream will end with no room for doubt. He will wake in the kennel, hole through his brain healed, and will face punishment for the days, weeks, months spent unconscious. He will wake in a mind that has tasted of mercy, of blood, of sunlight, and be deprived once more. 

If Petras has his way.

Dream-beast versus spawn. Freedom versus thrall. 

Astarion stops laughing. 

He dodges the next swipe and hooks his fingers into Petras' collar, against cold skin underneath; the taller spawn squawks, off balance, perfectly smooth hair and crooked lips and parted jaw. Exactly as he has always been—exactly as he will always be, so long as Cazador lives. 

But not here. Not in the dream. 

Astarion drags him, blood-filled strength, to the window, and wrenches back the curtain. 

Sunlight spikes through the glass. Petras screams. 

He writhes, limbs spluttering and kicking out, eyes rolling back and throat pushed to its limits in agony—his skin peels and flakes, scorching off in rolls of paper-white like birch bark, the red beneath twisting like kicked maggots. Hardly any blood, a trickle from empty veins, and still he contorts, shrieking. Dalyria's voice joins his, shrill, unable to cross the dead man's line of sunlight scorched over the flophouse's wooden floor. 

Astarion presses his face to the glass, watches skin strip until bone cracks through, and wishes he could be surprised when Petras bursts into smoke before he can die. 

Dalyria, a second later, though she has enough time to stare at him with horrified eyes before the thrall summons her home. 

Even in a dream, he cannot have the satisfaction. 

The room echoes hollowly in their absence. 

Petras, gone. Dalyria, gone. 

Astarion, safe once more. 

It hadn't been an interrogation, a questioning; just pain for pain's sake. He should be giddy with it, should relish in carving Petras' arrogance free, in finally winning over the spawn that never hesitated to betray him. Family they were called, brothers and sisters, but it is family held together with punishment that can only come from two, Cazador or Godey. Two versus seven. Not everyone can be tortured. That weight falls on only a few. 

Astarion was ever so popular, and Petras knew that—used it, when he could. Revealing stolen books or sewing needles, reporting disobedience, forcing Astarion to travel further for targets. Anything to keep the scrutiny off him—anything to appear loyal in his master's eyes. 

Astarion has finally won. He should be giddy with it. 

Pain for pain's sake. 

It's too familiar. 

Monster, Astarion thinks. Monster, aren't I?

He doesn't slip from the world this time, doesn't blink and come to hours later—just looks up and sees the party spreading around him, stark and pale. Karlach's gripping her greataxe like she'll cleave through the next thing that sneezes near her, Lae'zel with teeth bared and ears flat, Shadowheart's crouch lit up in silverine glow, Wyll with scarlet energy crackling up his arms and over the points of his horns. Ready for battle, to attack anything threatening. 

But not him. 

They aren't looking at him in fear, in rage, like they did with Gandrel. They aren't trying to kill him. 

Perhaps they should.

Gale's face is white around the edges, a fury that grits his teeth like fangs. "Your sire," he says, fumbling around the word like he wishes he could say something else in its place. "He will know you're here."

Two spawn returning, speaking of a third who walks through sunlight with heroes by his side. One without glowing eyes. 

"Yes," Astarion says, still looking at the ash on the ground. It's hardly anything; merely the outer layer of skin, already whispering over the floorboards as wind blows it away. "I suppose he will."

Petras is not Cazador.

Monsters beget monsters; Petras is cruel because if he wasn't, the blade fell upon him. Astarion would have played the same game if another spawn had been Cazador's favourite. Would have done anything to escape the agony. 

They are both survivors. And their survival came with nothing kind. 

Petras is not Cazador. 

Astarion killed Gandrel instead of the Gur who ambushed him. Tried to kill Petras instead of the man who made them hate each other. 

How many more will he kill, claiming vengeance against everyone except the one who matters?

Centuries has he hid, slunk under shadows and begged for mercy, for any break, any compassion, any semblance of leniency. It was survival and he will not curse himself for it; it was survival, and he survived, and that is all he can ask for. 

But then the dream showed him freedom, showed him a world beyond the silver grip of shackles, and he did the same. 

Still he crawled on his stomach, sought acceptance with submission and one-sided pacts. Ignored his existence for theirs; drowned his hunger under fear of retribution, of punishment, of ending the dream. Died a second death to fake a person he thought they would accept, rather than himself. 

It is not the mindless obedience of a thrall; it is not the tamed purr of a tavern whore. It is not him kneeling, tongue heavy with seed, mouth closed around words he dares not say. It is not him dragging himself to hang from chains in the kennel in fear of how Godey will make it worse if he does not do it himself. It is not that. 

But it is close enough. 

A slave still, with memories as master. 

The dream gave him distraction after distraction, and he took them greedily, dragged his heels, curled in the shadows of hated places and the warmth of false ones; did everything to avoid Baldur's Gate. And even when he arrived, he said nothing, played silent, played hero. 

Ran from Cazador, even in fantasy.

Wyll, making his own choices despite the consequences; Lae'zel, rediscovering herself free from blind devotion; Karlach, searching for life past the horrors of her legacy; Shadowheart, abandoning her life's ambition for one without servitude.

Gale, feeding the hunger, but not letting it take his life. 

Astarion opens his hand and sees the soot there, smeared black under his fingernails. There is no blood; no spawn has ever had enough to leave behind. 

Just death and consequence.

I don't want to be this kind of animal anymore. 

This dream is not real. It has never been; just a fool's façade of it all, with ever-changing blue skies and a sun in white instead of yellow. 

It is not real. 

But it is real enough. 

-

The roof of the Elfsong is cold. 

Astarion slips up the ladder, tunic fluttering in the evening wind as it races over the surrounding slums. There's no one here, not at the late hour, and the air is iced and weary with it, billowing salt in from distant seas. 

It's familiar, as he pads forward to rest against the railing, staring over the city that has caged him for two hundred years. 

Astarion exhales a useless breath. Draws another one in, just to feel the chill, and holds it. Tries not to think. Fails. 

He's told the party all he knows. Cazador is a vampire lord, and they have weaknesses, few and meaningless though they seem; and this is the group that has folded empires and crippled tyrants and laid century-old curses to rest. Victory is too strong a word to imagine, to even think—but this is a dream, and there is no thrall to hold his words, and he tells them everything. 

Only a little of torture, of torment. His tongue stuck to his mouth and choked him, if the pity in their eyes wasn't enough to do that already. If he cannot even say it aloud in a dream, he will never tell a soul in real life. He doesn't know whether to be content or crushed. 

He told them of Cazador. They are as prepared as can be. In the morning, when vampires are at their weakest, they will strike. Tomorrow, one way or another, this ends. 

But for tonight, Astarion climbs to the roof of the Elfsong, and he stares over Baldur's Gate, and he wonders. 

Freedom. 

He has never pictured it. 

Oh, he's imagined it, but in myopic fashion; the aspirations fizzle out once he's slit Cazador's throat, once the lord crumbles and falls to rotten ash. 

But he's never truly pictured what comes next, when freedom is no longer an ideal but a fact; when his chains are tight in his own grasp, to be held by no one else. When there aren't even chains, just existence—just life.

His tent is filled with pillows. He drinks shitty wine with Karlach. He trains with Lae'zel. He dances with Wyll. He hunts for flowers with Shadowheart. He talks, and talks, and talks, with Gale.

He is an improbable creature. 

Astarion curls his fingers into the railing. The wood splinters under his grip—Wyll caught a deer in the surrounding wilderness, one full and surging with life, and flashed a smile with his tongue between his teeth as he handed it over. Preparation, he'd said, calm, open. You'll need it.

He'd let Astarion drink. Had given him blood, and flitted with nervous energy as he asked if it was enough—if he needed more. 

Starvation still pooled in his gut, because it has been two hundred years, and the shadow-cursed lands before this, and fear before that—but Astarion knew he needed to say he was fine. To bat his eyes, thank him for the generous gift, ask how to repay it. 

His head had nodded before he could begin. 

And Wyll agreed. Disappeared, and came back with two rabbits, and gave those just as freely. 

Astarion stands on the roof, clutched in the fingers of terrible anticipation, and for the first time in two centuries, the hunger is mere ache between the bars of his ribs. An annoyance, a distraction. Not pain. Not agony.

He doesn't know. He doesn't know many things, he's discovering.

A thump, from behind. 

Astarion flicks a glance over his shoulder just to see Gale shove his head through the ladder hatch, a curse stuck behind his teeth; sleeping robes hardly make for the most agile of outfits, and he fumbles onto the roof with all the grace of a hurricane. His hair has been styled by a displacer beast and his scruff moved well past polite company. 

Of course it's him. 

Stars caught in orbit, they've been. Mirrored reflections of each other. 

Gale pries himself upright, shaking out his head and rubbing at his eyes; they're gummy with exhaustion, though not sleep. Perhaps no one can get any tonight, knowing what they face tomorrow. 

The wizard looks at him, quiet, and doesn't come closer; gives him room to set his own territory instead of crossing in. 

It is awful, to have his fears be noticed. Be seen.

"Apologies if you wished to be alone," Gale says, a touch hesitantly. "But I thought you could use the company."

Astarion snorts, just a little. Cannot make himself clutch at his chest, hiss and snap, curl up like he can hide all weakness beneath his shivering back. "I won't stop you."

Gale nods and crosses the roof, peering over the city. He's tense with something, but it's not active, not the coiled danger-sense. Just watchful waiting for what he knows will come. 

What will come tomorrow.

"Cazador Szarr," Gale says, to the emptiness, to the grey that lingers against the parapets of the roof like lapping tides. He doesn't look over, bracing his elbows on the railing, drumming his fingers on faded wood. Moonlight curls around the edges of his hair, highlights the smile lines surrounding his eyes. He isn't smiling now, though. 

It's such a simple name, at the end of all things. 

"Cazador Szarr," Astarion says back. 

His sire. His master. They know who he is, now, know the monster that lurks in the heart of Baldurian nobility.

The thrall aches in his chest, a gargoyle against bone. Baldur's Gate has strengthened it, tightened the chains for all their ends have not been reattached to their master; he is pressingly aware of it at all moments. 

The dream protects him. But it cannot last forever. 

"If he commands it, I will kill you," Astarion says. 

This has been—not pleasant, because he has carved and scraped himself along broken horizons and impossible heroics for tendays now, but perhaps gentle. It has softened its blows, given him freedom of tongue and hand, unshackled him from the worst of his duties as he dragged himself on. Granted him mercy at a cost he was willing to pay. 

But all his dreams before this point have been short and violent. They end with him digging his fangs or his claws or his dagger into Cazador's throat until black blood soaks through, until the kennel runs ragged with it, until the Szarr Palace crumbles to the ground in municipal devastation. They are lovely and wonderful and impossible, and he treasures them regardless, and sinks into hopeless hope that lasts until the next time a command hooks at his naval and makes him obey. 

This dream is not that. And for all it has been gentle, still the thrall sits in his chest, and still he knows where he will be when he awakens. 

Gale exhales. He rests his arms on the railing, peering over the quiet of Baldur's Gate, of the rumble of distant refugees and the clatter of late-night carts. It is an alive place, it always has been, but in the reflection of Gale's eyes, it seems dead. 

"I know," he says, wane. "And if my orb explodes, I will kill you, despite my best efforts." He laughs a little, the kind of laugh that comes in awe of the pressing lack of humour. "A pair we make, truly." 

Astarion tilts his head to the side. 

The party has been heroes to the core. Lae'zel brutish, Wyll blind, Karlach violent, Shadowheart angry; but heroes. They throw themselves onto the blade. 

Gale does, too. He always has. 

But heroes are not hunger, and heroes are not more.

"To being monsters," Astarion says. An echo of a memory, of another time, a moment in an empty party shared so long ago. 

"To being survivors," Gale corrects. 

Astarion licks his lips. Looks away. 

Baldur's Gate stretches before them, hollow in its vastness. Lower City is nothing but scraps and scraping folks, those biting for anything, a way up, a way out. That is the nature of this city; people with nothing to do and nowhere to go. 

Survivors.

"Astarion," Gale says, and there's no pomp and circumstance, none of the verbose barbs Astarion has grown to be uncomfortably fond of. His eyes are dark and serious in his face, magic curling from his tongue, hanging heavy in the air between. "Cazador will never have you again."

Astarion smiles, despite himself. "That would be a lovely dream." 

"It would be," Gale agrees, "if we were dreaming. But I find reality is enough."

Oh.

Astarion swallows. His throat is uncommonly dry. "You're not playing your part well," he manages, and cannot make it come out acrid and biting. It comes out unsure. "Hunger or ambition; I thought you'd be more vicious."

More cruel. More unkind. More Astarion.

Less like a real person. 

Gale ignores his odd statements—the dream knows how to play along, though Astarion has lost his script. "I will be," he says. "Tomorrow. When we kill him for what he's done. But you're going to be free, Astarion. I swear it."

He is clutching onto the railing, because if he doesn't, he will be trembling. 

Gale smiles, something soft, something sad. "Try to get some rest," he says. "We'll be ready."

Astarion nods, tongue stuck firmly to the back of his fangs. He watches Gale struggle down the ladder, disappearing into the Elfsong, back to the room filled with four other heroes who prepare for an impossible fight. Tyrants have they faced, True Souls, hags, constructs, necromancers. 

Vampire lord fits in well amongst the list.

"A lovely dream," Astarion murmurs. He looks over Baldur's Gate, over the empty grey, over paths and alleys he has hauled his shaking body through, over taverns and flophouses with souls that will never return. Over memories, stitched together in dream.

Tomorrow, then.

-

Szarr Palace is exactly as he remembers it. 

His dream has sculpted this lovingly, each detail in place, from the threadcount of carpets he has pressed his face into, sobbing, taken from behind—from the paintings, polished frames and oil-slick anonymity bled through canvas—from the bedchamber's ragged bunks, bare scraps of personality trickled throughout. 

There are no spawn. Just dried blood in the kennel, with a miserable, rotten, monstrous sack of bones that Astarion breaks, dagger to the eye sockets, snaps the broken jaw over his knee, cracks each in two until Godey is nothing more than splinters of white on the cold stone. 

He will still be there when Astarion wakes. But he will have this memory, empty and priceless, and he will treasure it for as long as the crypt lets him keep it. 

Astarion spits on the bones. Stomps the skull to dust. Laughs, and sobs, and flees the room. 

Attendants still wander in frantic servitude, yearning for a life they think as desirable; he has always hated them and his dream pulls no punches, addressing him as Master Astarion, asking why he is not at Lord Cazador's side. 

The Black Mass, again. Whatever ritual Cazador is doing, something to scorn the stars and bring godly retribution down. Turn his spawn into even lesser creatures, festering things on their bellies in the mud. Something vile and malevolent and pointless. 

He's shaking. Since he entered the palace, and he can't stop—it's in his shoulders, down his spine, fingers white around his daggers to keep from tumbling over the carpet. Don't touch me, he wants to hiss, but doesn't have to. The party circles him but keeps air, keeps space, between them all. 

Astarion shivers as they slaughter the werewolves, as they find the hidden study, as they ride the elevator down. As they find the caged spawn, leagues beneath the earth, trapped and unending and deathless. 

His mind is more broken than he knew. Never did he think he could imagine this. 

And Sebastion, red-eyed, fanged, hollow. Pressing his fingers to the bars, hair ragged, clumps pulled out with no blood to heal. A fury that cannot hide the despair. I'll kill you.

I'll let you.

He promises to free them. Promises, promises, promises, that he will be better; that he will not be the monster survival has made him. 

Astarion trembles as they find the study, the office, black skull biting into a scroll. As Gale reads a journal with his face bleached white and declares no one else should. As they approach the final doors, towering overhead, in the dark and the deep. 

They're nothing like the doors of the palace, with old wood and crimson-stained trim. With runes carved over their surface in a language he's never been allowed to learn, with memories and cold mausoleum air; these are glassy, grey. Gold filigree runs between the hinges, to pale light spilling under the bottom. 

Astarion stretches out a hand, careful, and presses his knuckles to the seam. Cold, smooth, with some distant energy humming under the surface.

It's a dream. 

It seems so real. 

"Astarion," Gale says, quiet. "Are you ready?"

He wants to laugh. Ready?

This is the cavern of his master. He has sunk down to exactly where he started. No grave but he can feel the dirt pressing into the walls, the weight of the world thundering around them. He will not be able to claw his way out of this rubble if he dies; if he wakes here at all. 

The thrall is alive in his chest, snarling and rampaging between his ribs; the four commandments echo like gongs behind his eyes, even if they haven't taken a hold yet. He's biting his lip. Deer blood, made acrid by his body, spills down his throat. 

The dream has made him weak. Softened him until he cried, until he comforted heroes and raised their sorry heads, until he bit through his own fear to help others. It has made him into something that could never survive this life. 

He could never survive. 

But maybe he can win. 

Astarion grits his teeth, tightens his grip on his daggers, and shoves the door open. 

It swings wide with a bang, slamming into the mirroring walls; a staircase of the same smooth grey descends before him, falling into void on either side, distant braziers flaring with magical light. A platform, encircling, etched in red and gold. Hovering over each edge, awash in scarlet and a light that hooks their chest, floats six figures familiar. Dalyria. Violet. Petras. Aurelia. Yousen. Leon.

The dream has scoured Petras' face, skin peeled back and bone exposed. His eyes are closed, caught in the ritual. 

And in the center, clawed spear held high and black robes edged in blood, stands the monster all this has ever come from. 

Cazador Szarr. The man frozen in time, caught between life and the mockery of it. 

Astarion stands at the top of the stairs, five lives behind him, emptiness spread around. There are daggers in his hands. But Cazador is not kneeling before him, pleading for life; this dream will not make it easy like others have before. It will be a victory won, not victory given. 

He descends, slow and steady, eyes fixed forward. 

Cazador tilts his head to the side, something that could be a smile settling on his face. It is anything but kind. "So you return," he says, and his voice is exactly as it has always been; dead. Warm to others, who don't know how to look past the lies. 

It is dead. He has always been dead.

"Have you come to beg forgiveness, boy? To crawl back to your rightful place?"

His rightful place, broken, beaten, made to apologize for an existence he never asked for. Astarion bares his fangs, coiled like a dragon. "I've come to kill you."

The vampire lord smiles, head tilted to the side in mock curiosity. "You have ever been ambitious," he says, and speaks it like an insult; like condemnation; like contempt. A child, scratching for control of the gods. "And how will you do that? One word, and you will remember you are mine."

Murmurs. Voices from behind. He ignores them. 

"I'm not yours," Astarion says, very quietly. 

Cazador laughs. It is long and cold and vicious, lips curling and eyes thinning to slits. "So barks the dog," he says. "How did you convince yourself of that, cur? Gnawed your leash and thought yourself free?"

He has never been free. He knows that. 

Astarion tightens his grip. Lunges. 

Red light explodes between them. 

It grabs at his hands, seizes his neck—the thrall shrieks, desperate to obey, desperate to reconnect, to serve man and master and myth—ice plunges through his skin and drags him upright, frozen, dead. Astarion thrashes but the paralysis grips him, locks him in place, leaves him shaking and helpless as Cazador leans down, pressing one clawed finger to the hollow of his throat. 

"I am glad," he whispers, barely audible over the party snarling to action around them, "that two hundred years could never dull your spark. It will make this all the more enjoyable."

Cazador smiles. His eyes are empty and cruel and dead.

Then his staff flashes up and the light moves, wraps around Astarion, and throws him back—he flies through the air, thrashing, motionless, and locks into place at the helm. Shackles intangible wrap around his waist, his wrists, his throat. A beast, caught in the darkness, in the death.

Astarion screams.  

The party charges, werewolves lunging forward and Karlach howling in primal rage—Cazador laughs, wild, and disappears into mist. All around, the spawn twitch and shake, infernal glow shredding through the runes, through their bodies. The light crawls over him, tearing through his armour, stripping it down until he's shirtless, exposed, none of the protection and weapons and strength he has dragged from this false world.

He's making this low animal sound of pain, pleading for it to stop, to end, to be put down like a fucking dog—anything but this nothing, this final agony, before he wakes and it's over and it's over–

Gale, teleporting over the entire field, blasts the magic with burning red of his own. 

The containment falls. 

Astarion gasps, knees cracking into the ground—Gale grabs his shoulders and hauls him up, presses a dagger into his hands, eyes wild and blown open. "Go," he hisses, framed with werewolves and ghouls behind, magic crackling over his chest. "Kill him!"

Astarion disappears. 

The battle bleeds and bucks and bellows; he's a ghost in the shadows, not breathing, not blinking, nothing but a blade. Shadowheart tears down radiant light and stops the necromancer, Karlach tearing through corpses raised just to die again, Wyll batting away ricocheted spells with his teeth bared. 

It's nothing but death. He can't think. Blood and guts and injuries, healing, destruction, resurrection, devastation. Lae'zel goes down—gets back up. A sword carves through Cazador's arm. Fire erupts from the ground. His blades find home in throats. He's silent. He can't think. 

The world empties, corpses falling and staying down, until it's only them—until it's just Cazador, spiraling through pillars and clouds of mist. He'd stopped laughing once Chatterteeth died, and now he's silent and vicious for it, punching holes through their fragile defense and tearing any advantage he can reach. A monster. There's a reason he's held his power.

But he's not desperate, and Astarion is.

He throws himself forward, daggers poised, and lands—right on the arm, blades through skin, puncturing like twin fangs. Cazador whips around and catches him, fist ensnaring his throat, dragging him off the ground. He's enormous in the dark. 

"I will rip you to shreds," he snarls, eyes like fire. "You have never felt pain, not until this. I will break you."

Astarion, gasping, scratching at fingers like iron. 

Then Gale, bleeding, hunched on a half-working leg, raises his hands. Magic crackles up his arms. 

A bolt of lightning, blue as the sky, tears over the field and impales Cazador's chest. 

The vampire lord freezes. 

He looks down, red eyes wide, like he never believed it possible—never imagined the hole bored through his stomach, pale ribs jagged and smoking, black blood dripping over his robes. His mouth opens. His gaze flicks up. 

And then he falls. 

Astarion can't breathe. 

Cazador's body dissolves into mist, and everyone flinches—prepares for him to teleport again, appear from behind a pillar with spells and cruel laughter—but the cloud just slithers over the ground, snake in the grass, and slips into the coffin in the back. The tomb of a lord. 

It's over. 

It's over.

Not yet.

"Astarion–" Gale, moving, coming closer. Shadowheart wearily sends healing around, though she can barely keep her eyes open, and everyone simply stands and shakes, painfully aware of how close death came for them all. 

Astarion can't focus. Can't think. He knows what comes next, what always happens next, when his dreams grant him the mercy of fantasy—knows what he wants, what he needs. He stumbles over, clutching acrid blood that pours through his shattered chest, and slams against the tomb. 

Cold stone. Marble. How fitting. 

He shoves off the lid. 

Cazador, resting within. 

His body is cold, drenched in blood and lacerations, eyes closed and chest still. Dead. He has always been dead. 

Astarion tears him out, snarling, and throws him to the ground—watches him hit and sprawl, graceless, a corpse cast to the rocks. He splutters awake, trying to catch himself, limbs fumbling with injury and removed power. The thrall erupts once more, chains straining to reach their master. 

Astarion shoves them down with a hiss. Stalks over, bristling, every thought edged in fire. 

This is the dream. The one he knows. Cazador, kneeling before him, bloodied and broken, red eyes filled with something that he has only ever seen reflected from his own. 

Fear.

He has won. 

"You think yourself worthy of my ascension?" Cazador demands, shrill. He's trying to rise to his feet. He can't manage it. "I'm no fool. Try it, and be consumed; the only purpose you have. That you have ever had."

The ritual. More distractions. More deaths to stand in front of the only one that has ever mattered—the only one that needs to die. 

He raises the blade. 

The world sings. 

"I am not yours," Astarion snarls. "I will never be yours."

He slams his dagger through Cazador's heart. 

They fall together, crashing back onto the platform; the vampire lord gasps and struggles but Astarion pins him, fangs bared, thrashing to stay on top. He's not laughing, like with Gandrel—just screaming, wordless and agonized, plunging his blades again and again and again into the monster. Blood, erupting, spilling, showering; he howls at it, at the corpse, at anything.

Cazador chokes. Goes still. Disappears under the cavernous ruin of injury.

Dies. 

Astarion stumbles upright. The world trembles around him, or maybe he is; he's dripping with gore and fear and viscera and terror. With relief.

Cazador is dead.

He's dead.

Deep in his chest, the thrall disappears. 

Astarion goes very still. 

There are no words to describe it. A weight existing for two hundred years slips away, piece by shattered piece, dripping like blood to the floor below; the hole where a heart once sat empties until the claws fade, until the commandments that have ever sat behind his tongue melt to memory. 

He can't feel it, because there's nothing to feel.

Astarion closes his eyes. Opens them. 

Still Cazador's corpse lies splayed before him, arms spread like shattered wings, black blood tangling his long hair. The spawn, dropping from their infernal chains. The room, open and echoing. 

Nothing disappears into mist, into the haze of completion. It doesn't end as it always has in the past. He isn't waking up, cheek pressed to the cold stone of the kennel, memories of comfort a new kind of torture to bear. The dagger in his hand doesn't fade, sinking into oblivion now he's done what the fantasy allowed him. Time keeps crawling on. Keeps existing.

This isn't a dream. 

This isn't a dream.

He drops his dagger. 

It clatters to the ground, the boom of a cannon in this silent space; reverberates out, once, twice. An inanimate scream in the pale. 

He takes a step back. Stumbles. Drags his eyes away from Cazador's corpse, splayed on the stone, bloody and gushing. Looks around and sees change, movement, things. People. 

People.

They aren't aspects of him. Aren't twisted reflections of his own mind, caught in the deception of a dream that has tried to defang him. Aren't puppets to some greater lesson he has been desperate not to learn. 

They're people. 

They're real.

He turns, clutching at his throat, useless breath wheezing in his lungs. His legs try to fail, to carry him to the ground—but hands catch his shoulders, holding him up, face swimming into focus. Eyes wide and worried. Mouth moving. 

Gale. 

"Astarion?" He says, bewildered, clutching at his arms. "What are you–"

"You're real," Astarion rasps, and the world shrinks to a moment, to the instant between this blink and the next. "You're– all of you–"

Gale, looking at him, looking at him. Alive. Real.  

Everything Astarion has said to him. Every line, prying at the dream to tear out the truth underneath, puzzling who they are and what they mean. Hunger and ambition and life. Things said with the expectation that they didn't matter—that he would wake up and they would be washed away, swept under running water, disappearing to his mind and the mausoleum after; but things said.

It's real. 

He knows. Knows what fractured mind Astarion bears.

But Gale just nods. Helps him up, holds him steady until his feet work, and blocks the rest of the party out; makes a bubble, just him, just the softness of his face. "What do you need?" He asks, quiet, searching.

What does he need?

Answers. Understanding. Life. Revenge. Blood. Healing. Knowledge. Everything. Anything. 

"The sky," Astarion manages, through a tongue that has only ever been harsh but now can barely work, thick and fumbling in his mouth. "The sky. Please."

Gale nods, pale, and holds out his arm—magic crackles to his call, pulling on whatever dredged reserves he has, filling the air with the bite and crackle of lightning. Purple, under his robes. Freedom. Escape.

The spawn. The slaves. 

"Free them," he chokes out, looking to Karlach. He's trembling. Nothing makes sense. Everything makes sense. It's jagged in his skull. "Free them, please, just–"

She nods, eyes flat with worry, and grabs the spear. Astarion latches onto Gale's arm with feverish desperation. 

Magic crackles around them, dimension door exploding in a thrum of energy, and then they're on the roof. 

Astarion staggers back, arms thrown wide—rough cut stone under his feet, parapets coiling on the edge. Sounds, of birds, of people, of Baldur's Gate moving and rustling and humming with life—sounds of travelers, of markets, of day.

He leans back. Looks up. 

It's blue. 

The sky is actually blue. 

Sunlight hits his exposed chest, trickling over collarbones and down his arms; it's warm and golden and bright, exactly like his memories of the past weeks, of the time he devoured like it was something he would lose. 

Astarion, on the roof of Szarr Palace, looking up at the sky. 

Awake. 

It's real.

His legs give out—he hits the ground hard, thudding down, a muffled curse from the wizard beside him. Something his neck cracks and a dull ache blooms over his ribs, shifting within, and all he can do is press his head to the stone wall and keep looking up, keep staring at the sky. It's blue.

Astarion has never seen anything so blue. 

He curls his knees to his chest, no particular reason except the desire to be small, and tucks trembling fingers between his chest and thighs. Blood, tacky, drying fast and black over his arms and legs, remains of victory; of victory won. Of a death that happened, that will not be erased by his mind's own cruelty, that has torn the thrall free from his chest. 

The commandments, dead. Their master, slaughtered. 

Their slave, gone. 

"Astarion?" Gale asks, cautious. He sits across from him, slow, moving with careful shifts and deliberate pauses. Not enough to touch, to give them that break between, the encircling space; but there. Present. Alive.

"It's real," Astarion murmurs. 

Some part of him knew, he thinks. Saw the cracks as more than cracks, as reality; knew Cazador had stripped away his soul until there was nothing left capable of creating this, Netherese magic and Elder Brains and illithid parasites. His dreams have always been simplistic in their violence; revenge, empty and impossible, black blood coating his claws. Not creative. Not more. 

But he never let himself believe it. Never fell into the hope, because he knew it would break him when he woke; that even the ideation of mercy after a lifetime without would crack him down to the marrow. 

It made no sense for this to be a dream. Everything was always too real. 

He survived hell. His mind thinks he's still in it. 

Not now.

"You're real," Astarion whispers, and clutches at his face. Feels tears spill over his cheeks. He's crying. He's laughing. "It's real."

"It is," Gale says, gentle, and puts a hand on his shoulder; touches him, grounding, a person. Not ambition, not hunger; a person, a living thing, with a soul and mind and heart and life. "You're safe, Astarion. It's over."

It's over.

He's free.

Overhead, the sky is blue.